steamvr tracking – Page 5 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

December 30, 2016

‘Athena’ is a New Lighthouse Tracked VR Gun Controller from Ilium VR

Ilium VR are working on a new VR-centric gun peripheral which plans to use Valve’s SteamVR ‘Lighthouse’ tracking to bring realistic weapon control to virtual reality games.

Shooting things in games is cool. Shooting things in VR can be infinitely cooler. Add in a dedicated controller that gives you the physical feel of a weapon and add tracking and peripheral functionality to it and you have something that has the potential to take shooting things to the next level.

Ilium certainly think so as they already begun a crowdfunding campaign to kick off their plans to build a virtual reality-centric gun peripheral to be powered by Valve’s Lighthouse tracking system. Athena is the peripheral’s name and it will come in the form of a futuristic looking assault rifle.

For clarity, outside of the design renders seen in the above promotional video, the rifle peripheral being demonstrated is not Athena but Ilium VR’s earlier VR gun dev kit “The Persuader”, modeled on the M1A1 Thompson ‘Tommy Gun’ and using a rudimentary mount for a standard SteamVR controller in order to leverage its tracking.

The Athena is an altogether more ambitious beast and promises recoil action, the ability to reload via a magazine pull-out / pull-in action, whilst also integrating standard joystick and button inputs. What makes the device interesting however is the team’s plans to integrate Valve’s ‘open’ SteamVR ‘Lighthouse’ tracking functionality into the device. Basically, the final peripheral would be clustered with sensors to enable the gun to detect the sweeps from SteamVR’s laser base stations, and as with the packed-in SteamVR controllers, beaming that data wirelessly for a compatible game to map to in game actions.

We reported recently that Valve’s long awaited plans to open up the Lighthouse platform to form a tracking standard of sorts for developers and manufacturers had finally begun in earnest. Valve announced just prior to the company’s Steam Dev Days event that it’s already licensed Lighthouse tracking to some 300 companies, royalty free since it’s original announcement back in august. According to Valve, the company are gearing up to show off “new VR peripherals” which will be made available for “demonstration and design collaboration with attendees,” at some point in the future.

The Athena is one of the first gaming specific product we’ve seen to take advantage of Valve’s new initiative and it’s a brave move. Traditionally, peripherals for gaming have rarely fared well. Gaming systems (including the SteamVR powered HTC Vive of course) ship with standard controllers allowing developers to target them and hone their software knowing that everyone who buys their game or application will own those devices. 3rd party peripherals on the other hand require the manufacturer to acquire interest and support from those same developers to add in legacy support for the proprietary device. The Catch 22 situation of course is that, developers don’t want to commit resources to build around a device few customers own and customers won’t buy hardware without software support.

Illium are of course aware of this and have tried to mitigate the issue by entered into a partnership with Invrse Studios (The Nest) and Vertigo Games (Arizona Sunshine) who will both include updates to add native support for Athena to their games. A good start indeed.

Athena is currently being offered via an Indiegogo campaign with a lofty $100,000 funding target. Backers can notionally get their hands on a single gun along with The Nest and Arizona Sunshine for $300. The device itself has a timeline for delivery of December 2017. The campaign seems troubled currently however, with just over $4000 of that goal currently met. It’s not clear how key the funding is to progress of the product.

It’s an interesting project and one we hope to see more of in the future, especially if the Ilium team manage to square the peripheral support issue mentioned above. However it does join Stryker, another VR-centric peripheral featuring impressive recoil, in the same space. We’ll watch with interest to see how much traction both projects gain in the future.

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December 5, 2016

Touch and Vive Roomscale Dimensions Visualized

Ahead of the launch of Oculus Touch, the company has finally detailed its ‘experimental’ camera arrangements for 360 degree and ‘roomscale’ tracking, allowing us to take a look at how those tracking volumes compare with the HTC Vive.

oculus-touch-2 — The front-facing setup aims for 180-degree focused experiences. Road to VR contributor Nate Kozak coined this ‘rug-scale’.

