SteamVR Tracking

>I expect to see a beer coozy

Yes, the killer app. I've been hoping for this myself.

> I know I saw a few devices (like gloves) at SIGGRAPH that attempted to reverse engineer tracking with the base stations

I'm attempting to do the same thing at the moment: https://github.com/jb55/libvive. I got basic stuff like buttons and gyros working. Right now I'm wrapping my head around some of the trigonometry that makes the lighthouse tracking work. Hopefully I'll have an open source reference implementation soon.

Since a little before the launch of the Vive, I've wondered if early VR adoption would have been better off if the focus of the platform holders was on content creation tools instead of hardcore games and 360 video. There are many examples of content creation tools available or in development in the form of art and music tools. Tiltbrush and Medium are awesome for example, but most of the applications available are much more on the toy side than the professional tool side currently.

Have a look at the VR support in the Unreal Engine editor[0]. You can actually manipulate the virtual world while inhabiting it! It's not much of a stretch to apply the same principles to CAD.

[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Editor/VR/

Probably because its not ready for mass hobbyists. If it was cheap their manufacturing wouldn't be able to keep up and Reddit would be super pissed their pre-order took 6 months and the SDK was janky as hell.

They don't want a bunch of people making bad hardware. They would rather put safeguards in place to help ensure that early builders actually implement the tracking well rather than have a bunch of devices that do it poorly and reviews saying it's the tracking tech that is bad.

It also reduces cost of support as, theoretically, each company should have at least 1 person who is well versed in the technology for troubleshooting.

Not to mention, it's in-person training, so anyone outside the US is effectively excluded.

Valve looks to be using VR to grow Steam as a platform

yes, notice it is steamVR tracking not openVR tracking.

They likely have a clause you need to make a steam game to get access.

Valve makes money selling software. The more accessories on their system (SteamVR) the more software will be sold.

They probably want this tech to benefit robotics and other autonomous research.

Valve isn't looking to be in the hardware game in the long-term, with the exception of expediting new technology like they have done with HTC and the Vive for room-scale VR. They want as many room-scale capable devices on the market as possible because they are confident most of those games and such are going to be sold on Steam.

They are not locking down the tracking technology (although in the short-term, you still need HTC Vive base stations, but that's just for now) and the OpenVR standard can be implemented by anyone and there are already integrations not just for the Vive and Rift (with SteamVR), but also OSVR.

Own the platform.

As an Oculus user, based on Valve work for the VR community, I will very likely move to the Vive for GEN II.

Well, the Vive does exactly this with two base stations. So, I'm guessing: yes

Well, the current TDM system has a limitation of 2 lighthouses. If you read into how it works, each lighthouse sends out an IR floodlight pulse follow by a horizontal and vertical laser scan. Each lighthouse has a single IR detector to be able to sync these scanning events (or you can use a cable). As far as I've read, the system is running a 60Hz (due to the laser scanner RPM) and as far as I can tell they can't really get the current TDM based system past 2 units without decreasing scanning frequency and theoretically decreasing tracking resolution.

What I find interesting is the idea of switching to a FDM system. I don't know enough about the current hardware to know if the IR detectors are capable of FDM (I think they've discussed this in interviews though), but if they are then you could have a system that supported many more lighthouses and a higher scan rate (since you don't require TDM anymore).

That's correct; he was funding it himself initially and failed to get the backing he needed to get it off the ground. It was an idea a little too early for its time IMO, so maybe this will be the catalyst for a renewed effort!

This one? https://uwm.tv/about-us/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3_m6Bn21Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBhvUgxfUjk

The tracked objects almost always have buttons on them that the user presses to interact with the world.

I disagree. That's the model the Rift uses, but that means that as you add devices, the extra computation of position lies on the PC (or mobile device, or w/e).

With this Lighthouse system, the positional computation is distributed amongst each device and they report their computed position, so it scales way better as you add devices.

Edit: I misread your proposal - I thought you wanted more intelligence in the peripherals. It sounds like you're actually proposing putting the light source on the tracked device. I suspect Valve made the decisions they did in part looking towards a wireless future where sensors can operate far longer on batteries than light sources can.<end edit>

UNC Chappel Hill developed a system like you describe a number of years ago [0]. The position-evaluation software they developed was amazingly cool but the size of the tracker (a bit larger than a golf ball) and the cost of the tracker were both far higher than the cost of the SteamVR sensors, while the cost of their "light houses" was much less than the cost of Valve's lighthouses. The UNC system works great in the case where you want to track a small number of high value devices in an extremely large office-building style environment but it scales much less well if you want to track a large number of inexpensive peripherals in a room sized environment. The approach you describe is great for many applications, but packing the complexity into one or two reusable base stations as both Valve and Oculus have done scales much better for a consumer market that is in part interested in additional "inexpensive" aftermarket peripherals.

[0] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/scaat.pdf

The headset is wired to the PC. That is its low latency path. Latency is less critical for the hands and they have still done a good job with getting it down.

This will allow things like backpack PCs (4 major companies already have them on the way, tailored for VR) and tracked mobile phone holders to have the low latency path.

You could connect such things with cameras that did on board processing and wireless sent the position, but that would fall on the high latency path.

Also you have it a bit backwards, optical tracking is high latency and low refresh, all the low latency stuff is done with IMUS on both Rift and Vive and then combined with optical via Kalman filtering.

If you like podcasts, the man primarily responsible for the Lighthouse system covers exactly this topic on this show: http://embedded.fm/episodes/162

I don't remember where in the episode, but if you're interested in these sorts of things it's a good listen overall. He posts a lot on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere and seems very willing to talk about every aspect of the system.