MixedVR Vive Full Body Tracking - complete setup guide

hi guys lelo here today i'm going to be doing a full setup guide and tutorial to set up vive full body tracking with a non-steam vr tracked headset in this tutorial i'm going to be using an oculus quest 2 with link but this tutorial will apply to pretty much every single vr headset that doesn't use steamvr tracking i'm also going to be focusing particularly on full body tracking use in vr chat but this will also apply to other full body tracking games everything in this tutorial should apply to any mixed vr setup you don't have to be doing 5 for body tracking you can use any non steamvr tracked headset and any combination of play spaces you could be using a windows mixed reality headset with valve index controllers just make sure that if you're not doing the same configuration as i am go and do some extra reading and some extra research into your particular configuration just in case there are any things that you need to do slightly differently before we get into the setup tutorial i'm going to quickly cover the devices that you need to do via full body tracking if you already have everything you need to get going with mixed vr for body tracking i'll put a timestamp here so you can skip ahead to the installation guide and tutorial the first thing you need is a vr headset and i'm using the quest 2. with that headset you're going to be running steamvr and for me to run steamvr on the quest 2 i need to plug it into my computer and use a link cable or i can use virtual desktop to wirelessly stream steamvr to my headset as well the first thing that you need for full body is three vive 2018 trackers these are the ones with the blue logo there are also the older model of vive trackers with the grey logo but make sure that you do not get these models this is because the older trackers just aren't as accurate as the new trackers and you need that accuracy for full body tracking to use the trackers you need some base stations you can use the 1.0 base stations and the 2018 trackers are also compatible with the 2.0 base stations head over to valve or vise websites that cover information about their base stations to see which ones are right for you you need a minimum of one base station to track your trackers if you place one base station down in your play space you're going to get coverage by standing directly in front of it which means you won't be able to turn around i'd recommend a minimum of two base stations to give you a decent full body coverage in your play space to attach the trackers to your body you're going to need some straps personally i would recommend the track straps from rebuff reality rebuff reality also offers some straps called the track strap pluses these have a built-in battery bank for each of the trackers that allow you to extend the battery life of the trackers trackers have a four to five hour battery life with the track strap pluses you can get an additional eight hours of battery life the track straps from rebuff reality are quite expensive and you can go online and find some third-party vendors or if you're feeling creative you can have a look online for some tutorials on how to make your own straps i've seen some people put the trackers on their feet into the laces of their shoes and just using an ordinary belt for the waist tracker in this tutorial i'm not going to cover how to set up steamvr or how to set up your base stations head over to vive or valve's websites on how to get that working for your headset and your playspace now would be a good time to get familiar with using steamvr with your headset and to go and get your base stations set up once you're familiar with steamvr and you have your base station set up and ready to go we can move into the tutorial of setting up your five trackers for full body tracking this is my vr setup for using vive trackers i have three five 2018 trackers the rebuff reality standard track straps and a quest 2. i'm using the mammoth dx grips with my quest controllers i'm also using two steamvr 2.0 base stations and this is my pc and you can see the three vive tracker dongles at the front there the placement of your vive tracker dongles is really important you want to try and reduce the interference between the dongles and your trackers so it's a good idea to keep them slightly apart from one another and reasonably close to your play space here i'm using the included usb cables and weights that come with the trackers to keep them on my desk right next to my play space i'm also using a usb hub and i have all of the trackers plugged into the same usb port on my pc and that's absolutely fine to do i'll have all the information on my vr setup and my pc specs in my description the main piece of software you're going to need for mixed vr full body tracking is open vr space calibrator some information here on their main page about the software scroll to install and latest release and the latest release will be at the top and the link you want is openvr space calibrator just run the exe to install it the second piece of software is one that i would recommend and it's called ovr advanced settings you can download it in steam directly just search for ovr and it's called ovr advanced settings scroll on down and it's a free download okay so now that we are in steamvr we can check that those programs we've installed have loaded up correctly so first you want to go into your steam menu and find over your advanced settings it's going to be the most obvious clue