Hacker News Reader

Outside tracking with a camera is not something I would have thought of. Seems cool.

Reminds me of how sad I am nobody's done a good job of cheaply cloning the lighthouse tech that valve/htc use.

I should point out that I'm not the first person to use camera tracking for this [1], but to my knowledge there hasn't previously been a serious attempt to combine it with inertial or pressure sensors (which are both necessary for competing with graphics tablets) or make it open-source.

[1] http://media.ee.ntu.edu.tw/research/DodecaPen/

Isn’t camera tracking + inertial sensors exactly how the Oculus Rift headset & controller tracking worked?

Yes (or something like that, I don't know all the details), but they use infra-red light which requires a dedicated camera. I think they might also require more than one camera (although it is possible to do monocular IR tracking).

AFAIK you can actually get the sensors used for tracking at somewhat OK prices. But iirc the sensors actually do some part of the position calculations and as such aren’t simple enough to be really cheap.

Yep, they're actually just tiny solar panels! I got several trying to figure out how to use the lighthouse system. Not enough hours in the day and at the time there wasn't enough compute in a small package cheap enough for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com