The Vive was the first consumer VR headset out the door with ‘roomscale’ tracking, giving players the ability to stride across a roughly room-sized space while partaking in a VR experience with motion controllers. Though Oculus was at once focused only on front-facing (180 degree) ‘standing’ experiences, the company finally announced back in October that they would in fact support both roomscale and 360 degree standing VR through two different camera orientations.

For roomscale, the company recommends three cameras (which means you’d need to buy one additional), two up front like the normal front-facing setup, and one in either of the rear corners of the play area. For 360 degree standing, they recommended two relatively close cameras at opposite corners. The company published a setup guide for each, including the specific dimensions of the play area that’s possible with both layouts. It should be noted that Oculus is still calling these camera configurations “experimental”.

Oculus Touch vs. HTC Vive Roomscale Dimensions

We laid out the play area dimensions of both recommended configurations to get a sense of how they compared with the HTC Vive’s larger roomscale tracking area.

vive-and-oculus-roomscale-comparison — Click here for metric.

All of the data here comes from official documentation. The HTC Vive setup guide recommends base stations are placed up to 16.3 ft diagonally, which makes a square play area that’s 11.5 ft on each side. You can see it in above in yellow.

In the 3-camera roomscale setup guide, Oculus defined a ‘room’ as being 10.5 ft on all sides (14.6 ft diagonally), which you can see above in grey. The actual play area within that room is 8.2 ft on all sides and 11.6 ft diagonally, above in pink.

For the 2-camera 360 standing setup, with two cameras placed in opposite corners just beyond the play area, the play area is 5 ft on each side and 7 ft diagonally, above in blue.

How well will Touch work within these volumes, and to what extent can the boundaries be pushed? With Touch launching this week, we’ll be able to answer those questions soon.

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November 29, 2016

Next-gen Lighthouse Base Station Could Bring “rapid cost reductions”

Valve is continuing to improve upon the design of the ‘Lighthouse’ Base Stations, the laser-beacons that form a crucial part of the SteamVR Tracking system. Future iterations are expected to become dramatically simplified, reducing size, noise, and perhaps most importantly, cost.

VR is awesome, but it’s still expensive. Until costs come down significantly, the sort of experience you can get from the HTC Vive isn’t likely to see mainstream consumer usage on the scale of the smartphone. But, just like the smartphone, it’s likely that we’ll see significant reductions in price as the market and the devices mature.

One step toward getting there is making the tracking technology less expensive. Valve’s SteamVR Tracking (AKA Lighthouse), which is employed by the HTC Vive, relies on a pair of laser-beacons called Base Stations. Each Base Station houses motors, lasers, LEDs, and an array of electronics to control it all. Judging by the $134 cost of a replacement Base Station on the Vive’s accessory page, the component may be the single most expensive part of the Vive system beyond the headset—and you need two of them.

So it makes sense that Valve is focusing a lot of attention on continuing to hone the Base Station design into something that’s more simple and affordable. At Steam Dev Days last month, the company showed a glimpse into the future of the Base Station, including a design insight that could dramatically reduce the cost.

Each current Base Station uses two motors to sweep laser lines across the tracked space; one line sweeps along the X axis and the other line sweeps along the Y axis, allowing independent tracking of each direction. Each motor also needs its own laser diode, optics, motor controller, wheel assembly, etc.

But, as Valve Engineer Ben Jackson pointed out at Steam Dev Days last month, it’s actually possible to get X and Y axis information from a single spinning motor. The key insight is generating a ‘V’ shaped pattern with two lines from the same motor, instead of one axial line per motor.

base-station-lines — Left: the present two motor layout. Right: the single motor layout. | Photo courtesy Ben Jackson / Valve

And that of course means that one of the motors, and all the components it’s reliant on, can be removed from the Base Station. As Jackson put it, “What better way to make [the Base Station] lighter, quieter, cheaper, and more power efficient, than to chop out half the parts?”

