- Recently, I've been getting into streaming VR
and there's no doubt that the holy grail
VR streaming set up is
a green screen with a mixed reality set up
where you actually transport yourself into the game
like we showed off recently.
Only problem is
if I wanted to do something like that in my living room,
I either have to hack an Xbox Kinect
for a somewhat convincing effect,
or I need to paint my livin groom green.
Which, what do you think?
Green living room?
- [Yvonne] Nah uh.
- Yeah, I didn't think so.
So, I discovered the next best thing.
It turns out, that with these,
these are called VIVE Trackers.
You can actually cover your body
with additional tracking points
that transport you into the game in avatar form.
So,
hey, what can I say?
I've always dreamed of turning myself into a wifoo,
and now I can make it a reality.
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(upbeat techno music)
We've gotten to a table,
so we'll use a monitor box.
The VIVE Tracker has already been opened,
because I've actually been fighting with this thing
for a couple weeks but that's okay.
The important things in the box are
a USB Micro B cable,
a wall wart, which,
oh.
Shoot, I left them all at the office.
It's not a wall wart!
(hit's table)
I knew it!
I knew at one point that it was not a wall wart and then,
for some reason I got it in my head that
it was a wall wart again.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
The point is, this is a multipurpose cable.
Purpose number one, is to charge the tracker.
So this is the tracker, it screws on to whatever you want
and allows you to bring outside objects into VR
through the same technology as your controllers
and your headset.
So you charge it up and it's got a battery on board.
Purpose number two,
is to plug into this little weighted base
that takes right here.
This little dongle.
This is the dongle for the tracker that it needs
to communicate it's location to your PC.
Now, your controllers use the headset.
But it only has two connections slots, so as soon as
you start to add multiple trackers,
you run out of connections.
You can have one controller and one tracker
and you wouldn't need this.
But as soon as you want to use both your controllers,
you're gonna need it.
Let's step back and take a look at some of the other ways
that you can stream VR first though.
The easiest is to just import your game
as a source into OBS.
This way the audience sees exactly what you see.
It's fast, it's simple.
but it does have the disadvantage
of being a little bit disorienting for the audience,
because they're looking out through your eyes but
they're not in control of where the camera is pointed.
You can mitigate this somewhat
by widening the field of view
and adding a smooth camera mod,
but it's not perfect, it's never going to be perfect.
That's where LIV comes in.
We're gonna get rid of our Beats Saber source.
We're going to set our target to Beat Saber EXC and boom!
Now we've got a virtual camera that acts as
a third party observer of what
the player is doing in the game.
Now, with the green screen,
we we're able to see me standing there in the game,
but now this is something different.
We've got an avatar, who's head is actually moving around
according to how I'm holding the headset.
Makes for a pretty neat experience.
Setting this up pretty straight forward.
You look down at your feet,
point the little pointer, and you are greeted
by the camera view finder and avatar menus.
So camera is basically controlled
by saying where you want the camera to be,
and where you'd like it to point.
You've got Third Person View which kinda like
follows you around.
I think it's actually hard to see it, because
it's following your head around all the time.
Mixed Reality, a bunch of different ones.
I like Selfie, I just like the automatic angle,
you can change your field of view,
all that kind of good stuff.
And then, there's your avatar.
You can see mine is pretty messed up
right about now, but that's okay.
We're gonna go ahead and calibrate it.
Stand like this and go like that
and hey look at that.
Oh, wait except we got a small problem.
The legs are like,
(laughs)
So, oh wait nevermind I did it wrong.
I did it entirely wrong that time.
Okay, point your little pointer at the icon at your feet.
My hands and my head are tracking
according to what I'm doing, except
oh, look at that.
I'm wiggling my hips and
he's just kinda doing whatever that is.
And if I move around,
you can see his legs move in a way that is really unnatural.
But in a game like Beat Saber,
where you don't necessarily have to move
your feet around much,
that might not matter to you.
Thing is with my play style,
I actually do like to move around a lot
because I play this sort of 50 percent for fun
and the other 50 percent for exercise,
so it ends up looking like I'm kind of
leaning back and forth, looks kind of stupid.