that it's loaded correctly and if it's booted with steam on load you should be able to see that it's in your system tray here over your advanced settings and if space calibrator is also loaded correctly space calibrator should show up here as well but if neither of those have loaded up head over to your settings startup and shutdown choose startup overlay apps and then toggle on space calibrator and ovr advanced settings and that means that both those programs will automatically load and be in your system tray when you load steamvr back on our desktop we can pair our htc 5 trackers in my steam vr item tray i can see that my headset is standing by and now it's time to turn on our base stations once your playstations are turned on don't worry if you don't see them popping up in your item tray the base stations are actually passive tracking items and they don't communicate with your pc at all so don't worry if they don't pop up to pair your htc vive trackers plug in your first dongle and go to settings devices and pair controller this menu will pop up and you can select htc vive tracker get your first tracker ready turn it on by holding down the button the light will go blue when it's on and then hold the button down again and the light will start flashing blue when it's in pairing mode then steam should automatically start pairing the device and the light will go solid green once it's paired if everything's gone well you should see your vive tracker is showing up in your item tray now repeat this process by going to devices pair controller plug in your next dongle connect your next tracker and again until you have all three trackers connected at this point you should see your three five trackers in your item tray and your base stations showing up as well now that i have my vive trackers turned on i can see that they're showing up in my item tray and i can also see my base stations when i initially set up my base stations i couldn't get them to show up in my item tray and it's because i had them set to the wrong channel head over to vive or valve's website on how to set up your base stations so you get them set to the right channels for your particular configuration you might also see a small eye next to each of your trackers and that's because there's an update available hold off on updating your five trackers until you've finished your whole setup and confirm that everything works properly but once you've finished you can update your trackers by plugging them in by usb then going to settings devices and update device and steam will walk you through updating each of your trackers it's important to note that when you're using a mixed reality setup when you're not using a steamvr tracked headset you're not going to have access to wireless communication with your base stations you can see that if you go to settings devices and base station settings it's going to not show the configuration settings and if you go to bluetooth settings here it says bluetooth not available and that's because both the htc and index headsets have proprietary bluetooth chips in their link boxes that allow them to communicate with the base stations wirelessly and control them but it's just something you don't have if you're using a mixed vr setup valve and vive headsets automatically turn off the base stations and put them into a sleep mode when you close steam vr and when you reopen it they'll automatically turn on your base stations in this way it is recommended to put your base stations into sleep mode or turn them off when you're not using them to prolong their life the easiest way obviously is to just turn them off at the wall when you're not using them and turn them back on when you're going to use them but i personally use the android app for controlling the base stations at the moment the android app only supports the 2.0 base stations and they're currently in beta for controlling 1.0s you can also use wi-fi smart plugs on the plugs of your base stations to be able to turn them off remotely as well this is the third-party android app for controlling 2.0 base stations if you have bluetooth and location services turned on and your base stations are turned on they'll show up here and you can control them and you've got a couple of different options you can set them to sleep set them to standby you can check which channel they're on and you can give the base station a nickname as well if you want to use this app and you've got 1.0 base stations you can head here to settings and enable support for 5 base stations but it's currently in beta so it's not guaranteed to work correctly if you're going to use a quest 2 with full body tracking using mixed vr there's a couple of things i'd recommend you do before you get into steam vr firstly i'd recommend you turn on glanceable floor boundaries especially if you get disoriented when moving around in steamvr it's gonna allow you to see your guardian boundary on the floor every time you look down i'd also recommend you regularly reset your floor level before you get into steamvr it's gonna make sure that your floor is absolutely at the right height so when you load into steamvr it's going to be accurate to your real world floor the last thing that i recommend is that you stand nice and central in your play space and you use the reset view button in your oculus menu this is just going to reset your headset's play space and when you enter steam vr it's going to make sure that you're absolutely centered in the middle of your play space and your