HTC hatte auf der CES 2017 die Vive Tracker vorgestellt. Im Endeffekt handelt es sich bei den Vive Trackern und kleine Versionen der herkömmlichen Motion Controller, doch diese lassen sich einfacher auf Objekte anbringen und die Ansteuerung der einzelnen Button kann schneller verwirklicht werden. Durch die Vive Tracker könnten in naher Zukunft also einige Virtual Reality Pistolen auf den Markt kommen. Da die Vive Tracker im zweiten Quartal 2017 frei verkauft werden, können wir uns sicher sein, dass nicht jedes Produkt die Erwartungen erfüllen wird. HTC möchte die Nutzer vor schlechten Umsetzungen schützen und plant deshalb eine Zertifizierung der neuen Controller.
HTC Vive Zubehör soll von HTC zertifiziert werden
Wie penibel die Kontrolle durch HTC ausfallen wird, ist ungewiss. Theoretisch können auch Produkte veröffentlicht werden, die nicht den Anforderungen von HTC entsprechen, denn wie sollte HTC dies verbieten können. Deshalb werden die zertifizierten Produkte ein Logo erhalten, welches die Überprüfung durch HTC bestätigt. Somit haben die Käufer die Sicherheit, dass das Produkt auch wie gewünscht mit den Vive Trackern funktioniert.
Das Besondere an den Trackern ist aber nicht nur die Form, sondern auch die Erweiterung der Anzahl an trackbaren Objekten. Mit den herkömmlichen HTC Vive Controllern können nur zwei Controller kabellos verwendet werden. Die HTC Vive Tracker werden aber mit einem USB-Dongle ausgeliefert, der die Daten von 16 Trackern erfassen kann. Mit dieser Anzahl sind auch komplette VR Anzüge denkbar, auch wenn die Tracker den Tragekomfort wohl etwas einschränken.
CloudGate Studio this week posted a video demonstration of its ‘Fullbody Awareness’ experiments in VR. The system brings a player’s entire body into the virtual realm, in this first test using four Vive controllers. Two are held in hand as per usual and another two are taped to President and Co-Founder Steve Bowler’s feet as he walks through the demo. Such a system wouldn’t be viable for consumers but, as Bowler points out on Twitter, replacing the bottom controllers with the Trackers may yield interesting results.
Still, what’s here right now is impressive. Using the system the developers were able to create what Bowler describes as “a pretty good facsimile of a human body in VR”. That includes torso, legs and arms, and not just the floating body parts we’re used to seeing in so many VR experiences right now. While not perfect, Bowler is able to accurately replicate a wide range of motions in VR like lifitng a leg up and even touching his toes.
The developers are even able to portray the player’s shadow within VR, and Bowler puts it to the test by dancing around before he starts to kick items in the virtual world. He also mentions that a third Tracker could be placed around the hips to more accurately track crouching, which he describes as “pretty good” in its current form but ultimately just “guessing”.
@nuclearfossil it’s a “hack” using two Vives so we could get 4 wireless controllers. Now that it’s proven will move to Vive Trackers later.
“Think about what this would look like for multiplayer, for social aspects, for everything, right?” Bowler says as he stares down at his virtual self.
It is an enticing thought, remdinding us of the Perception Neuron MOCAP system to an extent, which places multiple markers around the user’s body. The Vive trackers aren’t exactly designed to be worn on a user’s feet, though, so we do question just how useful this solution could ultimately be.
Bowler, however, doesn’t seem to be phased. Over on Twitter he suggested that the company might have “a plan”, possibly for special shoes that would fit the Trackers. “It’s easier than you think,” he said.
It’s certainly an option developers could start to provide to VR enthusiasts once the trackers start shipping in Q2 2017. Would you strap three extra Trackers to your body to fully dive into VR?
The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, a modular Lighthouse-tracked ‘puck’ attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new innovative applications and gameplay for consumers, to kickstart a lot more mixed reality livestreams, but also grow the overall VR ecosystem as there will be more high-end B2B applications, advertising campaigns, and VR arcade peripherals.
