31–40 of 40 posts
I actually just arrived in Seattle to take the official HTC course on using the Steam VR positional tracking system, and this was one of the first things I saw as I got off the plane.
Fantastic! Having been developing with the Vive for most of the last year for Left-Hand Path ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760 ), and given I've got a lot of mocap experience before that, I can confirm that Lighthouse's tracking is ridiculously good. It's not just as good as something like an Optitrack system: it's significantly better. If this provides comparable tracking to what the Vive offers, it's an ab…
I was really inspired by that too! The tracking is comparable, but not on par yet - you need multiple sensors and IMU fusion to achieve the smoothness of Vive. This is only a first step :)
I have a colleague with some deep technical knowledge in this area - he's the guy who did the heavy lifting when I built an inertial mocap suit a while ago. I've pointed him at your project. If it turns out that it is of interest, perhaps you can get some useful collaboration / suggestions out of that!
How was the base station visualization[1] done?
[1] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/d9241f231a03d177d215f98bd...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you have any issues with PX4 interpreting and fusing MOCAP data?
I needed to make some adjustments and fix some bugs there to make it work. It has the code, but it didn't work great indoor. I'll try to send these changes upstream when I have time. Let me know if you're interested in them - I can explain further.
A bit off-topic, but I was wondering: How was the base station visualization[1] done? [1] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/d9241f231a03d177d215f98bd...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, it's only going to give you a signal "upon incident light from an IR source once the threshold level for light intensity has been exceeded"[0]. What you are getting in this chip is all of the work Valve and Triad have done in improving the accuracy of that envelope signal. Essentially, the accuracy in the timing of that signal == the accuracy of the position. There's a really good talk from Steam Dev Days[1]…
The cool thing is you can probably just use Teensy and my code to convert the envelope to 3d position. I haven't thought about that :)
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The cool thing is you can probably just use Teensy and my code to convert the envelope to 3d position. I haven't thought about that :)
Apparently the math is complex (and proprietary). They claim they saturate a single core of an i5 processor with all of the math converting the timing signals for all of the devices to position. With the official kit, you don't do anything on the hardware side on your own with regards to figuring out position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently the math is complex (and proprietary). They claim they saturate a single core of an i5 processor with all of the math converting the timing signals for all of the devices to position. With the official kit, you don't do anything on the hardware side on your own with regards to figuring out position.
Wow, definitely post more info on this if you can. I had no idea about this. I want to take the class, but can't shell out $3000 for a side project.
There is a huge amount of design that has to go into the sensor layout. Bad sensor layout will cause significant problems in tracking. It's extremely constraining in what you can do.
The system is designed to work with one base station. The second is only for redundancy, covering areas of the play area that are occluded for the master base station by your own body.
In contrast, Oculus uses cameras to detect IR LEDs on the device. It's kind of inside out from SteamVR. They have to them do image processing on the PC to get the angular position with regards to the camera of each LED. SteamVR just has to convert timing values into laser emitter motor positions. Once you get to that point, they are pretty much the same, having to compute position and orientation from that data. It's just a lot cheaper for SteamVR to acquire that data.
It also means that adding more cameras to Oculus adds to the workload, whereas adding base stations to SteamVR does nothing to the PC. Both will increase workload to add more devices, but it's negligible compared to the image processing Oculus has to do. Oculus' system is fundamentally unscalable. SteamVR is fundamentally scalable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently the math is complex (and proprietary). They claim they saturate a single core of an i5 processor with all of the math converting the timing signals for all of the devices to position. With the official kit, you don't do anything on the hardware side on your own with regards to figuring out position.
Wow, definitely post more info on this if you can. I had no idea about this. I want to take the class, but can't shell out $3000 for a side project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently the math is complex (and proprietary). They claim they saturate a single core of an i5 processor with all of the math converting the timing signals for all of the devices to position. With the official kit, you don't do anything on the hardware side on your own with regards to figuring out position.
Wow, definitely post more info on this if you can. I had no idea about this. I want to take the class, but can't shell out $3000 for a side project.