HTC Vive Wrist Tracker Could Solve One of VR’s Big Problems

HTC desires to make it simpler for Vive digital actuality headsets to monitor the motion of a person’s arms and the instruments they could be holding. The firm’s resolution, a blobby bracelet known as the Vive Wrist Tracker, guarantees correct information from the fingertips to the elbow, even when the headset can’t see the tracker or a person’s arms occlude a handheld object.

The machine, introduced right this moment at CES 2022, is designed to be used with HTC’s all-in-one Vive Focus 3 headset, which tracks the situation of a person’s arms utilizing onboard cameras. That strategy can fall brief for plenty of technical causes, together with that it’s exhausting to inform if a hand is small and near the digicam, or giant and much away. Invisible LEDs on the Vive Wrist Tracker add extra factors of reference and actual scale to the equation, permitting the headset to calculate exact location and motion by a 3D area.

The Vive Wrist Tracker is about the identical weight as a smartwatch, regardless that it’s extra bulbous, and it’s 85% smaller and 50% lighter than a Vive Focus 3 controller. It comes connected to a regular watch wristband, however may also be connected to different objects, like a weapon or a instrument, to supply extremely correct monitoring in all kinds of VR situations.

The new Vive Wrist Tracker will out there within the first quarter of 2022 for $129.

HTC says it has additionally designed an open-source 3D monitoring resolution that makes use of an affordable Arduino board and 3D sensor which might be connected to a instrument and utilized in live performance with the Vive Wrist Tracker. The firm plans to launch the plans free for customers to obtain and experiment on their very own.

HTC additionally introduced two new charging options for the Focus 3 headset at CES. The Focus 3 Carrying Case is a weatherproof tote with a deal with, latches for a shoulder strap, and a lockable zipper. Once a headset and controllers are packed inside, you may plug a charger into an exterior port and cost all of the contents directly. The machine may even robotically pair the controllers with the headset, even when they weren’t earlier than, which is an extremely helpful function for locations which have a number of headsets, like arcades, faculties, and coaching rooms, the place controllers and headsets can simply get combined up.

Similarly, the brand new Focus 3 Multi Battery Charger addresses the necessity of installations that have to cost a lot of batteries directly. The machine holds 4 of the headset’s removable batteries and can cost all of them on the identical excessive pace, enabling companies like arcades to simply swap out drained batteries for fully-charged ones, with out lengthy pauses in between video games or coaching periods.

HTC didn’t specify launch dates or value for the brand new charging equipment.

The firm additionally introduced a brand new partnership with telecommunications firm Lumen Technologies at CES, promising to ship wi-fi VR experiences which are corresponding to wired PC-based VR, utilizing non-public 5G networks and edge computing techniques.

Updated 1/5/2022 12:15 pm: Added value particulars.