I had a chance to catch up with HTC’s Dan O’Brien, who is the Vive General Manager of America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We talked about HTC’s emphasis of growing the ecosystem in 2017 with this new Vive Tracker, and what type of applications he expects that it will enable. We also talk about some of the privacy implications of virtual reality, and more about HTC’s approach of minimizing, anonymizing, and protecting any private data that is collected. There are amazing new opportunities for application developers to learn more about individual consumers than ever before, but with that power comes a responsibility to be conscientious enough to not record and store more identifiable information than is necessary.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
O’Brien used to be the Global Director of Compliance and Consumer Privacy & Security for HTC, and so privacy is near and dear to his heart. He says that privacy has been an important priority for HTC from the beginning since they’ve had a privacy engineering team working to anonymize, minimize, and protect any customer information that’s captured.
O’Brien says that there’s three different layers of security including the operating system, the driver software that runs the VR hardware, and finally the application developers. There are privacy considerations at each layer, and it’s up to each application developer to decide what information to capture and keep from their users. Once eye tracking becomes an essential part of the higher-end VR systems, then the fidelity of available insights will be both vast and powerful. O’Brien says:
I sit in talks sometimes where I’m the one saying to the publishers, ‘Hey, you’re going to be able to have a one-for-one relationship with a consumer that you’ve never had before with VR. You’re going to be able to learn so much more about what they like, what they dislike, whether that ad worked, whether they were interested in that product. You’re going to be able to learn so much more about your consumer if you’re doing the right things. It’s no longer going to be about clickthroughs. You’re going to know if they actually looked at it, and picked it up and interacted with it.’ But on the flip side of that is ‘How much of that information should you be grabbing? And what should you be holding onto? Then once you hold it, and once you draw that information in, how well are you protecting it?’
Whether it’s the developer of applications, hardware, peripherals, or the operating system O’Brien says that “Some people take too much information. They really don’t need to have all of that.” He’s calling for VR hardware and software developers to be very conscientious about what information they’re collecting and how well it’s being protected, especially since the Federal Trade Commission has the power to fine companies, but also to stop companies from selling or importing their products.
He says that consumer privacy is a contract that fosters trust with consumers, and that it’s a relationship that is directly connected to their brand and whether or not consumers will recommend their product to others. But privacy is also about protecting sensitive consumer information from hostile hacks or a potentially overreaching government.
Throughout 2017, there will be more dialog between government regulators and virtual reality companies to explore the potentials and risks. Virtual reality has the potential to enable so many amazing new capabilities, but also a lot of new risks from collecting and protecting sensitive biometric data. O’Brien says, “It’s a balance because you don’t want regulation that stops innovation. You don’t want too many rules that stops just what’s getting started to really flourish into what it could be, what it should be, and even what it will be.” He says that there’s already a lot of existing consumer protections for mobile phones and gaming software that be built upon, and that it’s more of a strategy of incremental improvement rather that needing to building something entirely new.
HTC and others will continue to sit down with government regulators throughout 2017 to explain critical concepts, existing approaches to protecting information, as well as contextualizing software concepts like heat maps that have additional implications when they’re applied to virtual reality.
There have also been larger trends within the tech industry that have been moving towards surveillance-based business models that correlate all of your internet activity into a singular identity, and I’ll be continuing to explore some of the privacy implications of virtual reality in future interviews.
Here’s a promo video of one of the Vive Tracker applications by DotDotDash, and was presented at HTC’s demo area at CES:
SteamVR Tracking lighthouses bathe a room with lasers you can’t see with the naked eye. These lasers spin, scanning the room in a timely pattern. Sensors on the headset record when these lasers arrive, allowing the system to pinpoint the headset’s precise location.
Even the Oculus Rift’s largest “experimental” room-scale setup is smaller than what’s possible with the HTC Vive, which uses Valve’s tracking system. So with the $800 purchase of a Vive you get much more reliable freedom to move around a virtual room than even $880 spent for a smaller three camera experimental Rift setup.
The genius of SteamVR Tracking is the lighthouse positional beacons you place around the room don’t need to be hooked up to the PC. Just plug them into a power outlet and you’re good to go. Though you might have to mount base stations to your walls like speakers for optimal coverage, lighthouse beacons make a lot more sense for the most immersive experiences in the largest settings. Backpack PCs, for example, are one avenue to completely wireless VR that’s doable with the Vive but not the Rift because the PC doesn’t physically connect to the tracking system.