(laughs)
Now we're gonna amp things up a notch.
One of my free USB ports,
they are technically USB too,
but if you plug multiples of them into single hub,
people have run into interference or band width issues,
so, your mileage may vary there.
One of mine's at the back,
so I'm gonna use this handy dandy extender.
I'm going to pretend I don't have these other USB extensions
from my previous trouble shooting step,
and I'm going to put the other two
directly into the front USB's on my case.
Now, you may have some difficulty pairing these controllers.
I actually had to take anything but the one I was pairing
physically out of the room, and just pair one at a time
in order to get them to all pair up properly,
and then I've gone and labeled them all
to make sure that I know which one goes with which.
But, your mileage may vary.
Mine are all paired though so I should be able to just go
one, two, three, and they should fire up for me.
Unless you've got a reliable way
to attach your trackers to your body though,
your base stations aren't gonna
know where your body parts are.
So, that's where this comes in.
Rebuff Reality sent this over,
this is their Track Strap Plus.
The only difference between the Plus one
and the regular one is that hhit has integrated battery bank
so you get longer run time.
I would say if you're streaming that long in VR though,
you could probably don't need to stream
that long in VR at a time.
You don't want to cut off your circulation but
a tight fit is important
because if your stomping and your trackers
are kind of jiggling around like this,
it will cause tracking anomalies.
Man, this is the nerdiest stuff I've ever done.
It doesn't get any better from here because
the next thing I'm gonna do is
roll up my pants a little bit actually
to make sure that the pants don't cover the tracking dots.
That's one of the reasons you can't just
duct tape these things to your feet
because if you cover up too many of the tracking points
then it won't work.
So, yeah, we're going flood pants for us in this video.
With the trackers on my feet, we just go into settings,
controllers, manage VIVE Trackers,
and make sure that I set the correct roles for each of them.
As you can see, you can actually
load yourself up with trackers,
but we're gonna be going for a relatively modest set up.
So selfie, that's all good.
Avatar, now we're gonna add oh, yes.
Feet.
Now that's a little bunged up, but that's okay,
we can calibrate that.
There we go, look at that.
And step, and step,
and step, and twirl.
Ta dah.
All kinds of dancing you can do like this.
(muffled stepping)
- [Yvonne] You still can't dance
- I know.
So if I was to move back and forth,
how's my motion now?
A little more natural?
- [Yvonne] - Uh.
- Yvonne?
- Yeah
- A little weird? Yeah.
I mean what's weird about it exactly because I think there's
- [Yvonne] You're a little weird
more than one thing that's a little weird right now.
To achieve a more convincing level of full body tracking,
we need just one more tracker.
This one is gonna go right around the hips,
because that's really where these joints move.
And now, we've got full hip wiggle tracking.
All right, let's have a look at how that works.
You know you haven't seen enough of this.
Yeah, we're gonna need to recalibrate that.
(swishing noises)
♪ Da da da, that's where the tracking problems come in ♪
♪ and now my butt is up in the air. ♪
This is where I was stumped for like two weeks.
I tried every combination of ports on the system.
I tried USB extensions, because I thought it might be a
range issue or compatibility issue with the tracker dongles.
None of them fixed the problem.
But what I'm hoping, is I really hope
we're finishing a video today,
is that I have the real solution.
Now, in this care package from Valve.
A typical VR set up has two base stations,
you got one on one corner,
and then you've got one over on the other corner.
The problem is that as soon as you've got feet involved
and clothes and you're moving around like this,
or you've got your tether coming down the back of your body,
it's really easy for the trackers to get occluded
from one or even both of the base stations,
which is what causes them to drift.
Now I have particular issues with number C.
Letter C.
Suggesting that it's not entirely occlusion issues
and it could be a weak radio in here, but whatever.
This I'm hoping is gonna solve it once and for all.
I'm adding not one, but two more base stations,
which actually from anecdotal evidence,
seems to give better tracking performance
just in all cases, not just if you're trying
to do a full body set up like what I'm doing.
