I've been using VRCFaceTracking for quite some time now. At the time of writing this, the better part of 2/3 years.

I've seen its beginnings as a mod, then a console app, then a Windows Form and finally (and currently) a fully-fledged WinUI3 application.

During this time, I have also seen the growth of VR on Linux. I understand the majority of people who use VR are on Windows, and by extension users of social VR apps, myself included. I'm writing this on my 11-year old workstation I built back in 2014, and it's seen every version of Windows 10 since.

I believe Linux has a place in the VR scene. More importantly, I wanted to enable my friends to smile and laugh like I'm able to in VRChat. So, I set out to port VRCFaceTracking to Linux.

My name is Hiatus, and I am one of the developers on the Project Babble Team.

For the past 2 years at the time of writing this, me and a team have been working on the eponymous Project Babble, a cross-platform and hardware-agnostic VR lower-face expression tracking solution for VRChat, ChilloutVR, and Resonite.

This blog post was inspired by a member of our community DragonLord. His work is responsible for this feature, and this blog post largely paraphrases his findings. Again, put where credit is due and check out his Github. You can check out his findings as well as his repo here.

This is the story of how the Vive Facial Tracker, another VR face tracking accessory was reverse engineered to work with the Babble App.

Buckle in.