At a ‘vSports’ event hosted by VirZoom at CES 2017, the startup placed two lighthouses on either side of eight exercise bikes set up side by side. Eight Vive headsets waited hanging from the handles, hooked up to PCs. Eight players competed in a multiplayer race together, each wearing a headset and pedaling to outpace their opponents. Our writer didn’t pace himself and was disappointed the game didn’t show other players, until he looked behind and saw them gaining fast.
Each PC-headset-bike system communicated independently with the pair of lighthouse base stations, which act as a kind of positional beacon for the eight individual systems. The same event equipped with Oculus Rifts would’ve required a minimum of eight sensors wired to each of the PCs. Anyone thinking about setting up a VR arcade has to consider the complexity of wires, and Vive could have fewer of them. For example, you could easily halve a 4 meter x 4 meter room split into a pair of 2 meter x 2 meter spaces without moving the lighthouses.
Vive Tracker Is Just The Beginning
Imagine batting cages covered by SteamVR Tracking beacons. Instead of a large mechanical arm throwing the ball, a batter wearing a headset swings a bat with a small oddly-shaped puck attached to it. This Vive Tracker sends its location information over wireless to the headset. Bottom line: You see a baseball bat in VR. Could a baseball player having trouble hitting a curve figure it out with hours spent in a VR training simulation that looks, sounds, and feels almost exactly like the real thing?
Demos shown by HTC at CES include tracking a wrist and glove combo for hand tracking, as well as a fire hose and gun.
Attach it to a camera for six hours of mixed reality footage. Attach it to a phone to make your single player VR game a two player game with the second player looking into the virtual world through their phone.
These apps really are just the beginning. An ecosystem of Vive-compatible accessories fits nicely with HTC’s aim of equipping thousands of VR arcades this year, and you could offer an incredible variety of highly immersive experiences in an arcade with realistic props. The Vive Tracker is just one accessory from one Valve partner. What’s coming could be so much more important.
“You’re going to have some peripheral partners that want to have a tracked object in their VR space, just like a headset or just like a controller and embed all the SteamVR Tracking into it, but you’re going to have some that don’t have the engineering capabilities, they don’t have the ability to go do that, or the time,” said Dan O’Brien, HTC Vive general manager. “What we’re creating now with the [Vive Tracker] is creating this universal tracker.”
SteamVR Accessories
Late last year classes were held to teach licensees how to use SteamVR tracking technology. We haven’t really seen the full fruits of those classes yet, except for one video posted last week during CES by Contact Control Interfaces, a startup working on controllers that can simulate touch.
The video shows the Vive Tracker attached to an accessory on the left arm and, on the right, a prototype accessory they built using the development kit from that class. Instead of the oddly-shaped puck attached to do tracking, they placed the sensors at the optimal spots so the object itself can be tracked by the lighthouse base stations.
So there are two avenues for creators to develop tracked objects and accessories it seems — slap a Vive Tracker onto it from HTC or attend a SteamVR Tracking class and figure out how to build your own accessory.
The Missing Pieces
Are additional headsets going to release that are compatible with SteamVR Tracking? If (or when) this happens, it will become clearer that Valve is enabling an ecosystem of objects and accessories all of which can be tracked by the same royalty-free technology. The only real requirement seems to be compatibility with SteamVR.
This means there may be some choices available to enthusiastic buyers looking to upgrade their room-scale Vive system this year. You could theoretically buy a headset from one company but new controllers from someone else. HTC isn’t talking new controllers yet, but according to O’Brien they’ve had access to the prototypes created by Valve.
“You have to think about holding HTC and Valve true to their promise that they won’t fragment developers, how are they not going to do that,” O’Brien told UploadVR.
More ergonomic grip buttons would be top on the list of requests for people owning the current HTC Vive, but more importantly you won’t need to install new tracking hardware to bring new VR items into your home or arcade. Whether it be a new headset, controller or specific tracked object built for specific interests or apps — the same lighthouses could track any of it.