Reid Wender of Triad Semiconductor, who has been working with Valve on SteamVR Tracking since 2014, says he expects the system will see “rapid cost reductions” due to changes like this.

present-and-future-base-station — Photo courtesy Ben Jackson / Valve

Chopping out half the parts will definitely have a dramatic impact on component and manufacturing costs, but Wender points out that a more simple system, with a single motor instead of two, is easier to calibrate and also likely to be more reliable, which could further reduce support costs.

In the same presentation at Steam Dev Days, Jackson also highlighted the new custom made SteamVR Tracking chip that Triad is producing for Valve, another cost-saving move that could even increase the system’s tracking performance.

So what might costs look like with these improvements taken into account? Let’s rough out some guesses with a little back-of-the-envelop reasoning:

The current cost of the HTC Vive is $800, and it includes the headset, two Base Stations, and two controllers (I’ve tossed out a few of the smaller pieces like the Link Box for the sake of this guestimate). Just going by known prices on the Vive’s accessories page (which are almost certainly more than the out-of-the-box cost), the Base Stations contribute $270 and the controllers $260, leaving $320 for the headset itself (again, that’s probably far off, but we’re more interested in the relative figures. Halving the cost of the Base Stations would bring their contribution down to $135, reducing the entire package to $665, about 17% less than the current price.

Once more, this is a very imprecise guess, but the point remains that, if the Base Station is the biggest cost to the system aside from the headset (which stands to reason from the present cost on the Vive accessories page), smarter Base Station design could make a big dent in the overall cost of the system, and that’s before considering any other improvements like Triad’s new SteamVR Tracking chip, and more optimizations that are surely in the works.

A big question arises however: Would Valve and HTC put new, cheaper base stations into the existing Vive package, or wait until the launch of an entirely new headset? For now, only time will tell.

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October 26, 2016

SteamVR Tracking Courses Begin, Already Completed by 50 Developers

Valve opened up their SteamVR tracking technology for third-party development in August, and since then, 50 developers have completed the mandatory training course provided by Synapse, the first company to enter the field.

Synapse says that most of the participants have been interested in gaming specifically, but some have expressed interest in applying the technology to the automotive industry, science, sports, education, and general consumer electronics.

Synapse has received more registrations for the training course than originally anticipated, so they’ve added additional slots for the course in November and December. A representative for Synapse said that there are currently no plans to continue the course past December, so interested developers should sign-up as soon as possible to get in the remaining classes.

Synapse will also be presenting a compressed version of their training course at SXSW as part of the VR/AR track in March of 2017.

At Valve’s annual Steam Dev Days event earlier this month, the company laid heavy emphasis on making their Lighthouse room-scale tracking technology available to companies wishing to integrate it into 3rd party products. Valve stated that claiming that those 300 licensees span multiple industries ranging from “entertainment VR to automotive to televisions and toys.” Further, Valve says we can look forward to seeing many of these products appear in 2017.

Shortly after the announcement that the SteamVR Tracking technology would finally begin to open up to third-parties, semiconductor firm Triad Semiconductor announced that it was collaborating with Valve to create the ‘light to digital’ chips that form an important foundation of the sensors and make the impressively accurate tracking and which Valve recommends for use in products integrating SteamVR Tracking.

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October 12, 2016

Valve: 300 Companies Already Planning to Use SteamVR Tracking Tech

Inside a Lighthouse basestation | Photo courtesy Valve

Valve have revealed that their room-scale tracking technology SteamVR has now been licensed to over 300 companies, many of which plan to release products integrating the tech in 2017.

Valve’s pseudo-annual developer focused event ‘Steam Dev Days’ will kick off tomorrow and the gaming giant has already teased some of what attendees at the Seattle based show will see. Running for two days at the Washington State Convention Centre, the event is developers-only for the most part with no press access.