play space isn't a little bit misaligned okay so we're back in steamvr and we're ready to set up our live trackers for the first time see our headset and controls are tracking here we can go ahead and turn on our first five tracker see here my track has been picked up and both my base stations are working as well when i close my desktop you can see that my vive tracker is all the way down there and through the floor with my base stations are also rendering in the wrong place this is because the vive tracker is using steam vr tracking and my headset is using oculus tracking these are two completely different play spaces and natively steamvr has no way of understanding what to do with this information and no way of aligning the two play spaces but that's why we installed playspace calibrator playspace calibrator is a program that allows you to take information from both play spaces and align them using that calibration so that you can use items like vive trackers in an oculus play space or for example index controllers in windows mixed reality playspace over here we have our oculus devices i've got my headset and my controllers and over here i've got my lighthouse devices just got my one tracker that i've turned on for now the devs of play space calibrator recommend that you only turn on one five tracker when doing the calibration process this is so that you don't accidentally pick the wrong vive tracker and calibrate using one cut one five tracker when it's not the one that you're calibrating with this is will make a lot more sense when you're actually doing it i would also recommend if this is your first time setting up your live trackers to only turn on one the one that i currently have turned on is sitting on my bed over there rendering down there and this is it here i'm going to be calibrating using my right controller so i'm going to select my right controller in my oculus devices and i select this tracker because it's the only one that's rendering at the moment i'm going to put my vive tracker onto the wrist onto the palm sorry of my dominant hand which is my left hand i recommend using your dominant hand because you need to be reasonably accurate with the movements you're going to make during the calibration process i'm going to put the right controller into my left hand as well and include some footage of what this looks like in real life so you can see how i calibrate how i hold my devices when i do the calibration process there are two important things about the way you hold your devices during calibration the first is that both are connected to the same point on your body here i have both on my hand if i had the tracker on my forearm and the controller in my hand then they'd be able to rotate independent of one another during the calibration process that's going to mess up the calibration you also need to make sure that both devices can be clearly seen by their tracking devices so they don't get obscured during calibration you can see now that the only tracker i have turned on is rendering down there if i move my hand around you can see the tracker moving i can see the controller moving as well here under calibration speed we can choose between a couple of different settings i recommend using very slow this is going to pull as much information as many data points as it can about the two play spaces it's going to give you the most accurate calibration and alignment between your two play spaces it's important to note both devices need to remain within their relative tracking volumes which means the controller that you use has to remain tracked by your headset the entire process of the calibration the five tracker has to be in clear view of at least one of the base stations for the entire calibration process as well so bear that in mind after a lot of testing i found the most accurate way to calibrate the play spaces is to as recommended by the devs of play space calibrator to do a very slow and large figure of eight like this but i've found that just doing a figure of eight in front of you isn't quite enough to get an accurate alignment i found that turning to the side and doing a figure eight on the side and turning to the other side and then also doing a figure of eight in front of you coming towards and away from you this way the two play spaces have plenty of data about the two positions of the devices you'll make sure to do it nice and slowly and keep both devices within their tracking volumes the last thing i like to do once i finish those figure of eight if i've still got a little bit of time left in the calibration process is to just rotate the two devices around and move through my play space not too quickly but just try and cover quite a large area by moving around we're trying to give both of the two tracking systems as much data about each other as possible so i'm going to begin calibration here i'm going to start doing my figure of eight in front and come to this side and do a figure of eight and the other side and i'm going to come in front and do a figure of eight going towards and away from myself like this and then i'm going to slowly rotate both devices randomly and just move around my play space when the calibration process is finished you'll see that the tracker will automatically snap to its real-world position you see here i have a custom texture on my vive tracker just why it looks a little bit different from how it looks normally you can go ahead and close this now that we've finished that we've got a couple of extra