How to Connect Your Kinect to VRChat for Full Body Tracking

Here's the latest clever hack for VRChat: An Xbox One Kinect connected to the virtual world, so the user's real life movement is tracked and mapped onto their avatar.

In this video above, VRCer "Zotteke" is using a Quest 2 to log into VRChat while dancing in front of a Kinect; Zotteke's furry avatar does the rest. The body tracking is fairly decent (especially for an older device that's likely sitting in your closet if you still have one), even accounting for its single camera:

"It's pretty good and smooth!" Zotteke tells me. "Depends on what you want to do with it. For example, crouching is mostly okay. Laying down is mostly bad, sitting down is okay, sitting in a chair is good. Of course you're limited to 90 degrees turns because it's only the one Kinect camera tracking your hips and legs, so 180 and 360 [degree movements] look straight up bad." 

As for how to do it, Zotteke points me to this tutorial video below which is worth a watch if you do have a Kinect sitting somewhere gathering dust and you want to play around with full body tracking in VRChat for a budget price:

Questions? Post in Comments and I'll nudge Zotteke to reply!

Hat tip: /VRChat, with a thread that's also worth reading for questions/tips.

Comments

[0xc0ffea]

This also assumes you have the xbox kinect adapter to connect the device to a PC (roughly $25)

[Joey1058]

Ihave been threatening to do this for an age. I have the Kinect, I have the software. I even have inexpensive bluetooth controllers that I've paired with the laptop. But I still have yet to get it all working together. No idea why I'm dragging my butt.