“Lighthouse tracking enables things like the Vive tracker to just work. Accessory developers don’t have to integrate the tech directly into their hardware yet and can allow for a faster time to market until they get lighthouse tracking built-in,” said Anshel Sag, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “Having the ability to support tracked items and accessories in game on the Vive will prove to be a major differentiator and advantage for Vive over Rift.”
What about inside-out tracking?
Now several major tech companies (such as Facebook and Intel) are racing to solve inside out position tracking, which would allow a headset to pinpoint its location without the need for any external hardware. Microsoft, for example, is sharing its HoloLens tracking technology with partners, which could translate to an even cheaper and easier solution for buyers.
Yet, we’ve not seen that solution in action yet on a VR headset. Plus, it is not clear whether inside-out solutions will be able to match the accuracy and coverage of SteamVR Tracking for hand or controller movements. Solutions like Intel’s that we tried at CES hadn’t seemed to perfect headset tracking yet, let alone the complicated task of tracking fast hand movements or accessories.
For this reason SteamVR Tracking headsets and accessories are poised to become a dominant technology this year for specific VR use cases, like training that requires realistic props and arcades featuring large spaces with a range of experiences.
Might this hardware ecosystem help SteamVR Tracking to become dominant in the home too? We’ll have to wait and see.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of Vive’s CES booth, there’s a war zone. It’s a hellish battlefield in which three brave brothers are making a last stand against a hive mind of silent soldiers, uniformly marching forward. The heroes twist and turn, covering every angle, ducking and weaving out of the line of fire — but it’s hopeless; the enemy never ceases in their conquest.
This memorable struggle I experienced was made possible by an HTC Vive, a couple of smartphones, and a lot of plastic.
The game, or rather the concept, was Master of Shapes’ Cover Me, a unique take on VR local multiplayer that adapts to the realities of current VR tech. You’re probably not going to have two Vives to play with and, even if you did, you’d walk into each other all the time. But why not take use smartphone and give a second player a window into the game? Better yet, why not attach the phone to the Vive’s new tracker peripheral with a gun and have it appear within VR?
That could be interesting.
Cover Me is in the very, very early stages of development right now, but on a conceptual and mechanical level alone it shows a lot of promise. One player is experiencing the everyday Vive shooter; enemies swarming in from all sides, using your two controllers to blast away at them. If others want to join in on the action, they can grab their smartphone, attach it to a plastic gun peripheral fitted with the tracker, and then use the screen to aim and move about in the world. They’re not seeing the world in VR, but they can interact with your world in a very meaningful way.
What you get is an effective workaround for local multiplayer, or at least a glimpse of it. This demo didn’t have any damage enabled so it was more of a shooting gallery than an action stand-off, but you can see how this concept would quickly take shape into something more exciting. Imagine having to constantly cover each other’s backs (the game’s name came from one of the developers literally yelling “cover me!”), calling out enemy positions with your life on the line, perhaps having to keep out of the way of friendly fire.
“We’d been playing around with the Vive controller a couple of months ago and how it could be used for something other than just a VR tool only,” Creative Director Adam Amaral tells me. They started looking into pairing the controller with a phone, as others have done recently, and then HTC got in touch about its tracker. A few weeks later and here we are with a working prototype.
So it’s not the ultimate immersive experience for those on a smartphone, but it does give them a serious role to play in their friend’s world, and gives them a very similar experience from a mechanical point of view. The Vive user will see bigger versions of the other players’ arms and guns so that they know to keep their distance from them.
But, in Master of Shapes’ eyes, this concept goes far beyond Cover Me. “Our hope is that this is almost like a new ecosystem for maybe the Vive or just mobile gaming in general,” Amaral says. “It’s like a new game dynamic. You now can fully move around but you have a small view port, which is kind of cool, it allows you to do some new things.”
Amaral and co. think the applications extend beyond games too. The maker community, for example, could outline real objects in apps like Tilt Brush by running them over with the phone and tracker, though I can’t help but think of the possibilities this might have for a multiplayer horror game, giving you the chance to create jump scares for friends.