options we've got start calibration this will do the calibration process again we've got edit calibration you can go in and fine tune the exact measurements of the alignment between the two play spaces it's best not to mess with this straight away and you can clear your calibration and do it again you can also now turn on your other trackers and they will automatically be pasted into the new aligned play space if your headset supports pass through now would be a good time before you enter any applications to check how well your two play spaces have been played been aligned so you can hold your tracker up in the air and enter pass through and see if the two play spaces have indeed been aligned accurately and what you'll see is that the last place you saw the digital render of the tracker should be roughly in the same place as the real world tracker as you see through the pass-through so i'm going to go ahead and turn on my other trackers now and i'm going to grab the tracker that i used to calibrate and put that onto my foot as you can see now we have our vive trackers on our body and the two play spaces being have been correctly calibrated and see my base stations are in roughly the right place and my virus trackers are also roughly in the right place in the real world you can actually leave this program not do anything else you can't actually close this program because it needs to remain running in the background to keep the two play spaces aligned at all times you can see here that everything is tracking correctly as well one of the common issues with using mixed vr and playspace calibrator is that your steamvr chaperone bounds are not set up in the way that steamvr want them to be set up if i go into an overlay such as not beat saber well no b tape would work you can see here play area warning your play area is currently uncalibrated and it wants you to run your room setup now we got ovr advanced settings to try and overcome this issue you go into settings you can check allow external app chaperone edits and that's going to allow you to go into calibrator and click copy chaperone bounce to profile what this will do is paste the alignment values that you use during your cut that you've created during your calibration process it's going to paste them and create a dummy chaperone bound using the ovr advanced settings and that usually fixes a lot of the issues with your play area but you can go ahead and actually set up a chaperone bound using the room setup in steamvr i haven't just yet because it's just something i haven't got around to doing yet personally i've found that when you go to do your calibration it actually calibrates a little bit more accurately if you have all three vive trackers turned on during the calibration process this is because when you turn on the remaining two vive trackers if you've only calibrated with one when the two new vive trackers turn on the whole play space shifts a little bit but if you leave all three turned on during the calibration process you don't turn them on turn any more on afterwards and there's no shift so i'd recommend memorizing the codes of your trackers or giving them custom names so that you can always calibrate using the same one and always have all three turned on during a calibration i like to use my left tracker for every calibration and i know that that is the one that has eight at the beginning and bef at the end and i'd leave all three on and i always make sure i select this one for calibration and that way there's no shift at the end of the alignment process now that all of our devices being detected and they've been correctly aligned within the two play spaces we can go ahead and jump into a game that supports full body tracking i'm going to be demonstrating this in vr chat when you first load into vr chat your avatar is going to be in a t-pose this is how you're going to bind into every avatar in full body tracking to bind in properly you need to make sure both your feet are parallel and facing forwards and then stand up nice and straight and face in the same direction as your feet line up the spheres that correspond with your vive trackers with the corresponding body parts that your vibe trackers are on on your avatar here i'm going to be lining these spheres up with the shins the ankles of my avatar and the hip with my side of my hip and when you're ready to bind in and the spheres are lined up pull both triggers at the same time and your avatar will bind in when you change avatars in full body tracking your avatar will automatically go into a t-pose if you haven't calibrated in it yet and if you've already calibrated in that avatar you should automatically go into the by bound in form of the avatar and you won't need to calibrate again if you do need to calibrate again for any reason open up your menu and your standing seated option will be replaced with a calibrate button this will automatically put your avatar back into t-pose and you can rebind into the avatar make sure once you've finished testing everything out and you're familiar with the calibration process to head back and update those vive trackers in mixed vr setups the tracking technology of the headset is usually less reliable than that of the vive trackers and that's what causes drift between the two play spaces most vr headsets that people are using in mixed vr full body tracking setups use optical tracking they have cameras on their headsets that track the environment visually to reduce drift between the two play spaces and how