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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.).
(Score: 4, Informative) by mmh on Thursday January 18 2018, @11:36PM
I've owned a Vive for over a year and still play it several times a week. Having come from a background of first-person shooter games going way back to Doom 1 and playing competition Quake1/2/3 (I miss the old HEAT.NET days) and competition counter-strike, I can say I will never play a non-vr FPS game again.
The Vive is everything I have always wanted in computer gaming. With the Vive + noise-cancelling headphones, it really tricks you into feeling as if you are in the game. Being able to move around the room, while not required, adds a lot to the feeling of freedom within the game. Being able to walk up to an object and inspect it, or look around it in ways that feel natural and normal.
On Steam, there's a game, Pavlov, which is just a Counter-Strike ripoff, peaking around corners, silently knifing a guy in the back, adds a whole new dimension of fun. Some older PC games have been ported over like Serious Sam, having gigantic monsters sneaks up on you is pretty great. Payday 2 has had Vive support added, and robbing banks in VR is way more entertaining than it was in front of a monitor, and really makes me want to try my hand at robbing a real bank (I'll post a follow up here in a few weeks and let you know if payday2 is a good training simulator).
VR is still very new, and the selection of games, while growing, leaves a lot of potential unfilled. Even with the current lack of good games, I'm really looking forward to and plan to purchase the next generation of VR hardware when it is released.
If you haven't researched any VR stuff, blah blah blah: