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Will Oculus Use The Valve Positional Tracking Lasers?

scottycam
Honored Guest
With the recent announcement of Valve/HTC Re Vive everyone seems to be saying Oculus has lost or something to that effect. I still think that Oculus will have the best VR HMD as they likely have big things in the making but are not ready to announce, with all these other competitors coming now Oculus seem to have shifted their original concept of being transparent. They now need to start hiding things from their competitors and be much more careful with what they announce, which means less information for us on what they are doing but I also think this is what they need to do.

Having said that I think the valve laser tracking system is superior to the Rift IR Camera tracking in many ways. The ability to have multiple VR HMDs in the same room using the same lasers is much better, plus the same tech tracks all the controllers/props used.

Plus the large decrease in CPU power required to track position is huge and increases performance and I would assume greatly reduces the problem of judder on all (including lower end) PC's. Using the laser timing method to calculate movement is simple math and easy on the CPU, the current camera/vision is not really.

And lastly this also increases the space you can track without any "out of camera" spots. It will have some issues with rooms that are cluttered but if you are going to be in a room like that anyway I'm sure you wont be walking around and could position the laser "light houses" to work for you. The ability to track the walls to phase into your game if you get too close is also awesome.

Valve said they will be licensing this out to anyone that wants to use it and they would like to see it on other HMDs as they think it is a better solution.

Do you think Oculus should license this method of tracking from Valve or create their own version of it? or do you think they should stick to camera tracking?
32 REPLIES 32

MrsVR
Honored Guest
"scottycam" wrote:
"MrsVR" wrote:
Oculus wants hand presence. Lighthouse doesn't offer that, so probably no. It will be up to devs if they want to use lighthouse or not. I'm not at all a fan of Valve encouraging a standing experience as long as there are cables.


They could use hand tracking with "lighthouse" but would require gloves with the receivers. However Oculus acquired nimbleVR which could be used to track hands easily without interfering with the rest of the "lighthouse" tracking system.

It's not that Valve are encouraging a standing experience, I think it is more allowing it. Many people are going to want to be able to stand up and walk around in the VR world (even with the restrictions). If you see something you want to inspect, like a sculpture (or more likely an attractive avatar/character) it will be much more immersive having the ability to stand up face to face and walk around the object/person/whatever.


And much more dangerous and a downright stupid design for a commercial product. As far as I know Nimble (and IR in general) is not up to the task, the latency is bad, tracking is bad, and the interference is ridiculous (doesn't work in daylight or near other IR sources). They will probably use gloves, unless they can perform miracles and somehow make IR hand tracking viable for hand presence. The downside is that there will be more cables, and you really cannot walk around like that.
Rendering/Game engineer

scottycam
Honored Guest
"MrsVR" wrote:
And much more dangerous and a downright stupid design for a commercial product. As far as I know Nimble (and IR in general) is not up to the task, the latency is bad, tracking is bad, and the interference is ridiculous (doesn't work in daylight or near other IR sources). They will probably use gloves, unless they can perform miracles and somehow make IR hand tracking viable for hand presence. The downside is that there will be more cables, and you really cannot walk around like that.


I do agree it is more dangerous due to the cables mostly but if you have a clean environment set up for VR then the room itself should be mostly safe. Since the lighthouse technique allows for easy tracking of the walls and large objects which phase into your game when you get too close, it will be much more viable when wireless VR arrives (mobile VR doesn't count).

It will be years away before the walking around part of VR is solved and no matter the tracking used at the moment (even with wireless) you will still need to do in game movement via input controller. However the huge boost in immersion from having the ability to walk around and inspect a small area is impressive.

I did this using the DK2, as many would have, but the walking space is extremely limited to side steps and small turns before you are out of camera range. Even with those limitations I was that much more impressed with how it felt more "real".

MrMonkeybat
Explorer
"MrsVR" wrote:


And much more dangerous and a downright stupid design for a commercial product. As far as I know Nimble (and IR in general) is not up to the task, the latency is bad, tracking is bad, and the interference is ridiculous (doesn't work in daylight or near other IR sources). They will probably use gloves, unless they can perform miracles and somehow make IR hand tracking viable for hand presence. The downside is that there will be more cables, and you really cannot walk around like that.


Gloves can be wireless, just put a box on the back of the hand with the batteries and bluetooth, and lighthouse sensors. Not that I think gloves will ever take off. Hot sweaty, hard to wash multiple sizes, time consuming to put on and off, there are many other reasons why gloves will never be popular.