Full Body Tracking on Meta Quest 3: How It Works and How to Set It Up

Short answer

• Full body tracking on a Meta Quest 3 works in three different ways, and they are not equal. The headset's own cameras track your upper body directly, software estimates your legs, and separate body-worn trackers give the most complete result when you connect the headset to a PC.
• Built in, the Quest 3 uses Inside-Out Body Tracking, a camera-based system that tracks your wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso. It works only in apps that support it. A companion feature called Generative Legs uses an AI model to estimate plausible leg movement from your upper body, so your avatar has legs even though no sensor is watching them.
• For true tracked legs and feet, you need a PC and SteamVR. The usual route is a set of body trackers, such as HTC Vive trackers or SlimeVR trackers, paired through SteamVR and used in apps such as VRChat. This is the setup most people mean when they say "full body tracking" in social VR.
• No route turns every Quest 3 game into a full body game. Support is decided app by app, and the built-in features only work where the developer has turned them on. Check the app you want to use before you buy any hardware.
• All software claims in this article are dated November 2026. Meta changes headset software often, and menu names and feature availability can move between updates, so check the current Meta help pages if a step below does not match your headset.

What Full Body Tracking Means on a Quest 3

Full body tracking, often shortened to FBT, means your whole body is represented in virtual reality, not just your head and hands. On a standard Quest 3 setup, the headset knows where your head is and the controllers tell it where your hands are. Everything else, your torso, arms, hips, legs, and feet, is guessed by the software using inverse kinematics, which is a mathematical method that estimates joint positions from the few points it does know. That estimate is often wrong in visible ways: elbows bend the wrong way, arms float, and the avatar’s legs do a generic walk animation that has nothing to do with your real legs.

Full body tracking replaces some or all of that guessing with measurement. The more of your body is measured, the more natural your avatar looks and the more your real movement matters. That is why dancers, social VR regulars, fitness users, and motion capture hobbyists care about it, and why a casual player may not need it at all.

On the Quest 3 there are three routes to a fuller body, and the first decision is which one fits what you want to do. The first route costs nothing and uses only the headset: Meta’s built-in body tracking, which watches your upper body with the headset cameras and estimates your legs with software. The second route connects the Quest 3 to a gaming PC and adds physical trackers worn on your body, usually HTC Vive trackers or similar hardware, which SteamVR then feeds into the game. The third route also uses a PC, but with inertial trackers such as SlimeVR, which measure rotation with motion sensors instead of cameras or base stations. Each route has different costs, different setup work, and different limits, and this article covers all three in order.

One point of honesty up front: none of these routes makes the Quest 3 track your whole body by itself in every app. The built-in route is limited to the upper body and to apps that support it. The tracker routes need a PC, extra hardware, and an app that accepts SteamVR trackers. If you only play standalone Quest games, the built-in route is the only one that applies, and even then only in the handful of apps that use it.

How the Quest 3 Tracks Your Body With No Extra Hardware

The Quest 3 is a standalone headset, which means it runs its own apps without a PC. It shipped on October 10, 2023, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, and it tracks itself with inside-out tracking: cameras on the headset look outward at your room and work out where the headset is, a method Meta calls 6DoF, or six degrees of freedom, tracking. Six degrees of freedom means the headset tracks both rotation, looking up, down, left, and right, and position, walking forward, stepping sideways, and crouching. The same cameras that track the room also watch your body.

Meta’s built-in body system has two parts, announced in September 2023 and released publicly with software version 60 in December 2023. The first part is Inside-Out Body Tracking, usually shortened to IOBT. Meta describes it as the first vision-based tracking system for mapping upper body movement with Quest 3, and it is exclusive to the Quest 3. It uses the headset’s downward-facing side cameras and computer vision to track your wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso directly, frame by frame. Because the cameras are actually seeing your arms, the result is far more accurate than the old method of guessing arm positions from the head and controllers. Meta says this improves accuracy for fitness, combat, and social presence, and it is the feature that lets a fitness app check whether your form is right or a game register a real dodge.