I'm not entirely confident this is gonna fix the issue,
which is why you don't see me drilling any holes in my
ceiling just yet, but I am pretty sure.
Come on, stop it.
Here we go.
(exclaims) (piece hits floor)
Whatever, you wanted to replace these floors anyway right?
Wow, that's pretty impressive, so these just fired right up.
Looks like one of them needs a firmware update.
And my headset, my headset got a firmware update
while we we're working on this.
This is compelling YouTube content.
It's the moment of truth time now,
and my feet are still wondering off into the sunset.
Okay, maybe the answer is a combination of the two.
Oh that looks way better.
Wow, I'm looking through my own waist.
Da da da da, shaking it.
I've got hope.
(crying) No, it got rid of my saber again.
No.
(whimpering)
Oh no, they're drifting.
What the (beep) (beep)
why are they drifting?
Quite literally, no reason on earth
for this tracker to drift.
It has three light houses.
Hello?
What are you doing?
There it goes, all right.
See it's here. That's where it is.
Not here, here.
Wait, why is it up here?
(sighs)
New idea, sometimes having large reflective surfaces
in the room can cause problems.
That moment when you get big old led gaming TV
and then you put a blanket over it to game.
Nope, they're all over the place now.
New idea and ironically my wife, she was like,
"hey, do the antennas have a particular pick up pattern?"
And I was like "oh yeah, they would be designed to
be plugged in on their little thing, probably."
So she's like, "oh, well why don't you put them up right?"
Well I don't have more of those little bases,
so how about this for a solution?
(tape rips)
Let's see if that helps.
Are we good?
Yeah, it's glitching again.
New idea, guys.
It might be my mic pack.
I'm gonna power that off, ouch.
Ugh.
Are we good?
Wow, that actually looks a lot better.
Fresh day, fresh perspective.
Fresh computer, I've actually wired up my test bench
with the boot drive from my VR PC.
Let's give it a shot.
It seems to be behaving quite a bit better,
so you can see now as I shift my hips around in VR.
We've actually got a fairly natural style of movement,
except when the tracker disappears through the floor
which it seems to be doing less of, but still doing it,
which is sort of unbelievable to me at this point.
But, we're gonna have to call this as good as we can get it
for now, so let's fulfill the promise in the title.
Transforming into ninja chick, or whatever this ones called.
Looking not bad.
(singing)
Well let's give it a run.
Does it look all right, right now?
Is it working?
Okay, I'm just going to put aside how frustrating
the last day has been and how sleep deprived I am,
and I'm just going to play the game and have fun.
Does it looks significantly more natural
than just having the feet?
- [Yvonne] I honestly don't remember now.
That felt like forever ago.
- Feels like a life time ago to me too.
Games are supposed to be fun, right?
Then I'm just gonna have fun now.
I'm not gonna stress about missing a block,
or a little glitch here and there.
This is supposed to be about documenting fun.
See, that block I missed right there?
Fun.
(laughs)
It's hard to have fun when you're sleep deprived.
Low blood sugar, and so frustrated you can't see straight.
- [Yvonne] So this is when people usually rage quit, right?
- Oh yeah, I will not rage quit.
I will rage persevere.
Dancing to the song that I can barely hear over the
blood pressure in my ears.
(laughing)
Good enough.
I don't know if I could say that that's worth it,
I don't know, does it at least look kind of cool?
Until I chucked the headset onto the couch
and it looks like I dive bombed the,
you know I feel like dive bombing into the couch.
(light music)
(rooster crowing)
Guys, I think that it's fixed.
Check this out.
Uh, yeah,
mm, yeah.
Pow pow, pow pow.
That looks really good, doesn't it?
Still getting a little bit of glitchiness,
but what I did was I changed over to a four port USB card
that has a separate controller for every single port
and it looks like after all that,
the issue really was some kind of USB incompatibility.
So I got the diagnosis right,
but then I solved the problem incorrectly.
That, does it look good?
Like it seems pretty good, oh I wandered.
I wandered forward a little bit.
Okay.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out
my full review of the valve index, actually no.
Go check out the mixed reality one which,
truthfully was far less frustrating.
Even though it also had it's moments.