The plan is to release a Unity and Unreal plug-in that allows others to quickly integrate the foundation that Master of Shapes is laying here. The team are even talking to Vive about the possibility of having a phone and tracker paired together being recognized as a SteamVR headset so that almost anyone could access the ecosystem, not just Vive owners, though it would obviously limit some content.
Of course that brings about the big question: could you make a position-tracked mobile VR headset with this tracker? “That was the first thing we thought: Cardboard, Gear VR, everything’s room-scale,” Amaral said, describing it as “fully doable”. He joked that he bought a Gear VR just to make sure no one beat him to the idea.
It might have been a joke, but that certainly seems like a big opportunity for mobile platforms, especially with Viveport Mobile serving as a possible way to sell and highlight position-tracked games. Inside-out tracking is an increasingly closer reality for mobile VR but this could be the most viable workaround for current headsets we’ve yet seen.
Noitom have unveiled their VR gloves which aim to put your hands and fingers into virtual reality with motion tracking provided courtesy of HTC’s recently launched Vive Tracker accessory.
We’ve now got a number of contenders for the accolade of ‘first VR glove to live up to the sci-fi hype’, all with slightly different approaches to the challenge of putting your hands, fingers and all, into VR. The latest is Noitom’s Hi5 VR gloves which were unveiled alongside a raft of other accessories at HTC’s press event at CES yesterday.
The Hi5 gloves integrate with the Vive Tracker puck through a wrist-mounted interface (along with a battery for each), one for each hand. The Vive Tracker then takes on positional tracking marker duties through SteamVR’s Lighthouse tracking leaving the gloves themselves to detect individual finger and thumb movement through a series of MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) which gauge the extension and position of each digit. The press release for the device quotes “pattern recognition” presumably in relation to interpreting finger tracking data in order to be used in applications proper.
Fuse these sensor feeds together and you have the ability to render a user’s hands precisely in 3D space along with input from each finger’s position. If you’re thinking of the iconic (if entirely impractical) gloves from the Tom Cruise sci-fi film Minority Report, you’ll have some kinds of idea of what Noitom are aiming to offer with the Hi5.
We’ve seen the Vive Tracker in action now on numerous devices, and it seems to be an excellent way to harness that great room-scale tracking precision Valve’s Lighthouse tracking system does so well.
Noitom claim that they’re aiming to have the Hi5 gloves on release for Spring 2017, although there’s scant detail on pricing, battery life of indeed how the company intend to square the ever present circle of software support for a proprietary peripheral, always a challenge. We’re hoping to get up close with the Hi5 during CES this week, so stay tuned for further thoughts on the devices.
HTC hat im Rahmen der CES 2017 einen neues Zubehör für die HTC Vive vorgestellt, welches das Unternehmen als „Vive Tracker“ bezeichnet. Mit diesem Produkt sollen zukünftige Erfahrungen durch individuelle Eingabegeräte erweitert werden.
Vive Tracker vorgestellt
Der Vive Tracker von HTC ist im Endeffekt ein kleiner HTC Vive Controller, der ohne Button auskommt. Dieser kann mit dem Vive System kommunizieren und besitzt Sensoren um die Laser der Lighthouse Stationen zu erfassen. Der Vive Tracker soll im zweiten Quartal 2017 ausgeliefert werden, doch einen Preis möchte HTC noch nicht nennen.
Der Tracker ist 10 cm lang und die Akkulaufzeit gibt HTC mit 6 Stunden an. Der Tracker wurde laut HTC zu designt, dass er sich einfach an anderen Objekten anbringen lässt. Valve Lizenziert zwar auch das Lighthouse System, aber dafür müssen Menschen an einer Schulung teilnehmen. Der Tracker kann hingegen einfach bestellt und verwendet werden. Somit soll der Vive Tracker die perfekte Möglichkeit für kleine Entwickler sein, die beispielsweise einen eigenen Gun Controller für Arcades verwenden möchten.
Doch nicht nur Arcades werden von dem Tracker profitieren. Entwickler könnten auch ein Tennisspiel einfach mit einem Support für den Tracker ausstatten und der Spieler kann den Tracker selbst an dem Schläger anbringen. Wir sind gespannt, was sich die Entwickler für die Vive einfallen lassen.
The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 
