Rec Room’s optional full body avatars are now available to all players in beta, but they still don’t support body tracking.
Full body avatars are an optional alternative to Rec Room’s current avatars, which only feature a head, torso, and hands. The feature started rolling out in beta in March, but was limited to level 50 players at first.
Competitor VRChat has supported full body avatars driven by body tracking hardware for many years now, while Meta’s Horizon Worlds added full bodies last year, though like Rec Room it also doesn’t currently support body tracking.
Rec Room says it’s still working on support for body tracking on SteamVR, such as via strapping on 3 or more Vive Trackers or using Quest 3’s inside-out upper body (IOBT) tracking on PC via Virtual Desktop. The company isn’t giving a specific timeline for this though, and hasn’t said whether Quest 3’s IOBT will be supported on standalone.
For now, Rec Room full bodies are driven with inverse kinematics (IK), meaning the system will attempt to estimate the likely positions of your limbs based on the position of your head and hands.
Rec Room stresses that full body avatars will remain fully optional, saying it’s “committed” to keeping the “floating bean” avatars around too.