The rift has more steps in the tracking process. It has to track the dots of the currently displayed pattern. Transpose that into 3D space. Then it can perform

The rift has more steps in the tracking process. It has to track the dots of the currently displayed pattern. Transpose that into 3D space. Then it can perform triangulation. The vive needs to only convert the time information to position relative to the base station. Then using the base station position, it can localise in 3D via the same/similar triangulation approach as the rift. Hence, the rift requires significantly more processing power than the vive. This will likely introduce some latency, though its probably negligible to human perception. Furthermore, as the rift shows different patterns, it is possible, if moving fast enough for the patterns to move between frames, warping the dot patterns of the headset. This is a similar problem to the vive's sweeping. The major problem I see with the rift, is that adding more objects to be tracked only increases latency and complexity for tracking from a 2D image (more flashing patterns). The lighthouse does not need to handle different timestamps for tracking. At each instant in time when new sensor data is received, the pose model is updated with the new sensor info (similar to a kalman filter). The pose model can be designed to update a single axis at a time though. There is only ~17ms between each axis update. You would have to be moving very fast to cause issues with tracking. So, objectively the vives tracking is a superior design. Its elegant and simple. The vive and rift may perform similarly within the restrictions of their respective domains of use, such that 90% of the time people can't tell the difference. However, I would argue the vives domain is conservative. Start to move outside of those domains, the lighthouse system has much more potential and very few limitations that cant be reasonably/practically mitigated.