6 ms·

SteamVR Tracking

202 points by Impossible 10y ago

d4mi3n 10y ago
Interesting that Valve isn't looking for royalties here. Any speculation as to what the strategy behind this release is?
- yodon 10y ago
  Valve looks to be using VR to grow Steam as a platform
- randyrand 10y ago
  yes, notice it is steamVR tracking not openVR tracking. They likely have a clause you need to make a steam game to get access.
  - berberous 10y ago
    Q. Can I sell my product wherever I want? Do I need Valve to approve my product? A. Yes, you can sell your own products wherever you want. No, you don’t need Valve’s review and approval to ship your product, but you do need to comply with the license to be able to use our technology, brands, names, or trademarks. Source: http://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247404603033/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247...
- haydenlee 10y ago
  Valve makes money selling software. The more accessories on their system (SteamVR) the more software will be sold.
- drak0n1c 10y ago
  They probably want this tech to benefit robotics and other autonomous research.
- carlosdp 10y ago
  Valve isn't looking to be in the hardware game in the long-term, with the exception of expediting new technology like they have done with HTC and the Vive for room-scale VR. They want as many room-scale capable devices on the market as possible because they are confident most of those games and such are going to be sold on Steam. They are not locking down the tracking technology (although in the short-term, you still need HTC Vive base stations, but that's just for now) and the OpenVR standard can be implemented by anyone and there are already integrations not just for the Vive and Rift (with SteamVR), but also OSVR.
- aaronsnoswell 10y ago
  Own the platform.
  - leoc 10y ago
    More to stop Oculus from dominating VR with its own platform and blocking out or disadvantaging Steam. Valve was very friendly with Oculus until the Facebook acquisition (or maybe shortly before).
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  As an Oculus user, based on Valve work for the VR community, I will very likely move to the Vive for GEN II.
  - madaxe_again 10y ago
    And there it is - you are the strategy. They're pushing for an open vr ecosystem, as they realise both that it's important to the medium as a whole as it encourages experimentation through greater access, and equally importantly, they realise that that matters to you. At this point they're setting up a playing field where oculus will be pretty much compelled to put down their dreams of platform and exclusivity, and all will benefit, particularly the guys who run the ubiquitous game marketplace. Oculus can have a glorious future as a hardware manufacturer, which is where they started, too.
gfosco 10y ago
There is a pretty high barrier to entry here with a required $3,000 per-person training program. I'm not sure why that is necessary, unless it's really difficult to work with.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  Probably because its not ready for mass hobbyists. If it was cheap their manufacturing wouldn't be able to keep up and Reddit would be super pissed their pre-order took 6 months and the SDK was janky as hell.
- carlosdp 10y ago
  They don't want a bunch of people making bad hardware. They would rather put safeguards in place to help ensure that early builders actually implement the tracking well rather than have a bunch of devices that do it poorly and reviews saying it's the tracking tech that is bad. It also reduces cost of support as, theoretically, each company should have at least 1 person who is well versed in the technology for troubleshooting.
- jestar_jokin 10y ago
  Not to mention, it's in-person training, so anyone outside the US is effectively excluded.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    I am sure you can come visit and take the training, though perhaps you mean it's more expensive for non-residents of the US to attend. It's more expensive for people living in other countries, certainly, but perhaps you could work out a deal where you become a certified trainer yourself and go back to your country to offer discounted officially-sanctioned training to folks in your region. Look for opportunities rather than problems.
revelation 10y ago
Seems the wrong way around for a lot of applications, I want the objects to be the dumb emitters and have a central base station that has a low-latency, synchronized (!) state of their positions. Otherwise all the effort on low-latency seems wasted on a device that has no low-latency path to getting the information out.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  The tracked objects almost always have buttons on them that the user presses to interact with the world.
- carlosdp 10y ago
  I disagree. That's the model the Rift uses, but that means that as you add devices, the extra computation of position lies on the PC (or mobile device, or w/e). With this Lighthouse system, the positional computation is distributed amongst each device and they report their computed position, so it scales way better as you add devices.
  - bhhaskin 10y ago
    I think it is definitely for scaling. Also you can add any number of devices that are independent of each other. Like for instance using two Vives in the same room, but use the same base stations.
- yodon 10y ago
