Vivetracker Setup in Vizard

Posted December 7, 2018. Filed under Hardware, Third Party Hardware. Tags: .

With the use of the HTC Vivetrackers you can easily setup full body tracking in Vizard. Now fully integrated in Vizard 6.

For adding the trackers, you will also need some straps to hold the trackers on, such as these.

Steps for setting up trackers:

  • Charge the trackers using a mini-usb adapter

  • Attach cable to cradle and insert dongle (one dongle per tracker)

(Note that you will need an available USB port for each tracker you add)

 

  • Start SteamVR and turn on trackers in this order (it is a good idea to place labels on the trackers so that you can remember which ones are which): Right Hand, Left Hand, Left Foot, Right Foot, and Pelvis. If tracker does not pair, may need to go to Devices- Pair Controller and hold the power button down on the tracker until it flashes blue. Once it’s paired, the light will turn green.

  • Attach Trackers using straps, making sure the green light is facing towards your body on the feet and facing down on the pelvis.

  • Vizard 6 includes a preset for the Vivetrackers. To run this Open vizconnect (Vizard- Tools- Vizconnect), choose “select from some common presets” and select the “ViveTracker Full Body” preset. Make sure to save this in the same location as your main Vizard script. You can name it whatever you’d like, but a good practice would be to name it “vizconnect_config.py”.

Note that this preset is for using the Vive Controllers to track the right and left hands and Vivetrackers for the pelvis and feet. If you wish to use Vive Trackers for tracking the right and left hand as well (such as when using a data glove), you will have to remove the right and left hand controllers from this preset and add Vivetrackers.

  • You may need to adjust the offsets to optimize to your setup (i.e. if the feet are too high above the ground you can adjust the “Y” offset for the feet trackers). To do this click in vizconnect, click on “Start Page”, then “go directly to the advanced configuration menu”, and on the “Trackers” tab click on the button under “Offsets”

  • To change avatars, go to the avatars tab and remove the current avatar, you will then have to reassign the trackers by clicking on the “animator” button in the avatars tab. Make sure that “Inverse Kinematics” is selected and that you also drag the main display under the head tracker in the scene graph once you’re done. You can do full body tracking on any of the avatars that are included with Vizard (Mark, Male, Male 2 and Female)

  • To add this vizconnect to your vizard script, make sure your vizconnect file is in the same location as your main script and add the following sample code:

Troubleshooting:

  • If the offsets of one of the trackers suddenly switches (i.e. the pelvis or feet are twisted), you may need to close and restart your script, or close steamvr and turn on your trackers again and restart the script.

  • If you are using the vive controllers as an input, you may lose the button input. If this happens you have to close and restart the script until it comes back. If this doesn’t work, you may need to restart your computer.

 

Code without vizconnect (it wanting to manually add trackers to a script):

To track a 3D object and not a body part, add a 3D model to your scene and then use viz.link to link the tracker to that 3D object