Pico Motion Trackers first impressions: a potential game changer

Today here in Qingdao I visited Pico and tried the new Pico Motion Trackers. I had a wonderful impression of them so I want to tell you all about my experience with them.

Pico offices

When I attended the Pico Business Connect in London I discovered with my great surprise that Pico was headquartered in Qingdao before the acquisition by Bytedance. I’ve already been a few times to Qingdao and I love it as a city, but I thought that there was not much VR-related here. But actually, this is where Pico had its headquarters (and still has a relevant office) and also where Goertek is based. Considering that Goertek manufactures almost all the headsets (including Meta’s), this city actually has its importance for the VR ecosystem.

I’ve been shown the offices and I found them to be pretty cozy. They were full of employees working on developing features for the Pico headsets, especially the Pico 4 Ultra and its Motion Trackers. Since I had not been able to try the Trackers during the Pico Business Connect, I asked if I could have a test with them and Pico People were kind enough to let me have a quick session with them.

What follows are my first impressions of these trackers. Keep in mind that I had just a bunch of minutes with them, so don’t consider this as a full-fledged review that would require a few days of testing, but just as the result of a preliminary hands-on.

What are the Pico Motion Trackers?

The new Pico Motion Tracker that Pico launched with the Pico 4 Ultra is not the first edition of these devices: Pico already launched the first version of the motion trackers last year, but they were sold only in the Chinese market. This second version is instead sold worldwide, and both for the consumer and the enterprise markets.

They are a couple of bracelets that you can wear on your ankles so that they can track your feet and you can have full-body VR when you wear your Pico 4 Ultra on your head and the controllers in your hands. The motion trackers are very lightweight (only 27g) and contain both an IMU and 12 infrared “sensors” to give 6DoF tracking with a frequency of up to 200Hz. Pico has an AI algorithm that can fuse the data of the headset, the controllers, and the two Motion Trackers to reconstruct the full body of the user with 24 skeleton points with a latency of 20 ms. All of this with a battery that should last for more than 25 hours.

According to a recent article on Upload VR, the Pico Motion Trackers can also be attached to props and used for object tracking and so substitute the Steam VR + Vive Trackers setup in some LBE or enterprise contexts. The tracker itself can be detached by the bracelet and it features and USB-C port that can be used to get the tracking data of the device.

I was very intrigued by all these possibilities and that’s why I asked to try the device to be able to verify with my eyes how good it actually is.

Hands-on Pico Motion Trackers

When I took the Pico Motion Tracker in my hand I realized it was indeed very lightweight as advertised. I also tried immediately to detach it: you have just to press a tiny button and the tracking unit comes out very easily, unveiling the USB-C port that can be used to get the tracking data. When you remove it from the bracelet you realize how small it is: it looks like a round tablet (the medical tablet, not the electronic one :P).

Pico Motion Trackers detaching

Regarding the IR “sensors” on the device, I had a clarification while I was at Pico: there are no active sensors on the device, but 12 IR lights that the headset can see with its cameras. The Motion Tracker is tracked exactly as if it were a tiny controller that is seen by the headset. So it is not a self-sufficient tracker like the Vive Ultimate Tracker, but it requires the Pico 4 Ultra headset to see it to be functional.

Wearing it is also very straightforward: the elastic mount it is on can be worn in a few seconds around the ankle, and then fastened by just using the velcro. It’s good that the tracker has already its strap without needing you to buy some third-party accessory as it happens with other trackers.

The setup procedure inside the headset was also very easy: you launch a configuration application that connects to the trackers, and then you launch the calibration. The calibration just requires you to look forward for a few seconds and then look down with your head so that to look at the trackers. It takes literally 5-6 seconds as advertised. Pico did a fantastic job in making the setup procedure incredibly easy and comfortable.

Full body tracking

I was able to try a couple of demos with full body tracking and I have to say that the tracking is really good. I started with some basic movements, and the tracking of the legs was correct, so I started doing more extreme things like raising one of my feet backward, so it was outside the field of view of the headset, and rotating the leg left and right, and the tracking still worked. I squatted, I tried to put one foot in front of the other, I tried to make the kick movement, I tried other strange positions and the tracking was still fine!

Frustrated by that, I decided to give the system a very hard time by putting my hand around the tracker so that to occlude its IR lights. Of course, this finally ruined the tracking, but thanks to the IMU data and the AI model of the body, the full body tracking algorithm still did its best to supply a pose of my legs that made sense.

I was pleasantly surprised by the full-body tracking quality: I was not expecting it to be this good.

Object tracking

I also tried a tech demo involving the Motion Tracker used to track a physical object. I put one of the bracelets with the tracker around a bottle and I tried to move the bottle in front of me to see if it was tracked in VR.

The tracking was very reliable also in this case: I started with the simple case of the Tracker facing the headset and moving the bottle slowly and everything worked as expected. Then I moved the bottle very fast in front of me and the tracking still worked (the liquid in the bottle was sparkling, so I made a bomb with the liquid, but that’s another story). I rotated the bottle so that my face could see the side of the tracker and not its front anymore (so a big part of its sensors were occluded) and the damn thing kept tracking! To break the tracking I had literally to rotate the bottle so that the Tracker was on the other side and so its view by the headset was occluded: in this condition, I saw the tracked object freezing in VR even if I was moving the real object. The IMU kept providing the right rotation, but the positional tracking was not working anymore. When the Tracker came back to view, it was tracking again, though.

I thought that a possible way to solve the occlusion issue could be adding to the object a couple of trackers in opposite directions: in this condition, at least one of the trackers is always tracked correctly, so the object can always be tracked as long as it is in the field of view of the headset. Maybe someone should do a mount to support a couple of trackers together…

Comparison with Vive Trackers

You may wonder at this point how you can compare the Vive trackers with the Pico ones. Well, to me the comparison feels more or less like the one between SteamVR headsets and standalone ones: the first offer the premium expensive experience that works in all the cases, while the second ones work in most of the useful cases and are much cheaper.

Vive trackers relying on SteamVR offer very precise and reliable tracking, and thanks to the use of multiple base stations, they are usually not occluded. But they require an expensive SteamVR setup. The Vive Ultimate Tracker lets you get rid of the base stations and is able to track in all conditions without occlusions thanks to its onboard cameras. But they both cost around $130-150 each, a price to which you have to add the cost of the straps to wear them.

A Pico Motion Tracker is very cheap ($80 for a couple) and already comes with the strap to wear it. But it requires to be seen by a Pico 4 Ultra headset to work: if it is occluded, the tracking fails. Plus the accuracy is probably less than the sub-mm offered by SteamVR. But in most cases, like doing full-body VR in VRChat, Pico Motion Tracker is good enough, so its advantages overcome its shortcomings. A setup with a SteamVR headset, basestations, and 2-3 Vive Trackers, worth more than $1300, could be substituted by a Pico 4 Ultra and a couple of trackers, which are half of the price! This can truly be a game changer.

Final impressions

I personally had a very good impression of the new Pico Motion Trackers. They are to me one of the most interesting things about the Pico 4 Ultra. They are easy to use, they are cheap, and they offer reliable tracking. They can be used for object tracking and even expose their data via USB. I think these are going to rock among social VR users and enterprise companies. If only they were compatible with all headsets and not only with Pico 4 Ultra, probably they would be able to democratize full-body tracking…

Again, take all these opinions with a grain of salt because they come from a couple of tests of a few minutes each and not from days of long testing sessions. But let me say that the premises are really good.