quickly the two playspaces drift apart you need to optimize your playspace environment for your headset there are a number of ways to optimize your playspace environment for your headset to track as well as it can for headsets that use optical tracking like the quest and quest 2 and the rift s and windows mixed reality headsets i'd recommend making sure that your room is brightly and evenly lit that your environment is free of reflective surfaces and shiny surfaces and make sure that your room has some sort of diverse amount of texture in for example if you are playing vr in a green screen room your headset's probably going to struggle with identifying depth between different surfaces because all the surfaces are very flat and even although if you're playing in something like a bedroom with lots of different textures on the floors and the walls the header is probably going to have no problem tracking the telltale sign that your two play spaces have drifted apart significantly is that your vive trackers are not in the right place the most obvious sign of this is when you open your steam menu and you look at the vive trackers and you see that they are definitely offset from how they should be in the real world to fix drift between your two systems head over to openvr space calibrator clear your previous calibration and do a new calibration then head back into the full body tracking game that you're playing and recalibrate your avatar and you should be good to go depending on how well your headset tracks in your play space you shouldn't need to recalibrate your avatar or recalibrate your openvr space calibration too frequently in fact if you're using something like a rift s or a windows mixed reality headset you probably only need to recalibrate your calibration every several times you play however if you're using something like a quest 1 or quest 2 with link you're going to need to recalibrate in open vr space calibrator every single time you put your headset to sleep this is because the quest 1 and quest 2 use a slightly different method for tracking and they realign themselves relative to their play space every time the headset gets turned off and turned back on again this is just a minor inconvenience that everyone has to put up if with if you're using a quest and if you don't want to recalibrate every time your headset goes to sleep for example if you're playing full body tracking in vr chat and you need to get up and go and grab something and you take your headset off and it goes to sleep you're going to have to recalibrate when you get back the best thing i can recommend is to set your headset sleep time to quite a long period of time i think the maximum is two hours that way when you take your headset off leave it in a place where it can see the environment and then you can leave your play space when you come back in and put your headset back on you shouldn't need to recalibrate to align your trackers if you're using your quest 1 or quest 2 to do mixed vr full body tracking you can do wireless full body tracking using a program like alvr or virtual desktop something to bear in mind with wireless full body tracking on a quest 1 or quest 2 is that latency and your internet connectivity is a really big part of how quickly the systems are going to drift apart you need to have a really strong and fast internet connection to be able to maintain a good calibration for a long period of time if your internet connection is very laggy and it stutters a lot with virtual desktop then maybe wireless vr full body tracking with your quest one or two it's probably not the best option in most cases i'd recommend also having a link cable on hand if you're going to be doing quest mix vr full body tracking it's just going to give you the most stable performance and you're going to have to calibrate much less often something to bear in mind is that not every public vr chat avatar is specifically built for full body tracking nowadays most avatars are reasonably well optimized for body tracking but just bear in mind that you might have some issues with calibrating and finding that parts of the avatar a little bit scuffed when you move around if you're planning on making your own full body tracking avatars i'd recommend an excellent channel from a youtuber called kung he makes these really good tutorials on using blender and unity making your own custom avatars for full body tracking i'll put links to his videos and his channel in the description from the past couple of weeks i've learned a handful of things that aren't covered in a lot of guides on how to use mixed vr in full body tracking and i'm going to be making another video uh just covering some of those tips and tricks on how to optimize your setup and things that i've learned along the way i'm also going to be particularly covering content to do with using the quest with mixed vr and full body tracking if you have any questions on mixed vr or mixed vr full body tracking feel free to put all your questions in the comments down below i'm going to be having a selection of different links in the description on the subreddit for mixed vr and there's a discord server for mixed vr as well hopefully some of you guys out there found this useful thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: LayLo's Tutorials

Views: 183,271

Keywords: Full body tracking, MixedVR, VRChat, Vive trackers, Tutorial, Oculus Quest 2, SteamVR

Id: mVC9Z9NnLXc

Length: 29min 48sec (1788 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021