According to a press release from Valve, the company are gearing up to show off “new VR peripherals” which will be made available for “demonstration and design collaboration with attendees.” Precisely what these peripherals are we don’t know, but Valve states that its SteamVR Tracking tech, the laser-based system which provides room-scale tracking capabilities to the HTC Vive, now has over 300 companies signed up as licensees for technology.

It seems Valve’s vision for SteamVR tracking uses is broad to say the least, with the company claiming that those 300 licensees span multiple, somewhat disparate industries ranging from “entertainment VR to automotive to televisions and toys.” Further, Valve says we can look forward to seeing many of these products appear in 2017.

Valve had been promising to open up its tracking technology to third parties for some time and finally announced a program in August offering both a royalty-free licensing model and developer kit to licensees looking to add integration. While the company doesn’t directly charge any fees to use the technology, they do insist that licensees attend a training course priced at $3,000 to learn the ins and outs of the technology.

For Oculus’ part, the company has said previously that they planned to open up their own ‘Constellation’ tracking technology to third parties but hasn’t announced any progress on that effort for more than a year.

Valve meanwhile has said that they want to make SteamVR Tracking ubiquitous, ‘like wifi’, and seems in the best position so far to make that happen.

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October 3, 2016

Send HTC Your Idea for a Vive Accessory and Win a Free HTC Vive

The Vive’s Lighthouse tracking system is an impressive piece of tech, considering it boasts sub-millimeter, 3D room-scale positional tracking for a VR headset and hand controllers using lasers. But haven’t you ever wished the Vive controllers could be used for more than just hand tracking? Maybe you want a Lighthouse-compatible harness for your dog, a cool gun accessory, or maybe you just want to keep track of your beer while in VR? Now’s your chance to pitch your crazy accessory idea to HTC.

HTC will be running the accessory contest through its Viveport community forum, and letting members vote on their favorite entries. The top three ideas—whether they’re created for the Vive headset, controllers, base stations, or all three—get a free HTC Vive system. The grand prize? The lucky winner could have their idea 3D printed into reality.

Potential designers may want to get out their reading glasses however. HTC maintains in their lengthy contest rules that the winner’s design is to exceed no more than $1,600 USD in cost when it comes time to 3D print—but doesn’t clearly say whether you’re allowed to slap on Lighthouse sensors to everyday objects or not. Considering the rules explicitly state that all aspects of the design “must be solely owned by or licensed to [you] or in the public domain,” it’s safe to say most people won’t be able to just pop on individual sensors to everyday items like a beer koozie. After all, Valve’s Lighthouse sensor technology is protected under a royalty-free license, but you can only obtain it after going through a $3,000 course.

So you’re probably better off designing around the hardware than making your own from the ground up.

Design submissions must be uploaded to the Viveport Community by October 30th with the contest officially ending on November 7th.

HTC Vive Accessory Contest

Note: Only legal residents (18+) of the following countries can enter to win: United States, Canada (excluding Quebec), United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Poland, Austria, Belgium, Russia, Thailand, Singapore, India, Mexico and Japan.

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September 19, 2016

Second-gen Lighthouse Chip Could Improve Tracking, Reduce Cost of HTC Vive 2

A new chip that Valve is recommending for use in future SteamVR headsets and accessories brings improved performance and significant power reduction compared to the first generation solution along with potential manufacturing savings.

htc-Vive-consumer-IPD-dial — Each divot has a Lighthouse sensor at its base

An essential component in the first generation HTC Vive is the cratered sensors that cover the headset and controllers. Each of these sensors consists of a photodiode and discrete circuit which detects and interprets pulses of light from the Lighthouse ‘basestations’. Elegant as the system is, there’s room for improvement in the sensor design; a new chip that Valve is recommending for use in future SteamVR tracked headsets and peripherals brings enhancements ranging from reduced costs to improved performance and power savings.

That chip is the TS3633 integrated circuit from Triad Semiconductor, a US firm which specializes in creating custom analog and mixed signal integrated circuits. We learned recently that Valve worked with Triad to architect the chip, and that it sits next to the photodiode as an interrupter of the raw signals from the Lighthouse basestations. The TS3633 is now available for purchase from Triad, and we’re learning more about what improvements it brings to the table for future headsets using SteamVR Tracking.

