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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

I'm really not a fan of the external camera. IMHO the ultimate solution is for a camera (or two) on the headset running SLAM to create a virtual world that overlays the real world. Then the experience has to be designed to map onto a large variety of real world environments. You're still free to change the textures and lighting of course. While this is not a generally applicable concept, it would make the virtual experience vary depending on your real-world location. Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun.

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Imagine going to a friends house to play Doom because his house is actually more fun.

That reminds me of the days when kids could make maps of their friends' houses and schools in various 3D games without being labeled as a psycho killer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrik...

Or playing with nerf guns in a friend's house?

We used real air guns, but loaded with paper balls once while celebrating a school year's end, was lots of good laughter :)

I think we're going in that direction, but current SLAM techniques aren't fast enough to provide the extremely low latency needed. John Carmack has mentioned prototypes that mostly work as long as you have dedicated room markings, but it gets unreliable when the environment can't be controlled, so it's a long way from consumer-ready.

If it could be done now, JC would definitely be getting it into the next GearVR. The other problem is that even with current best-case everything, something like GearVR doesn't have enough processing power and if it did, it would kill the battery.

The Vive already has a front-facing camera that it uses for Chaperone and a few other things, but it's not involved in tracking at all. In the short-term, expect other HMDs to borrow this idea.

Have you seen the HoloLens by Microsoft? They've developed a custom silicon chip to off-board all the SLAM processing, and they use that for realtime localisation. Current SLAM techniques are absolutely fast enough for this, VR manufacturers just haven't gotten on board yet.

You're referring to Mixed Reality, which is the concept that Magic Leap is working on (rather fantastically). It may ultimately prove more enjoyable than VR in a variety of ways, but it has a different set of challenges. The goal there is to bring virtual objects to your world, while the goal of VR is to transport you to another one.

Augmented Reality or AR is a better word.

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