The BEST VR Full Body Tracker - TUNDRA TRACKER Review

[Music] it's finally here after almost a year of talking about these things the finished consumer tundra tracker is finally in my hands or i guess on my feet and they do not disappoint tundra labs recently pulled in a whopping 1.3 million dollars from a kickstarter campaign for these trackers for probably one of the most niche things you could make for vr selling to one of the pickiest groups of people in vr so i have put these things through the ringer stress test tracking test dancing tests even wearing them constantly for four days straight on a trip across the country let's see just how good these things are but spoiler they are so good that they've become one of my favorite vr devices for everything tracking related but first i guess i should back up for a second in case you have no idea what a tundra tracker is or you just stumbled across this video while looking at vr stuff well welcome and if you just want the review there are time stamps but here's a quick explanation just to get you up to speed the tundra tracker is a vr full body tracker basically it gives you legs at least wherever there's software support that is and right now that's vr chat neos a couple other applications and something like blade and sorcery and even though limited software wise full body tracking is probably my favorite part of current vr instead of just putting on a headset and playing a game full body tracking or fbt allows you to literally step into virtual reality with presence and control over your full body it's honestly a magical feeling and there's really nothing else quite like it in gaming or in the consumer tech space and it's not just limited to vr chat or blade and sorcery this is essentially a cheap motion capture rig and real quick just to give context types of full body tracking in vr you can do it a few ways and some of them really cheaper free you can use a single or multiple webcams and xbox kinect slime vr is another good option but the most accurate full body tracking available right now for the price is using base stations as long as you have base stations a pc and steamvr you can use these with any vr headset including a quest to even though it's a little more expensive because you have to buy the base stations however these trackers in particular are kind of a big deal because before the tundra tracker you had one company as an option for laser full body tracking and that was htc and the vive trackers well that changes today with the tundra well sort of if you can buy them so let's actually talk about all the features and the pros and the cons the first thing i want to talk about is just how tiny these trackers are in just about every single way size wise they're about half as big as the vive tracker 2.0 and still smaller than the 3.0 but one of the biggest improvements comes in weight the vive trackers weighing 84 and 73 grams respectively while the tundra tracker weighs in at just 49 grams may not sound like much of a difference but when these are attached to your body flopping around every gram counts and this is especially true when we're talking about attract device if steam is reading every millimeter of movement from these things then obviously the less floppy and clumsy that these can get the better but before we get into the amazing parts of the tundra tracker we should talk about some of the downsides that this can potentially have believe it or not the majority of the weight and a lot of the size of most of your wireless devices comes from the battery it's a constant tug of war with any company designing a product to either have exceptional battery life or to be small and compact well somehow tundra labs pulled out the best battery life out of all of these trackers in my most recent battery life test the tundra tracker lasted 7 hours and 22 minutes the vive tracker 3.0 lasted 6 hours and 12 minutes and the vibe tracker 2.0 lasted a measly 3 hours and 25 minutes of course these are going to vary quite a bit depending on how often they're discharged or what conditions they're in but these are the numbers i got this time around the next hurdle of being small would be occlusion or tracking quality you'll notice that all of these trackers have a very interesting irregular shape to them and this is because of the nature of laser tracking sensors on each device pick up lasers from the base stations and mixed with imu measurements give a 3d tracked position the smaller and less complex the design the harder it is for steamvr to figure out what is where and in what orientation which could potentially present an issue for the tundra tracker except it doesn't i did test out a development version of the tundra tracker months ago and to be fair that tracker did suffer from slightly worse tracking than the vive 3.0 but those issues have been completely solved with the final version of the tundra tracker and in my three base station setup i've had exceptional tracking quality indistinguishable if not slightly better than what i have with my vive 3.0 at least in practical testing of course there are always going to be moments where you do lose tracking no matter how good your trackers are and if you've spent any time in vr chat at all and you see someone's avatar flying away from the hip this is usually what's happening and i noticed it just doesn't happen as much with the tundra trackers in my setup and another metric that i'm pretty happy about is how fast these trackers regain proper tracking after losing it inevitably occasionally one more thing regarding the size is honestly it can be kind of a negative in some ways and i guess it's kind of a good problem to have like oh man my trackers are so small that i accidentally cover them on occasion yeah i don't really know here i did an occlusion test and surprisingly i can cover almost all of it before totally losing tracking and then it regains it back it's not really an issue it's just something that i have to mention but now onto the really really good parts of the tundra tracker i use full body tracking just about daily usually in vr chat and the tundras have become my absolute zero compromises replacement for my vibe trackers they've got better battery life they're smaller and lighter but there are two really big things that i love about them one well one of the most annoying parts of full body tracking is having to use watchmen dongles or steamvr specific dongles to connect your trackers to the pc sometimes