The second part is Generative Legs. Where IOBT stops at the torso, Generative Legs takes over. It is an AI model that looks at your upper body position and generates plausible leg motion to match, with no extra hardware or sensors. Meta is clear about what this is: the legs are generated, not tracked. The system can detect jumping and crouching, and it produces a natural looking walk, but it cannot capture fine leg movements such as crossing your legs. Generative Legs works on all Quest devices, not only the Quest 3, because it only needs head and hand positions as its input, though Meta says the result is more realistic on Quest 3 because it can use the upper body tracking as an input too. Together, IOBT and Generative Legs produce what Meta calls Full Body Synthesis: a complete-looking body built from a tracked upper half and an estimated lower half.

It helps to understand why the legs are estimated rather than seen. The Quest 3’s cameras point outward and downward, and they can see your arms and torso when you look down, but your legs are usually below and behind the cameras’ view, especially when you are standing upright. Meta’s answer is to infer them. That works well for a social avatar standing and talking, and it works acceptably for fitness, where the upper body is the part being coached. It does not work for anything that needs your real feet to be in a precise place, such as dancing, martial arts footwork, or kicking a ball. For those, you need physical trackers.

The built-in features also depend on the app. IOBT and Generative Legs are developer tools, provided through Meta’s Movement SDK, and an app has to implement them before they do anything. They are not a system-wide switch that gives every Quest app full body tracking. A game that does not support them will keep using the old head-and-hands estimate, no matter what you turn on in settings. This is the most common source of confusion about Quest 3 body tracking, and it is worth stating plainly: the headset has the capability, but each app decides whether to use it.

The same camera-based approach explains why the system can struggle in some rooms. Meta’s help pages say hand and body tracking works by using the headset cameras, with software analyzing images of your hands and body in real time to estimate position and orientation. Cameras need light and contrast to see, so a dark room, a plain wall with nothing for the cameras to lock onto, or a mirror confusing the view can all reduce accuracy. Bright, even room lighting gives the cameras the clearest view, and the headset’s tracking cameras should be kept clean.

What the Built-In Tracking Can and Cannot Do

The built-in route is free and needs no extra hardware, which makes it the right starting point for most readers. It is also limited in ways that matter, so here is an honest summary, current as of November 2026.

What it can do: track your upper body, meaning wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso, with camera-measured accuracy in apps that support IOBT, and only on Quest 3. Generate plausible leg movement for your avatar in apps that support Generative Legs, on any Quest headset. Improve fitness coaching, combat games, and social presence in the apps that have adopted it. Work entirely on the headset, with no PC, no base stations, and no extra purchases.

What it cannot do: track your legs or feet directly. There is no sensor on your legs, so any leg movement you see is an estimate. It cannot tell whether you raised your knee, crossed your legs, or tapped your foot. It does not work in apps that have not implemented it, which is still many Quest apps. It does not give you the precision a dancer or a VRChat regular expects, where the avatar’s feet need to match real feet on the floor.

There is also a privacy point worth knowing. Meta’s help pages note that hand and body tracking analyzes camera images of your hands and body in real time, and the company publishes a separate Hand and Body Privacy Notice describing what data it collects. If you turn the feature off, your avatar’s movements fall back to being based on the position and orientation of your headset and controllers. The toggle is yours to use, and turning it off does not break the headset.

Setting Up Built-In Body Tracking on the Quest 3

If you want to use the built-in features, the setup is short, because there is almost nothing to install. The steps below follow Meta’s own help pages, checked in November 2026. Menu names can change between software versions, so if a label below does not match your headset, search settings for “Hands and body” instead.

First, update the headset. Open Settings, go to System, then Software Update, and install any pending update. IOBT arrived with version 60, and later updates have refined it, so an out-of-date headset is the most common reason the feature seems absent. Make sure the app you want to use is also updated, since body tracking support is added by the app’s developer in app updates.

Second, turn on hand and body tracking. Press the Meta button on your right controller to open the Navigator, select Quick controls, select Settings, select Hands and body, and turn on the toggle next to Hand and body tracking. Meta’s help page lists exactly this path, and the same screen holds the hand tracking gestures and the option to switch between hands and controllers. If you use controllers most of the time, leave the automatic switching on: put the controllers down and hold your hands in view, and the headset switches to hand tracking on its own.

