Meta Won’t Make VR Motion Trackers For Quest Unless PICO’s Succeed
Meta CTO, Andrew Bosworth says they won’t be making motion trackers for Quest unless the PICO trackers do numbers
Alongside the newly announced PICO 4 Ultra, ByteDance is shipping ankle-strap Motion Trackers that will support leg tracking across many apps and games, retailing for £80 in the UK and €90 across Europe.
This is exciting news for many VR fans, however, Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth has confirmed in a live AMA (ask me anything) that Meta will not be manufacturing their own competing motion trackers—for now, at least.
What are PICO’s Motion Trackers?
Pico Motion Trackers are wearable VR accessories that you strap to each of your ankles to add leg tracking to your VR experience. ByteDance has confirmed that they’ll be supported by the new PICO 4 Ultra, PICO 4, and PICO Neo 3 headsets.
Each PICO Motion Tracker features an inertial measurement unit (IMU) equipped with an accelerometer and gyroscope for accurate tracking, similar to Sony’s Mocopi wearables that have been popular for PCVR. However, PICO’s Trackers each feature 12 infrared LEDs in addition to the standard IMU, which your PICO headset can track for two purposes:
- Rapid initial calibration: While wearing your headset, just look down and it’ll calibrate the base position of your legs.
- 6 Degrees of Freedom tracking: Once your position is calibrated, the Trackers will provide 6DoF positional information whenever they hit a sightline of a tracking camera on your headset.
But the Motion Trackers don’t have to be in sight of a tracking camera to work. When they’re out of view, IMU data is used to estimate your leg position and pose (with an average position error of 5 cm and angle error of 6 degrees). This is a different approach to leg tracking which should work well—and at a significantly lower cost than Vive Trackers.
PICO’s Motion Trackers also weigh a tiny 27 grams each, so you’ll barely even know they’re there! ByteDance also claims they provide 25 hours of active use, rechargeable with a USB-C cable.
Plus, since the Trackers are detachable from the straps, they can also be used for general object tracking, which presents a range of applications within the business and entertainment markets—which could hopefully help drive greater VR adoption. After all, we like multiple use cases!
In terms of apps and games supported at launch on the PICO Store, they’ve confirmed a launch lineup of several titles, with more than 10 additional games adding support in the future (including Drunken Bar Fight, Venture’s Gauntlet, and Blade and Sorcery: Nomad).
The launch lineup will include:
- VRChat
- All-In-One Sports
- Les Mills Dance
- Let’s Get Fit VR
- Foot Pool
- Racket Club
- Tempo Club
Why won’t Meta be making their own leg trackers?
Meta CTO, Andrew Bosworth has stated in a recent AMA on Instagram that Meta will not be manufacturing their own leg trackers any time soon.
Here’s a brief transcript:
“I think there’s just not that many use cases where people need that high of a degree of precision on extremities. It’s not zero. If you’re a dance enthusiast in VRChat and you want to show off those moves (and by the way, I’m actually a keen dancer and have decent footwork, so I respect that) it’s great — I’m glad people have a chance to do that and they have a path for that.
But I think getting this thing to be mainstream where we make this something that way more people use — I’m not sure that the juice is worth the squeeze. And I don’t mean that from a business standpoint, I mean even for the consumer in terms of what they get out of it.
I hope it goes so well for them, and they prove me wrong and then we’ll have to do it.”
We kind of hope PICO proves him wrong too—it would be amazing for the wider adoption of VR (especially in the US where PICO has a much smaller presence). However, for now, it appears that Meta is squarely focused on growing the VR user base at its core—by shipping great headsets for the average consumer. And strapping extra gubbins to your legs, wrists, chest, or any other part of your body may not be the way to get a mainstream audience more engaged with VR.
Based on the current tracking tech available with Meta’s Quest 3, it seems we may have to wait until the internal sensors within the headsets become advanced enough before we get proper leg tracking firsthand from Meta.
Unless PICO’s trackers do really well. Then they’ll have to do it too, apparently!
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