Cost

While first-generation VR headsets are impressive, they’re still priced in the enthusiast realm with the Oculus Rift at $600 and the HTC Vive at $800. Like the smartphone, widespread adoption of VR headsets will come as the devices, and the components in them, mature and become less expensive and easier to manufacture.

oculus rift cv1 unboxing (26) — **See Also:** Oculus Rift Components Cost Around $200, New Teardown Suggests

The first generation HTC Vive—the first (and so far, only) VR headset using SteamVR tracking—uses a discrete circuit sensor design consisting of 41 individual components. The TS3633 cuts that number down to 9, which means more streamlined manufacturing.

Triad’s VP of Marketing & Sales, Reid Wender, explained that the chip is cost-optimized for high volume manufacturing. For a complete system (including headset and controllers), which has around 80 sensors, the chip reduces component placements by 2,560 over the 41 component per-sensor design of the first-generation Vive. That brings savings in component placement and also opens the door to simplifying circuit board designs which can further reduce cost, says Wender.

An example circuit layout for a sensor using the TS3633

Less components can also mean better reliability which can cut down further on tangential costs that go beyond the price of a device’s components alone.

“The more components in a system the more likely there will be a manufacturing yield problem or field reliability problem,” said Wender. “The circuit boards that these devices are implemented on are relatively expensive. Removing the 2,560 placements means that the final assembly will have a higher yield and require less expensive manual rework. And, fewer components means better reliability in the field and lower warranty costs.”

Performance

**See Also:** Valve Opens Vive’s Tracking Tech to Third-parties for Free, Details Dev Kit for Licensees | Photo courtesy Valve

Wender explained that the Triad chip is more capable across a range of abilities that are important to the SteamVR Tracking technology, ultimately delivering improved tracking performance.

Image Courtesy Doc-OK.org — **See Also:** Analysis of Valve’s ‘Lighthouse’ Tracking System Reveals Accuracy

“The TS3633 excels on several technical characteristics such as detected pulse width versus distance, more sensitivity for longer range detection, better off angle detection, improved optical sync detection, improved start of sync detection, and improved centroid location,” he said. “All of these technical improvements equate to a more robust SteamVR Tracking experience with observably improved user experience.”

I had suspected that increasing the size of the sensor’s photodiode would be an obvious way to improve tracking performance and range, but Wender explained why this might not be the ideal approach with a useful analogy:

You can think of the system as radio system with a link budget. The basestations are the transmitters and the tracked objects are the receivers. Extending this analogy, the photodiode takes the place of the antenna that would be there in an RF system. The Triad TS3633 is the front end of the receiver that provides ‘lots of amplification, filtering and extracts the signal from the noise.’ So, instead of simply making the photodiode larger (slower, more expensive overall system) it may be a better-engineered system (lower jitter, higher performance, lower cost, smaller size) to have a somewhat smaller, faster photodiode and get more sensitivity & gain from the Light-to-Digital converter IC.

Continue Reading on Page 2 >>

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September 5, 2016

These Tiny Sensors Will Let You Build Lighthouse Tracked Headsets and Peripherals

With Valve’s move to open up its Lighthouse tracking technology to third parties, Triad Semiconductor is soon to be selling specialized chips which companies can use to create new VR headsets and peripherals with SteamVR Tracking.

Last month Valve finally made the first big step in opening the Lighthouse tracking technology for third-party licensing. Lighthouse is the tracking system used in the HTC Vive headset; using two sensors (‘basestations’) placed at the corners of the tracked space and an array of sensors on the headset and controllers, the system allows for ‘room-scale’ tracking that’s fast and precise enough for virtual reality. Valve said they would license the tech to anyone for free and that it would not require that third parties seek its approval before using the technology.

