Tundra Labs, the company developing the Tundra Tracker SteamVR Tracking accessory, has revealed pricing for the device starting at $95. Previously planned for earlier in the year, a Kickstarter campaign for the tracker is set to launch on March 29th with the first deliveries expected in July.

Tundra Tracker is an upcoming SteamVR Tracking tracker designed as an alternative to HTC’s Vive Tracker; we previously revealed many details of the tracker here.

Compared to the new Vive Tracker 3.0 revealed this week, Tundra Labs says the Tundra Tracker is still the smaller of the two, though it isn’t clear yet how the improved battery life of the Vive Tracker 3.0 will compare to the Tundra Tracker (Tundra Labs previously said its tracker would have better battery life than the Vive Tracker 2.0).

This week has brought the first look at the official pricing for the Tundra Tracker. Pricing is slightly confusing because the company is actually selling three different dongles, all of which connect via one USB connection, but are capable of connecting a different number of devices. We’ve labeled them A, B, and C for clarity:

Tracker Dongle Price
1x – $95
1x Dongle A (up to 3 devices) $130
3x Dongle A (up to 3 devices) $300
5x Dongle B (up to 5 devices) $460
7x Dongle C (up to 7 devices) $630
– Dongle A (up to 3 devices) $43
– Dongle B (up to 5 devices) $60
– Dongle C (up to 7 devices) $80

Tundra Labs is positioning its multi-device dongles as a unique advantage over the Vive Tracker dongles.

Vive Trackers need one dongle per tracker, so if you want to use 5x Vive Trackers for body tracking, you’d need connect 5x Vive Tracker dongles to your computer (each on their own USB port, or with a third-party USB hub).

All of the Tundra Tracker dongles, on the other hand, use a single USB port but can connect multiple devices. Tundra Labs says its dongles are also capable of connecting Vive Trackers, controllers, and other peripherals which use SteamVR Tracking (including the ability to mix and match), and its dongles are designed to fit inside the ‘frunk’ USB accessory port on the Valve Index. (Vive Tracker dongles can also connect any SteamVR Tracking peripherals, but only one device per dongle.)

Tundra Tracker prototype next to Vive Tracker 2.0 | Image courtesy Tundra Labs

Tundra Labs told us at the outset that it was aiming for “slightly cheaper” pricing than the Vive Tracker 2.0; here’s how pricing compares between Tundra Tracker, Vive Tracker 2.0, and the new Vive Tracker 3.0:

Tracker Count Tundra Tracker Vive Tracker 2.0 Vive Tracker 3.0
1x $130 (Dongle A) $100 $130
3x $300 (Dongle A) $300 $390
5x $460 (Dongle B) $500 $650
7x $630 (Dongle C) $700 $910

Tundra Labs said this week that it’s still on track for a March 29th Kickstarter. Assuming the campaign succeeds, initial delivers are expected to begin in July.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Bob

    Well the good news is HTC is at least taking advantage of their leading position with the SteamVR trackers market. Question is: is Tundra Labs the new Oculus of this segment of the market? Or could HTC genuinely hold their position? The story continues! :)

  • Tundra Labs pricing is keen considering their small scale; if the Kickstarter sees generous support it’s possible to use economy of scale to further reduce pricing.

    Best of luck to Tundra Labs for their tracker Kickstarter, and further developments. It’s fantastic to see a new hardware innovator in the steamVR environment.

    I’m thoroughly impressed with their new steamVR HDK and 12v power supply for PCVR headsets, both arrived last week.

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  • Content creators REJOICE!

    Everybody else wonders if one could be used to track their beer.

    • wheeler

      I think waist tracking could actually be very useful to the majority of VR gamers. E.g. movement directed by the waist so there aren’t conflicts with HMD and controller movements (one of the most frustrating things about VR movement IMO), leaning, and reliably grabbable body-mounted holster positions

    • kontis

      There is actually a lot of FBT users in VRChat who don’t stream and don’t make any video content.

      The theme is usually “I want to have legs”. And 90% of time they use it for a laying on the bed pose… But that actually has a value, because you can realistically chill with body presence instead of being an awkwardly standing avatar.

      A few years ago it was all the desktop players who wanted to “have hands”, so they were getting VR. It was NEVER about immersion, but only motion controls. This showed complete misunderstanding of the market potential of Oculus at that time, which released a VR set with an xbox controller…

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Pretty sure Oculus was fully aware of the need for hand control. They showed the Oculus Touch as a research project in the same presentation where they announced the CV1 would ship with an XBOX controller. They simply weren’t ready.

        Tracking the Touch controllers plus the headset with two IR cameras is technically harder than anything using lighthouse. Each Valve/HTC/Tundra tracker can determine its absolute position by itself thanks to multiple integrated sensors, while the IR camera version has to distinguish between multiple IR sources.

        Oculus picked the version that required no extra hardware, thus reducing the cost, but took longer to get working properly and doesn’t scale well with extra trackers. Valve/HTC chose the technically superior system, allowing for more precision and more tracked objects, but at a very high price for each tracker. They probably hopped to reduce prices once they where producing at large scale, which unfortunately never happened.

