Remember shooting ducks with the NES Zapper? HTC today announced preorder availability of several Vive Tracker bundles, one of which comes with a similar looking Hyper Blaster to relive (or experience for the first time) Duck Hunt-style gameplay in VR.
The Vive Tracker is a motion accessory designed to bring real-world peripherals into the virtual world for a more immersive experience. It costs $99 by itself and works with dozens of games, but is also being packaged in bundles with different accessories. One of those is a replica of the old-school NES light gun, called the Hyper Blaster.
"When paired with Vive Tracker, the Hyper Blaster serves as both a gun and motion controller in integrated games such as Duck Season, Arizona Sunshine, The American Dream VR, Operation Warcade, TacticalAR, and Practisim VR. The Hyper Blaster will be sold exclusively through Amazon and includes Duck Season as a pack-in title, and one Vive Tracker, all for $149.99," HTC says.
Duck Season, as you might imagine, is a throwback to Duck Hunt, but with elements of horror thrown in to the mix. And of course the other games offer different experiences.
Another bundle being offered is Racket Sports. It comes with paddle and racket peripherals that are weighted to feel like the real thing. Pricing is the same at $150, with five games included and a redemption code for Virtual Sports.
In addition to Trackers for accessories, HTC aims to turn you into a peripheral of sorts. You can purchase TrackStraps for $25 a pair that allow you to strap Trackers to your feet and other body parts, enabling full-body tracking. Here's a look at an example of how it works:
All of this drives up the price of VR hardware, but if you already own a Vive headset and are looking to mix things up, this is one way to level up your VR experience.
The bundlers are available now at various online retailers and will ship around the middle of next month.
