Pico 4 Ultra enhances body tracking with 5 Pico Trackers. Travel Mode

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The Pico 4 Ultra has a travel mode, using five Pico trackers to enhance body tracking and support two tied things on the forearms and thighs.

Bytedance’s Pico 4 Ultra is undoubtedly the only direct competitor of Quest 3 and Quest 3, and the only headset on the market that uses the base Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset. Like his predecessor, the Pico 4 Ultra is not available in North America.

Since its launch, Bytedance has been updating its Pico OS with features such as phone mirroring, mouse and keyboard support, free window positioning, 3D screen recording, and 2D to 3D image conversion.

Pico4 Ultra Gets Free Window Positioning and 3D Recording

PICO 4 Ultra OS 5.13.0 brings free window positioning, 3D screen recording, 2D to 3D image conversion and more.

Currently, with Pico OS 5.14, the company brings travel modes to the headset, and supports using five Pico trackers to enhance tracking of the feet and arms.

Airplane and train travel modes

It was first introduced in Apple Vision Pro at launch, then in Meta Quest Headets a few months later, Travel Mode properly tracks the headset location on mobile vehicles such as planes and trains.

Without it, virtual objects and interfaces will drift in the opposite direction when the vehicle you are in changes altitude, speed, or bearing – and if there is turbulence, everything will shake violently.

But why do I need a travel mode in the first place?

I often think that markerless inside-out tracking systems on headsets, glasses and self-tracking controllers use only cameras, but that’s not the case. These systems rely just as much as inertial measurement units (IMUs), which are chips containing small accelerometers and gyroscopes.

The camera normally runs at 30Hz or 60Hz, but the IMU typically offers an update of around 1000Hz, allowing for much lower latency. However, the IMU cannot actually detect absolute movement – at least not directly. IMU’s accelerometers sense acceleration compared to gravity and can integrate acceleration over time to obtain speed. Also, if we reintegrate these velocity values over time, we get displacement from the original position.

This process is called Dead Reckoning. Sometimes, it’s a way that every headset and controller tracks itself, and optical aspects such as cameras and laser base stations are essentially used to correct the cumulative errors that arise from the fuss of IMU data. However, in moving vehicles such as planes, the accelerometer picks up the acceleration of the vehicle itself, and the headset itself is moving, resulting in sudden, rapid, positional drifting.

Pico says that when it detects it’s in a moving vehicle, like Vision Pro or Quest (v74 and later), it automatically suggests turning on the travel mode when the headset is in the moving vehicle. Alternatively, you can manually enable it in the Quick Settings.

Enhanced body tracking with 5 Pico trackers

Pico Motion Trackers was launched last year along with the Pico 4 Ultra, but also supports the previous Pico 4 and Pico Neo 3 headsets. Considering the headset’s cameras, they are tracked perfectly positionally, and if not, they feed the skeletal model with the output from a small built-in accelerometer, generating plausible but incomplete estimated body poses.

At launch, they were sold as a pair only, for €90/£80, and strapped around the ankle to allow for leg tracking. Then, in April, Pico began selling a single tracker with a long strap to fit at 50 euros/£40 on the waist, called the Pico Motion Tracker version, for basic standalone body tracking with a total of three trackers.

PICO Motion Tracker Body Tracking is supported on titles such as Vrchat, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Les Mills Dance, Racket Club, PC VR and more.

Now, Pico has added support for using up to five Pico trackers at once, a new feature called Enhanced Tracking.

Along with one Picomotion Tracker waist version, you will need to own two pairs of standard Pico Tracker SKUs, with a total price of 230 EUR/£200.

Once you have them, you can choose from two configurations, an expanded thigh tracking, or an enhanced forearm tracking.

This is to be clear, along with the trackers you already have at your ankles and hips.

Pico, strengthened thigh tracking, tracks your thighs and knees more accurately. This is especially important for dance, fitness and other social VR experiences where accurate leg movements are required.

Alternatively, enhanced forearm tracking will generate more accurate arm poses, and using controllerless hand tracking will reduce positional delays.

Combining all of these benefits, there’s no word on whether the company could ultimately support 7 tracker mode. Perhaps it’s pushing the limit on the number of simultaneous Bluetooth devices that headsets can reliably handle?

The owner of Quest headset VR enthusiasts has been requesting similar products from Meta for many years, but in September Meta’s CTO shot down a prospect and doesn’t believe “juice is worth squeezing.”

Quest 3 and Quest 3S use upward-facing side cameras to track wrists, elbows, shoulders and torso, and use advanced computer vision algorithms and AI models to generate plausible positions for the foot. However, this did not provide true body tracking, and due to performance costs, it was rare for developers to use it, and not even a meta of their own meta avatar.

Pico’s solutions effectively perform cost-free, work in lighting conditions and track your feet.

Improved positional and hand tracking

Pico also says it has improved the quality of the head and hand tracking of the Pico4 Ultra.

Specifically, headset location tracking is “upgraded to improve tracking accuracy and efficiency, improve adaptability to complex environments such as large spaces and moving vehicles, and ensure greater stability in a variety of conditions.”

Meanwhile, hand tracking is “optimized to improve finger flexibility and stability, improve wrist tracking stability when occlusion or against a similar skin tone background, and improve overall accuracy while reducing power consumption.”