Third, set up a proper play space. Body tracking needs room to see you move, so use a Roomscale boundary rather than a stationary one when you plan to move around. Open Quick controls, select Settings, then Environment setup, then Boundary, and draw a Roomscale area with a clear floor. Clear the floor of clutter, keep the lighting even, and avoid mirrors and bright LED strips in the cameras’ view, since reflections are a known cause of tracking loss.

Fourth, open an app that supports body tracking and check that it is working. Fitness apps are the most reliable place to see it, because several of them adopted IOBT early, and social apps that use Meta’s Movement SDK show it in avatar movement. In a supported app, look down at your avatar’s arms: they should follow your real elbows and shoulders instead of hanging in a default pose. If your arms still look estimated, the app may not support IOBT, or you may need to enable a body tracking option inside the app’s own settings.

Fifth, if tracking is poor, work through the basics before changing anything else. Add more light to the room, wipe the tracking cameras on the front and edges of the headset with a dry microfiber cloth, and check that headset tracking is still switched on under Settings, then Movement tracking. If the headset has dropped from full six-degree tracking to rotation-only tracking, you will notice it immediately: you can look around but you cannot walk toward anything. That is the headset telling you it has lost its position lock, and the fix is light, clean cameras, and a clear boundary.

A note on what to expect in social apps: in VRChat’s standalone Quest version, body tracking support is limited, and the full body tracking most VRChat users talk about is the PC route described below. Do not expect the built-in features to give you tracked feet in VRChat on a standalone headset. The built-in route is best thought of as a better upper body, not as full body tracking in the sense VRChat users mean it.

Route Two: PC VR With SteamVR Trackers

The second route is the one most people picture when they hear “full body tracking.” You connect the Quest 3 to a Windows gaming PC, run SteamVR, and wear physical trackers on your body that report their real positions. This is how VRChat users get tracked hips, knees, and feet, and it is the only route that measures your legs directly.

Connecting the Quest 3 to a PC

Before any tracker can work, the headset has to become a PC VR headset, which means the PC renders the game and streams the picture to the Quest 3. There are four common ways to do this, and the choice affects latency, which is the delay between your movement and what you see.

Meta’s own wired option is Quest Link, now called Meta Horizon Link, which connects over a USB-C cable. You install Meta’s free PC app, plug a USB-C cable that supports at least 5 Gbps into a USB 3 port on the PC and the headset, then open Quick controls in the headset, choose Link, select your computer, and choose Launch. A cable is the most reliable connection and the easiest way to confirm your PC, drivers, and headset all work before you add trackers.

Meta’s wireless option is Air Link, which uses the same PC app over Wi-Fi. Meta recommends a 5 GHz network, with the PC connected to the router by Ethernet cable and the headset within roughly 20 feet of the router. Wireless freedom is the advantage, and network quality is the risk: a weak or crowded network shows up as stutter and delay.

Valve’s Steam Link app, installed on the Quest, streams your Steam library over Wi-Fi and is the simplest wireless route if most of your games are on Steam. The paid Virtual Desktop app is the fourth option, and it is the one many VRChat users prefer, because it can forward the Quest 3’s body tracking data to the PC. In Virtual Desktop, two switches in the Streaming tab have to be on for that to work: “Forward tracking data to PC” and “Vive Tracker Emulation.” With those on, VRChat on the PC can use the headset’s camera-based upper body tracking alongside physical trackers, though note that even through Virtual Desktop the feet are not tracked by the headset: Quest 3 gives camera-based upper body tracking with estimated waist and legs.

Whichever connection you choose, your PC has to be able to run VR. The heavy lifting is done by the PC, not the headset, so check that your machine meets the requirements before you spend money on trackers. Our guide to whether your computer can run it explains how to check a PC against a game’s requirements, and the same habit applies here: a PC that struggles with the game will struggle more once trackers are added. If you play wirelessly, the network matters as much as the PC, and our guide to lowering ping in games covers the latency habits, such as using Ethernet for the PC and keeping the headset close to the router, that carry straight over to wireless PC VR.

The trackers: base station and camera-based options

SteamVR trackers come in two broad families, and the difference is how they find their position.

