The #1 XR Blog in the World
- English
- Sign In
HTC announces new wireless, thin and intuitive wristband tracker, enabling higher fidelity tracking for simulation and training at scale.
Announced at CES2022, the new wrist tracker is paired with the HTC Vive Focus 3 and comes with a multi-battery charger and charging case. It is wireless, lightweight, intuitive, and resembles a fitness band on your wrist like a watch.
The tracking itself is inside-out, so external sensors are not needed and it will deliver, as HTC wrote in their press release, a “more accurate tracking for occluded objects and hand tracking”.
Furthermore, HTC will provide a CAD file, or computer-aided design, allowing enterprises to develop in-house accessories: namely, the architecture industry utilizes CAD files for plans and models.
For now, the tracker only pairs with the all-in-one HTC Vive Focus 3, released and aimed at the enterprise market, making the wrist tracker pivotal for business cases where precision-tracking from fingertips-to-elbow is essential, such as simulation and training purposes. In effect, making kinesthetic learning and virtual training accessible and scalable for businesses.
Before this wrist brand tracker, HTC released in 2017 a three-legged pug that served the same tracking purposes. But for businesses to adopt VR tracking at scale a thinner, lighter and more accessible design was required.
Specifically, the tracker is “85% smaller and 50% lighter than a VIVE Focus 3 controller and can also be attached to objects for highly accurate 6DoF tracking”.
The new wristband tracker will cost $129/€129/£119 and launch in the latter half of April this year.
One feature standing out for the HTC VIVE Wrist Tracker is the inside-out functionality of high-precision tracking of occluded objects.
One such partnership where it will be used is with the Axon VR Training platform, training police officers in community engagement training. As Rick Smith, CEO of AXON, says, “When it comes to virtual reality training, few things are more important than creating a seamless and immersive user experience. That’s why we’re so excited to incorporate HTC VIVE’s Wrist Tracker into Axon’s latest training platform. The VIVE Wrist Tracker makes VR training more seamless, more immersive, and thus more effective,”
With the newly announced thin, light, and intuitive VIVE Wrist Tracker, accessibility is taken to the forefront to scale virtual reality in enterprise simulation and training. The six degrees of freedom provides high-precision tracking of occluded objects furthering the fidelity of simulations where this is pivotal. It will undoubtedly further cement HTC as one of the go-to business options for enterprise VR together with their partners.
