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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-here dept.

Don't want to join the growing ranks of virtual reality fatalities? In-headset room tracking may be for you:

Occipital, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, focuses on 3D scanning hardware and depth-sensing cameras: One of its Structure camera sensor arrays works with both an iPhone mixed-reality headset and an upcoming home robot. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive VR headset on me, outfitted with an in-development feature that let me see the room even with my headset on. The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift's cumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.

Inside-out tracking, as in-headset room-tracking tech is called, has been in place on Microsoft's VR headsets and upcoming hardware like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream as well as AR devices like the Microsoft HoloLens, but Occipital Tracking aims to make that tech even better for VR with far more room-aware scanning.

Much as Apple's ARKit or Google's ARCore can scan a room and sense edges and surfaces using a camera and the phone's motion sensor, Occipital's tech pinged my demo space and found glowing points in space that formed a map. The test demo alternated between the real world via pass-through cameras and a fully closed-off VR world with edges of the room overlaid. The VR hardware I tried had stereo cameras, but Occipital says the tracking will work with a single camera, too. It really does seem like ARKit/ARCore for VR.

A game could show a partial overlay only when you are in imminent danger of colliding with something, or even create a virtual environment that incorporates real life obstacles (walls, tables, etc.).


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:16PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:16PM (#624464)

    I'm sure some VR-fanatic will claim how this will break their immersion. Perhaps they could hook up a GPS to it and then geo-fence a safe VR area.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 19 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday January 19 2018, @12:19AM (#624486) Journal

    Unless you have your system generate a force field, you are still going to have to break immersion somehow.

    Maybe you could just put a few layers of duck tape on everything with a corner.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @01:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @01:23PM (#624669)

      I put fome layerf of duck tape on my mouf.