The older family uses base stations, also called Lighthouses. Base stations are small boxes you mount in opposite corners of your room, and they sweep the room with infrared laser light. Sensors on each tracker detect those sweeps and work out exactly where the tracker is. The HTC Vive Tracker 3.0 is the best known example, and VRChat’s own documentation lists Lighthouse ecosystem trackers, such as HTC Vive Trackers and Tundra Trackers, as the supported route for full body tracking. The advantage is precision: each tracker reports its true position in the room, including feet on the floor. The cost is setup: you need at least one base station, two is better, they need power and mounting, and a tracker hidden from both base stations, under a blanket, for example, stops tracking.

The newer family tracks itself with onboard cameras, so no base stations are needed. The HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker is the leading example: it uses two wide field of view cameras and computer vision to work out its own position, connects through a Vive Wireless Dongle plugged into the headset or PC, and one dongle connects up to five trackers. HTC lists up to 7 hours of battery life per charge, with the usual note that battery life is an estimate and varies with use, and each tracker weighs 94 grams. Because the tracker sees the room itself, you can use it in a larger space without mounting anything on the walls, and it keeps working when it moves out of the headset’s view. The trade-off is that it depends on the room being visible to its cameras, so a very dark room or a featureless wall can reduce accuracy, in the same way the headset’s own cameras need light and contrast.

Which family you choose matters less than matching it to your room and your app. VRChat supports up to eight additional trackers beyond the headset and controllers, and it officially supports Lighthouse ecosystem trackers, while noting that it does not officially support other methods, even though many users have success with them and VRChat support cannot help with those setups. Before buying, check the tracker maker’s compatibility list and the VRChat documentation page for the current state of support, because both change.

Setting up trackers in SteamVR and VRChat

The setup has the same shape whatever tracker you buy, and it is worth doing in order rather than all at once.

First, get the PC connection working with no trackers at all. Connect the Quest 3 to the PC, launch SteamVR, and confirm a game runs cleanly. If the picture stutters or the connection drops, fix the network or cable first, because trackers will not fix a bad stream.

Second, install the tracker’s software and pair the trackers. For base station trackers, mount the base stations high in opposite corners, plug them in, and let SteamVR see them. For camera-based trackers, plug in the wireless dongle and pair each tracker to it. Charge every tracker fully before the first session, since a tracker dying mid-calibration wastes the whole setup.

Third, assign each tracker to a body part in SteamVR. VRChat’s documentation recommends this step, because mixed-up trackers are a common cause of crossed legs and swapped feet. In the SteamVR window, open the menu, hover over Devices, and choose Manage Vive Trackers. The window lists your tracking devices, and each one has a dropdown where you assign it to Left Foot, Right Foot, Waist, or another role. To tell the trackers apart, turn all but one off and watch which icon stays green, then label them or note which is which so you always wear the same tracker in the same place.

Fourth, put the trackers on. The standard minimum set is three: one on each foot and one on the waist or hip. That gives VRChat the points it needs for legs and hips. Add knee and chest trackers for better accuracy, and elbow trackers if you want your arms tracked independently of the controllers. Straps are usually sold separately, so check what is in the box before you order, and wear the trackers snugly: a tracker sliding down your shin during a session will drag your avatar’s leg with it.

Fifth, calibrate in VRChat. Launch VRChat with the trackers paired and the headset on, and it should detect that you are in full body mode and show new options. Open the Quick Menu and click Calibrate FBT to enter Calibration Mode, which shows small spheres where your trackers are. VRChat’s documentation gives a careful procedure: check that your height setting is correct, make sure your play space is not offset by tools such as OpenVR Advanced Settings or Playspace Mover, stand with your feet separated by about the width of one foot, keep your hip tracker in a sensible place, and then stand up straight, look directly forward, and click both Interact buttons at the same time. Do not crouch while calibrating, and do not look down when you press the buttons, or your viewpoint will be off. If your avatar’s legs look too long or your feet sink into the floor, your height setting is the first thing to check.

A final point on avatars: VRChat says full body tracking works best when the avatar is proportional to a typical human, with limbs and torso of ordinary length, and when the avatar’s rig has a slight bend in the knees and elbows for the IK solver to work with. A very stylized avatar with short arms or very long legs will behave oddly in full body mode, with effects VRChat calls “arm pull” and “stilts.” That is a property of the avatar, not a fault in your trackers.

