Sweedish Teenager Created Cheap Body Tracker for StreamVR
This tracking kit will greatly reduce the cost of VR body tracking.
With the help of JA Sweden, Anton Bill Månsson and two friends founded a startup called StonX. Not that long ago they developed a body-tracking kit for SteamVR.
The price of their kit is put at around $80, including shipping. It comes with four trackers, called Cookies, and one Beacon. The Beacon connects to your PC via USB 2. Cookies are unpowered, there’s no charging or connecting of any sort involved. One Beacon offers front-facing body tracking, but the full version is planned to come with two Beacons for any angle.
The low price comes from a development approach that differs from that of Microsoft's Kinect and HTC's Vive Trackers, which are also used as body-tracking devices for VR. HTC’s tracking tech was designed by Valve to deliver sub-mm precision for head and controller tracking. But the minimum viable tracking quality for other limbs isn’t necessarily as strict, so StonX is currently aiming for sub-cm, making cheaper tracking techniques viable.
The team hopes to sell the final kit, with two Beacons, for 1390 SEK, around $165, later this year. Potentially, it could drive much wider adoption of body-tracking on SteamVR.
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