Back in March, HTC put its incredible Vive trackers on sale for developers, even though you didn't exactly have to be a developer to purchase them. Today, the company announced that they're also available for the general public for $99.
The Trackers are available for pre-order now and will start shipping out in December 2017. So you can start adding them to any object in your home to bring it into your HTC Vive-based virtual reality experiences, but that's not all HTC has up its sleeve.
Read this: The brilliant ways people are using the Vive Tracker
The company is also lunching Vive Tracker accessory bundles, so if you don't want to just stick the Tracker on things, and want a more tangible, bespoke experience, you can get that too.
The first bundle is the Hyper Blaster set, which has a Tracker sitting on top of a light gun that looks a lot like the old NES Duck Hunt accessory. This bundle will turn the Hyper Blaster into both a motion and gun controller, perfect for use in games like Duck Season, Arizona Sunshine and Practisim VR.
The second bundle is the Racket Sports set, which are custom-molded paddles and rackets that have the Tracker attached to them. If you've played with a Wii you'll get the idea here. You can use this set with games like Virtual Sports to play, well, ping pong and tennis. Both the Hyper Blaster and Racket Sports sets are available for $149.99 and will start shipping at the end of the year.
The final bundle is the TrackStrap in partnership with Rebuff Reality. Available now, a pair of these costs $24.99 and allow you to stick Trackers on to your arms and legs to enable full body tracking. You'll also get a redemption code for Redfood Bluefoot Dancing, a game that is apparently like a mix between Dance Dance Revolution and Audioshield. This will of course be able to work in any game that has enabled full body tracking.
The Vive Tracker is an exciting development in the world of VR - so much so that it won the 2017 Wareable Tech Award for VR/AR innovation. And while developers have managed to do cool things with them, like track cats, it's about time regular people can get their hands on them and, by extension, more immersive virtual reality.
How we test
By Husain Sumra
Husain joined Wareable in 2017 as a member of our San Fransisco based team. Husain is a movies expert, and runs his own blog, and contributes to MacRumors.
He has spent hours in the world of virtual reality, getting eyes on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR.
At Wareable, Husain's role is to investigate, report and write features and news about the wearable industry – from smartwatches and fitness trackers to health devices, virtual reality, augmented reality and more.
He writes buyers guides, how-to content, hardware reviews and more.