Route Three: IMU Trackers Such as SlimeVR

The third route uses inertial measurement units, or IMUs, which are small motion sensors that measure rotation. SlimeVR is the best known open source system of this kind, and it works on a different principle from both the headset cameras and the base stations: instead of measuring where a tracker is, each tracker measures how it is rotated, and software combines the rotations with your body proportions and your headset position to calculate where each body part is.

SlimeVR’s own documentation explains the idea plainly. The system uses forward kinematics, which means it calculates the position of each body part from the angles of your joints, using the headset as the only fixed reference point. Because the headset is the only fixed point, SlimeVR needs no base stations, no lighthouses, and no cameras, and the trackers cannot be occluded: they keep working under a blanket, under clothing, or in a small space, because nothing needs to see them. The cost is that position is calculated rather than measured, so the result is an estimate built from rotations, and like all IMU systems it can drift over time: the trackers slowly go off axis, typically over 20 minutes to an hour depending on activity, and need a reset to re-align them.

The minimum useful set is five trackers: one on the chest or waist, one on each thigh, and one on each ankle, which covers the lower body and spine. SlimeVR’s documentation lists larger sets for more detail: six trackers adds a hip tracker for better stability when sitting or bending, eight adds foot trackers, ten adds elbows, and sixteen is aimed at motion capture work. More trackers means more points of rotation measured, which means more realistic movement, but five is enough to start.

Setup follows a clear sequence. Install the SlimeVR Server software on your PC or phone, since the server is what combines the tracker data with your headset position. Charge the trackers, strap them to the mounting points SlimeVR’s documentation shows, and assign each tracker to its body part in the server interface. The server interface includes step-by-step guidance, so follow it rather than guessing. Then connect the Quest 3 to the PC in the same way as the SteamVR route, and launch your app. SlimeVR states it is compatible with any headset that connects to SteamVR, as well as with any headset that can run VRChat standalone, and its server feeds the calculated pose into SteamVR as virtual trackers.

The practical strengths of IMU tracking are cost, comfort, and freedom from room setup: no base stations to mount, no cameras that need light, and trackers small enough to wear under clothing. The practical weaknesses are drift, which means you will re-center or reset during a long session, and the fact that position is inferred from rotation, so a foot planted on the floor is not measured as planted: it is calculated as planted, and errors show up as feet sliding or floating slightly. For social VR, dancing, and role play, most users find the trade-off worth it. For anything where a foot must be exactly somewhere, a camera or base station tracker is the more accurate tool.

Choosing Between the Three Routes

The right route depends on what you want to do, what you already own, and how much setup you will tolerate. The table below summarizes the choice as of November 2026.

If you only play standalone Quest games, the built-in route is the whole answer, and the question is whether the apps you like support it. If you spend your time in VRChat on a PC, the tracker routes are the answer, and the choice between base station and IMU trackers is mostly a choice between precision and convenience. If you are unsure, start with the free built-in route and see whether it satisfies you before spending money: it costs nothing, takes minutes to enable, and will quickly show you whether your use case needs real leg tracking or not.

There is no purchase recommendation in this article, and no affiliate content. Hardware mentioned here is named because it is the hardware the official documentation discusses, not because it is endorsed. Prices and models change quickly in this market, so check the maker’s current product page and compatibility list before buying anything, and confirm that your app supports the tracker you are considering.

Troubleshooting Common Problems

Most full body tracking problems have a small number of causes, and they are worth checking in order before you assume hardware is broken.

Your avatar’s legs do not move, or move oddly. In a standalone app, the app probably does not support IOBT or Generative Legs, or the feature is off in the app’s own settings. In a PC setup, check that the trackers are assigned to the right body parts in SteamVR, that VRChat has detected full body mode, and that you have run Calibrate FBT. A tracker assigned to the wrong foot will mirror your legs.

Tracking is jittery or drifts. For the built-in route, add light, clean the headset cameras, and remove mirrors and bright LED strips from view. For IMU trackers, drift is expected over 20 minutes to an hour: use the reset function in the SlimeVR Server to re-align the trackers, and keep the session shorter or reset more often during active movement. For base station trackers, check that both base stations have power and a clear line of sight, and that nothing is blocking them.