        So I’m pretty sure all the players are fully aware how useful FBT would be. But at this time pure optical tracking doesn’t work well enough and smart tracker based tracking is very expensive. Given that high end phones now get depth sensing cameras, we will probably have cheap single camera skeleton tracking in a few years.

  • HindsiteGenius

    Too bad it’s not coming out sooner as this is needed. They are loosing a ton of business. The majority of buyers will be mostly smaller Virtual Production and mocap people and they needed this yesterday so most will pony up the $30 extra for the new HTC that comes out next month.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Don’t know, To be honest the Vive trackers do look much more robust, as the Tundra trackers just seem to be 3D printed stuff.

      • HindsiteGenius

        I think I agree, they look way better, and we know they will work when they are released.

      • It’s normal practice to build development devices with 3D printed parts; cutting an injection molding tool even for a small component is not inexpensive by any means.

        This tool cost cannot be recovered unless large volumes are being manufactured. For a large manufacturer like HTC with mature distribution and retail partners these sales numbers are much easier to achieve.

    • Anonmon

      A good few will be people doing indie mocap, but by overwhelming amounts more the use case is going to be full body tracking for VRChat, and by extension the other social VR chatroom type software (ChilloutVR / NeosVR). Just take one look at ebay listings for trackers and notice that if it’s not a listing for just one tracker, it’s going to be a bundle of three, the upper limit for vanilla VRChat.
      Unless there’s some significant advantage in primary function (how well it tracks), I don’t think anyone will be buying the $130 trackers unless HTC discontinue the 2.0’s. Which they probably will, and the 3.0’s probably won’t have any significant difference in tracking quality as the tracking was already pretty solid.
      If nothing else, Tundra Trackers may make sense if HTC discontinue the $100 2.0’s for anyone who misses out on buying the 2.0’s.

      • HindsiteGenius

        I agree that most mocap people will use suits. And there even seems to be affordable options in that area.
        But to me it seems a little expensive for someone to buy these kits of trackers to use in chat room apps that are mostly filled with squeakers. I could be wrong though. Those 2.0’s still seem to be working very good as camera trackers.

        • Anonmon

          You would think, along with much of the industry before tracking in VRChat was a thing, but it’s surprising just how much people value the ability to move all their limbs in VR in social settings, given body language and all.

          And with the squeakers, that’s what you see the most of because most of the mature audience with money and aren’t using Facebook devices are squirreled away in private worlds. Which the only way to see them is to find the rare times they’re exploring public worlds and try to get friend groups going with chaining enough friend requests until you have a sizable number of people who aren’t in orange stasis and/or in some flavor of private world at any given time.

          I’d imagine the trackers as they are now are wonderful for camera tracking, among many other applications that don’t require sub-micrometer levels of precision.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Don’t know but smaller, lighter and 70% longer playtime would be the extra 20 euro’s well worth. I certainly wouldn’t buy a 2.0 tracker anymore unless I really have for some peculiar reason.

  • Lulu Vi Britannia

    Lower that damn price! Selling it for half that price will make it sell four times more, probably even more than that. It’s a fucking add-on for a small market! This is literally the niche of a niche of a niche!

    • kontis

      Well, niche geeky gadgets are usually more expensive than mainstream mass produced devices.

      • HindsiteGenius

        The problem here is that there are existing established products that are competing at or below the price they are asking.

        • Morten Haraldsen

          Well this tracker is the smallest tracker out there right now, so I would say many people would buy this either way just for the size. The price also gets drastically lower the more you buy at once. So it does actually sell for lower than HTC’s trackers.

        • john

          the vive trackers which is their closest direct competitor is even more expensive

    • Andrew Jakobs

      And it’s exactly THAT why it’s pretty expensive, it’s only a very small market.

    • Jakub Kamecki

      Check out our etee SteamVR standalone trackers. We aimed to reduce the price to give more people an entry point. eteexr.com

  • I expected a lower price. I wonder if just -$30 will be enough to compete with an established brand like the Vive Tracker. But the multidevice dongle thing is very cool

  • wheeler

    Best of luck to these guys. I hope they do well here so they can expand further. The price is reasonable given the scale. I’m happy to support companies that are competent and willing to give the enthusiast market the time of day

  • brandon9271

    I had always hoped that Valve themselves would’ve just cranked out a bunch of trackers and base stations and sold them cheaply but i guess they don’t want to undercut their buddies at HTC

  • Andrew Jakobs

    Hmmm.. looking at the new Vive Tracker 3.0 (https://www.vive.com/eu/accessory/tracker3/) you can see it has shrunk about 33% which makes it pretty much the same size as the Tundra tracker, but to me the vive tracker looks much more robust than the Tundra tracker, and not knowing how much longer the Tundra tracker can hold out compared to the 2.0 version I’ll bet it won’t be 70%, AND the 3.0 is slightly lighter.. If I really had to choose as a small studio I would still go for the Vive tracker, even if it cost a bit more, in a studio you’d rather have some robust hardware.

  • Marcel

    Hoped it would be a little bit less expensive wo offer a really good alternative to the Vive ones

  • Yami

    To be honsest I think that price is too high and not reduced enough compared to the Vive trackers tho I hope they wilöl reduce it more after some time.