there's weird interference or usb issues that could affect your tracking and unless you have a usb hub you'll have to sacrifice three usbs just for full body and god forbid you are crazy and use more than three trackers for something like 11 point tracking well that's gonna be a lot of dongle and easily my favorite part of the tundra tracker is the super dongle yeah it's actually called the super dongle tundra labs has solved one of the biggest fbt issues by making one dongle to rule them all sw3 allows three steamvr devices to connect to a single usb and this alone has made my life better and they even have an sw5 and sw7 and those allow for well 5 and 7 devices to connect to one usb and even better it was designed to fit inside of the valve index's trunk absolutely genius something cool as well is that you don't even need 100 trackers to use this you can easily connect normal vibe trackers or controllers to this if you really wanted to i didn't even have to pair them i just plugged in the super dongle and open up steamvr and they were already paired and ready to go and the next thing that i really love about tundra trackers is the lack of shake or jitter when moving around but there's also something you can do in addition that makes this even better and i think if you're a dancer in vr this is probably the absolute best option for the highest quality full body representation of well your body i tried it myself so one of the most important parts of the quality of your full body tracking is the strap that you use and for a long time i use rebuffs reality's track strap plus because it has a battery bank built in and it would keep my 2.0 trackers charged for well longer than the three hours they could put out but with the 3.0 and tundra trackers the battery life has gotten good enough but i don't really need those anymore so i moved to standard amazon straps but i did try tundra's deluxe straps that they sell and it does something pretty cool it has an extra strap on the back of the feet that wrap around your ankle to give a little bit more of a secure fit on your feet trackers so they're not flopping around so much and the waist belt works as you'd expect it's just a standard waist belt but it does have a little pouch for a battery bank or i guess a little snack however everyone is different it doesn't really matter what strap you're using as long as it works for you and whether it's a track strap plus or an amazon strap or a tundra deluxe strap there is one thing here that is amazing and it's the ability for me to not use a strap at all i'm probably in the minority here but i really like wearing shoes when i'm in vr for long periods of time especially if i'm in social vr or partying or dancing or something like that but the tundra tracker has swappable back plates with a couple screws you can take off the typical quarter inch adapter and replace them with a shoelace plate to just lace into your shoes no more straps no more velcro just toss on the shoes and that's it this alone has been an absolute game changer for me and has led to me ordering some dedicated vr shoes for just the house to keep the trackers on because the experience is really nice and the trackers stay more secure than they normally do there's absolutely zero jitter once it's laced up and if you're looking for the highest quality foot tracking this is probably the way to go as long as you don't mind you know wearing shoes and i even ended up keeping the trackers on my shoes during a trip across the country because well they're kind of cool and i was in a rush to get to my flight in time and i actually missed that flight but that's besides the point i've been wearing them for a few days now just chilling on my shoes and not only did no one really notice i had a set of full body trackers on my shoes but they still work and it turned out to be a pretty decent stress test even if the tsa raised a couple eyebrows in security so the tundra tracker like i've already said here it's smaller lighter has a better battery life and it's cheaper than the competition at three hundred dollars for all of them and a super dongle compare that to around four hundred dollars for the five tracker 3.0 and 300 for the vive tracker 2.0 every issue i had with it was practically solved in between the development version and the final consumer version and they've turned into my main tracker that i use for everything it's pretty cool that a relatively small company is making the things that we want it's a niche product for a niche audience but it's legitimately better than what we currently have and i haven't ran into many issues yet the biggest problem is gonna be actually buying these things right now it looks like their kickstarter is closed and they're waiting to be able to open up for more orders as they want to get this batch out first before they commit to tens of thousands of orders but i suppose this video can serve as a reference for when those orders do open back up because they're honestly really good i just wish that more people could have them and also thank you to tundralabs both for making these of course but also sending them to review it always feels kind of weird but also really good to have a glowing super positive review of a product that i'd end up really liking but i do want to clear up that these were sent to me but of course i'm not sponsored or anything i just ended up liking the trackers a lot using them a ton and i like that tundra is willing to make some cool stuff for the vr enthusiasts even if it means they're not going to be selling millions of them to the mainstream audience and i will be streaming with the tundra trackers today after this video so you can see their performance live and i don't know make me do weird things with them so come on by and say what's up i've been taking a break from twitch lately and this is going to be my first stream back so stop on by also wanted to say thank you to all of my patreon supporters especially my omegas i couldn't do any of this without you don't forget to like this video if you loved it subscribe if you want more of this and hit that freaking bell if you just can't live without it much love thrill out [Music]

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 456,893

Keywords: VR, FBT, full body tracking, VRChat, Tundra Tracker, Tundra Labs, Quest, Quest 2, Oculus, Quest2, Oculus Quest, valve Index, Full body, Best, Thrillseeker, Vive

Id: bohzJkvHHqc

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021