Soulart's Stations Deliver High-Precision Marker-Free Full-Body Tracking for VR — with More to Come

Korean virtual reality startup Soulart has opened crowdfunding for a marker-free full-body tracking system, designed to carry out all its computation on-device using a custom machine learning model: the Soulart Station.

"As VR users ourselves, full-body tracking has always been part of how we play. But it always meant strapping trackers to our bodies," says Soulart's Hyeokjae Oh of the device's inspiration. "Each and every use, we would tighten straps, recalibrate, charge trackers, and sometimes even replace them due to battery degrading or damages. These frustrations led us to embark on a mission: challenge the assumption that motion trackers must be on the body."

While most virtual reality headsets have moved away from "lighthouse" based external markers for head tracking, moving instead to camera-based inside-out tracking, limb tracking is largely still reliant on markers worn on the body. The Soulart Station, by contrast, is a single-unit system with an integrated time-of-flight (ToF) depth-sensing system scanning at 120Hz and capturing 300,000 points at a claimed millimeter-scale.

Data from the ToF sensor are combined with an integrated 4k visible-light camera and a near-infrared camera to deliver a 3D representation of the user's body, Oh claims. Data is processed on-device using a custom machine learning model running on a neural coprocessor, turning the point cloud into 23-joint six-degrees-of-freedom movement data in a less than a claimed 10 milliseconds of latency.

While it's possible to track a user's body with a single station, the company says multiple stations can be combined to improve both accuracy and framerate — with an eight-station test setup delivering a sub-8mm maximum positional error at 200Hz. The company has also promised to extend the on-device model to include facial and hand tracking, foot contact detection, and multi-person tracking, with plans to bring those to all Soulart Stations as software updates with face tracking scheduled for the first quarter and hand tracking in the second quarter of 2027.

The Soulart Station is now funding on Kickstarter, with pricing beginning at $419 for a single unit and rising to $2,850 for a nine-unit Studio Pack bundle. All hardware is expected to begin shipping in June next year, Oh says, but as with all crowdfunding campaigns fulfillment is not guaranteed — and as this is Soulart's first crowdfunding campaign, there's an extra element of risk involved. The company has also pledged to release the source code for the Station's software in "early 2027," under an unspecified license.