Rendering of Valve's SteamVR Tracking 'Licensee Dev Kit' tracked reference object — Rendering of Valve’s SteamVR Tracking ‘Licensee Dev Kit’ tracked reference object

Valve created a ‘Licensee Dev Kit’ for SteamVR Tracking which includes a Lighthouse tracking reference device, along with sensors and boards to help companies start building new Steam VR Tracking enabled headsets and peripherals.

For those starting from scratch, Triad Semiconductor, a US firm which specializes in creating custom analog and mixed signal integrated circuits, is soon to be selling Valve-approved chips which form the foundation of the sensor array needed for SteamVR Tracking.

The appealingly-named TS3633 is a tiny ‘light-to-digital’ integrated circuit which takes input signals from a photodiode (like the small sensors seen scattered across the HTC Vive headset) and converts them into useful data for processing by the SteamVR Tracking algorithms.

Triad’s VP Marketing & Sales, Reid Wender, told me that Valve architected, approved, and certified the chip as SteamVR Tracking’s light-to-digital solution.

mts jack mccauley vr tracking system laser (8) — **See Also:** Former Oculus VP of Engineering Demonstrates Long Range VR Tracking System

“This chip is Valve’s idea. The team at Valve worked with Triad to define the functionality of this chip. The Valve team consists of an incredible group of algorithmic-genius-makers. I use that weird term because the guys at Valve don’t just sit around thinking up cool product ideas and algorithms but they also immediately start hacking/making the ideas into reality on their bench-top,” he said. “Valve has an awesome vision of making SteamVR Tracking available to the world for a wide variety of precision tracking applications from room-scale virtual reality to embedded robotics control.”

Wender says that Triad is the first company to create an integrated circuit like the TS3633 for SteamVR Tracking, and that the company plans to begin selling it later this month.

In quantities of as little as 50 the part runs $0.92, and once you bump up to an order of 1,000 units the cost comes down to $0.49. A SteamVR tracked headset might have 32 sensors on it, meaning the chip would add about $15.68 to the bill of materials. Granted, you still need photodiodes and a few more components for each sensor, and that’s before considering other materials and components in the headset or peripheral.

A tiny integrated circuit like the TS3633 alone isn’t very easy to work with, at least as a starting point. So Triad is also creating the TS3633-CM1 which is a castellated module containing the TS3633, photodiode, and resistors, forming a complete SteamVR Tracking sensor for easy prototyping. The CM1 runs a steeper $6.95 each in quantities of 10, but it’s just a prototyping module rather than a finished product component. Triad says the CM1 will also become available later this month.

Wender gave a high-level overview of the structure of a Lighthouse tracked object:

A number of Light to Digital Sensors (Photodiode + TS3633). Typical tracked objects have between 20 to 32 such sensors. Smaller numbers of sensors can be used for more ‘casual’ tracking applications.
A digital function block to aggregate the envelope signals from each TS3633. Current systems use an FPGA that can accept up to 32 such sensor inputs.
An IMU. The location information from the IMU gets fused with the light-to-digital angle information.
A microprocessor to take the data from the FPGA and IMU, form packets and then send the information to a Host Processor (currently a Windows PC or Linux PC) over a USB or proprietary 2.4GHz link.
A Host Processor running SteamVR software to serve as the “position engine.” The position engine computes the position and the orientation of tracked object.

lighthouse-schematic — **See Also:** Valve’s Lighthouse Base Station in Action, Inner Workings Explained

Wender acknowledges that at this stage, creating a new device for SteamVR Tracking is still fairly complicated and accessible to many beyond engineers. With that, he says that Triad is working to create a more hacker/maker friendly approach for “simple tracked objects.” He teased that we’d hear more about this in the near future, but I suspect he may be hinting about a self-contained SteamVR tracking module which could be affixed to arbitrary objects for easy tracking.

It’s only been a month or so since Valve opened their SteamVR Tracking technology to third-parties; given that short time, we expectantly have yet to see any products with the tech hit the market, but Triad’s new chip offerings will likely accelerate things going forward.

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