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Occipital In-Headset Room Tracking for VR

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-01-18 13:33:20
Software

+hardware

Don't want to join the growing ranks of virtual reality fatalities [soylentnews.org]? In-headset room tracking [cnet.com] 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 [cnet.com] and an upcoming home robot [cnet.com]. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive [cnet.com] 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 [cnet.com] 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 [cnet.com] and upcoming hardware like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream [cnet.com] 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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