Feet float above the floor or sink through it. This is usually a calibration or height problem, not a tracker problem. Check that your height setting in VRChat is correct, that you stood straight and looked forward when you calibrated, and that your play space is not offset by another tool. Recalibrate from scratch rather than adjusting one tracker.

The picture stutters when you move. The problem is usually the PC connection, not the trackers. On a cable, check that the USB port and cable meet the speed the PC app asks for. On Wi-Fi, move closer to the router, connect the PC to the router by Ethernet, and reduce other traffic on the network. The latency habits in our guide to lowering ping in games apply directly here, because the cause is the same: a congested or distant connection.

The headset loses tracking entirely. If you can look around but cannot walk toward anything, the headset has dropped from six-degree tracking to rotation-only tracking. Add light, wipe the cameras, check that headset tracking is switched on under Settings, then Movement tracking, and restart the headset if the problem persists. If it happens often in the same spot, something in that spot, such as a mirror, a window with strong sunlight, or a blank wall, is confusing the cameras.

Body tracking worked yesterday and does not work today. Check for a software update first, on the headset and in the app, since Meta moves settings between versions and developers change feature flags in app updates. Then check the toggle: Settings, then Hands and body, and confirm hand and body tracking is still on. Updates occasionally reset settings, and a single toggle is the most common explanation for a feature that vanished overnight.

Safety and Play Space

Full body tracking invites you to move more than ordinary VR does, and moving more means the play space matters more. Use a Roomscale boundary with a clear floor, and keep the area free of furniture edges, cables, and anything you could trip over. Wear the trackers snugly so they do not slide, and keep the charging cables out of the play area. If you use a cable to connect to a PC, manage it so it cannot wrap around your legs: a ceiling pulley or a cable guide is a common solution, and a spotter in the room is better still for a first session.

Take breaks. VR sessions with full body tracking are physical exercise, and fatigue shows up as clumsy movement and poor balance before you notice it. Stop if you feel dizzy, hot, or unsteady, and do not use full body tracking in a space where a fall could hurt you or damage something. For fitness uses, the same common sense applies as to any workout: warm up, stay hydrated, and stop if something hurts. Our guide to beginner strength training with dumbbells covers the general habit of starting light and building up, and it applies to VR fitness as much as to the gym.

FAQ

Does the Quest 3 have full body tracking built in?

Partly. The Quest 3 has Inside-Out Body Tracking, which tracks your upper body, meaning wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso, with its cameras, and Generative Legs, which estimates plausible leg movement with an AI model. It does not track your legs or feet directly, and both features only work in apps that support them. For directly tracked legs and feet you need a PC and body trackers.

Can you do full body tracking on Quest 3 without a PC?

You can use the built-in upper body tracking and generated legs without a PC, in apps that support those features. You cannot get directly tracked legs and feet without a PC, because the tracker routes all run through SteamVR on a Windows PC. If you want tracked feet, a PC is required.

Do you need base stations for Quest 3 full body tracking?

No, not necessarily. The built-in route needs no base stations, and neither do camera-based trackers such as the Vive Ultimate Tracker or IMU trackers such as SlimeVR. Base stations are needed only for Lighthouse trackers such as the Vive Tracker 3.0, which rely on the base stations’ infrared sweeps to find their position.

How many trackers do you need for full body tracking?

The standard minimum for VRChat is three: one on each foot and one on the waist or hip. Five is the minimum SlimeVR recommends for its system, covering chest or waist, thighs, and ankles. VRChat supports up to eight additional trackers beyond the headset and controllers. More trackers give more accurate movement, especially at the knees, chest, and elbows, but three is enough to start.

Why do my avatar’s legs look wrong in VRChat?

The most common causes are a wrong height setting, a calibration done while crouching or looking down, a tracker assigned to the wrong foot, or an avatar whose proportions are far from a typical human body. Check the height setting first, then recalibrate standing straight and looking forward, then check the tracker assignments in SteamVR. If the avatar has very long legs or very short arms, the avatar’s rig is the likely cause.

Which is better for Quest 3: Vive trackers or SlimeVR?

They solve the same problem in different ways, and neither is better in every case. Vive trackers, and other Lighthouse trackers, measure true position, so feet stay planted on the floor, but they cost more and need base stations or a dongle setup. SlimeVR trackers measure rotation and calculate position, so they are cheaper, need no room setup, and work under clothing, but they drift over time and feet can slide slightly. Choose on the basis of your budget, your room, and how much precision your use case needs.

Does full body tracking work in every Quest 3 game?

No. The built-in features work only in apps whose developers have implemented them, and the tracker routes work only in apps that accept SteamVR trackers, of which VRChat is the best known. Check the app you want to use before you buy hardware, and treat any claim that a tracker works “with all games” with suspicion.

Sources & references

• Meta Horizon OS Developers, "Inside-Out Body Tracking and Generative Legs", developers.meta.com. IOBT as the first vision-based upper body tracking system for Quest 3, exclusive to Quest 3, tracking elbows, wrists, and torso; Generative Legs generating plausible leg motion for all Quest devices with no extra hardware; public release as part of software version 60. Read November 11, 2026.
• Meta, "Learn about hand and body tracking on Meta Quest", Meta Help Center, meta.com. Steps to turn hand and body tracking on and off, and the explanation that cameras analyze images of hands and body in real time to estimate position and orientation. Read November 11, 2026.
• Meta, "Learn how headset tracking works on Meta Quest", Meta Help Center, meta.com. Inside-out 6DoF tracking, the difference between 6DoF and 3DoF, and the headset tracking toggle under Movement tracking. Read November 11, 2026.
• Meta, "Meta Connect 2023: Quest 3, AI Advances, Next-Gen Smart Glasses, and the Road to the Metaverse", Meta Quest Blog, September 27, 2023. Quest 3 shipping October 10, 2023, and the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform with double the graphic processing power of Quest 2. Read November 11, 2026.
• VRChat, "Full-Body Tracking", VRChat Documentation, docs.vrchat.com, updated November 13, 2025. Support for Lighthouse ecosystem trackers for feet, knees, hip, chest, and elbows plus shoulders; maximum of eight additional trackers; no official support for other methods; tracker assignment in SteamVR; Calibrate FBT procedure and avatar proportion guidance. Read November 11, 2026.
• HTC Vive, "VIVE Ultimate Tracker", vive.com. Two wide field of view cameras and computer vision for 6DoF inside-out tracking, no base stations needed, Vive Wireless Dongle required, up to five trackers per dongle, up to 7 hours of battery life, 94 grams, compatibility with third-party SteamVR-supported headsets. Read November 11, 2026.
• SlimeVR, "SlimeVR 101", SlimeVR Documentation, docs.slimevr.dev. IMU-based tracking with forward kinematics, the headset as the only fixed reference point, no base stations needed, compatibility with any SteamVR headset and with headsets that can run VRChat standalone, minimum of five trackers, and set sizes from 5 to 16 trackers. Read November 11, 2026.
• SlimeVR, "SlimeVR Server", Steam store page, store.steampowered.com. Each tracker measures its own rotation with an IMU, and the server combines tracker data with body proportions to calculate body part positions. Read November 11, 2026.
• SlimeVR, "SlimeVR Full-Body Tracker", Crowd Supply, crowdsupply.com. Drift appears as trackers going slightly off axis over 20 minutes to an hour, depending on activity, and a reset re-aligns them. Read November 12, 2026.
• Immersive Learning News, "Body Tracking", immersivelearning.news. IOBT and Generative Legs announced alongside Quest 3 as coming in December, released as part of the v60 SDK, with IOBT using Quest 3 side cameras for wrist, elbow, shoulder, and torso tracking and Generative Legs estimating leg positions. Read November 11, 2026.
• XR Guidebook, "Virtual Desktop Guide", xrguidebook.com. Forwarding IOBT to a PC through Virtual Desktop with the "Forward tracking data to PC" and "Vive Tracker Emulation" switches, and Quest 3 camera-based upper body tracking with estimated waist and legs and no foot tracking. Read November 11, 2026.
• VRDB, "How to Play PC VR Games on a Quest in 2026: 4 Ways Compared", vrdb.app, November 7, 2026. Quest Link over USB-C cable, Air Link over Wi-Fi, Steam Link, and Virtual Desktop compared, with the Meta Horizon Link PC app, cable and network requirements. Read November 11, 2026.