  Edit: I misread your proposal - I thought you wanted more intelligence in the peripherals. It sounds like you're actually proposing putting the light source on the tracked device. I suspect Valve made the decisions they did in part looking towards a wireless future where sensors can operate far longer on batteries than light sources can.<end edit> UNC Chappel Hill developed a system like you describe a number of years ago [0]. The position-evaluation software they developed was amazingly cool but the size of the tracker (a bit larger than a golf ball) and the cost of the tracker were both far higher than the cost of the SteamVR sensors, while the cost of their "light houses" was much less than the cost of Valve's lighthouses. The UNC system works great in the case where you want to track a small number of high value devices in an extremely large office-building style environment but it scales much less well if you want to track a large number of inexpensive peripherals in a room sized environment. The approach you describe is great for many applications, but packing the complexity into one or two reusable base stations as both Valve and Oculus have done scales much better for a consumer market that is in part interested in additional "inexpensive" aftermarket peripherals. [0] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/scaat.pdf https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/scaat.pdf
carlosdp 10y ago
It's awesome that Valve is doing this! They have said from the start that they were going to open up Lighthouse (the codename for the tracking system) to hardware manufacturers and this is the first part of that follow-through. Should be exciting to see what kinds of devices come out of this. I know I saw a few devices (like gloves) at SIGGRAPH that attempted to reverse engineer tracking with the base stations, so this should speed up their development considerably. I wouldn't be too surprised if we see at least an announcement of wireless Lighthouse-tracked gloves for VR by the end of the year. It's not just controllers or HMDs either. I expect to see a beer coozy with tracking so people can pick up drinks on a desk while remaining in VR, and maybe a collar for pets so you don't step on your dog/cat while the headset is on. The possibilities are endless!
- orginal__idear 10y ago
  >I expect to see a beer coozy Yes, the killer app. I've been hoping for this myself.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    VR: Pepsi. Real world: Coke. Brain: shattered.
    - girvo 10y ago
      I wonder if that would "change" the taste of it?
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        Taste is difficult to measure but perception, yes. Look for the blind pepsi campaign from the 80s.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        It certainly holds true for red vs. white wine. Not being able to see the colour makes it very hard for most people to reliably tell the difference, if you avoid the dead-giveaway heavy reds.
gravypod 10y ago
If there is one thing I CANNOT wait for is these new VR systems being applied to CAD/CAM software. The ability to move tools and remove material in 3D from items and move them around as you feel fit will revolutionize the world of CAD software. I'm saying this as someone who is attempting to get into doing some CAD modeling but having an EXTREMELY hard time getting into it. It really is software made for engineers by engineers.
- Impossible 10y ago
  Since a little before the launch of the Vive, I've wondered if early VR adoption would have been better off if the focus of the platform holders was on content creation tools instead of hardcore games and 360 video. There are many examples of content creation tools available or in development in the form of art and music tools. Tiltbrush and Medium are awesome for example, but most of the applications available are much more on the toy side than the professional tool side currently.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I feel the same exact way. Not only for the design aspect but for debugging and data visualization as well. Imagine simulating a 3D representation of a nuclear power plant and overlaying information from sensors in pipes into a 3D model. Rather then thinking of "Sensor 19932324Z is malfunctioning" you can think "All of the pipes intersecting at point X are having a shared problem" When dealing with large and complex systems it is a HUGE issue to deal with data visualization. 3D representations of data basically completely solves that problem for many systems.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      But is VR all that relevant, compared to an interactive 3D rendering on a regular screen?
      - gravypod 10y ago
        Yes because I feel the mode of interface is entirely different. Looking around with your face and using you legs to walk (with a correct treadmill setup) will be much better for human computer interaction in my opinion.
kelvin0 10y ago
SO I guess you can only track within a range of 5 meters? Any way to daisy chain the base stations to have higher coverage? This is an awesome tech, soooo many applications!
- ben174 10y ago
  Well, the Vive does exactly this with two base stations. So, I'm guessing: yes
- lsaferite 10y ago
  Well, the current TDM system has a limitation of 2 lighthouses. If you read into how it works, each lighthouse sends out an IR floodlight pulse follow by a horizontal and vertical laser scan. Each lighthouse has a single IR detector to be able to sync these scanning events (or you can use a cable). As far as I've read, the system is running a 60Hz (due to the laser scanner RPM) and as far as I can tell they can't really get the current TDM based system past 2 units without decreasing scanning frequency and theoretically decreasing tracking resolution. What I find interesting is the idea of switching to a FDM system. I don't know enough about the current hardware to know if the IR detectors are capable of FDM (I think they've discussed this in interviews though), but if they are then you could have a system that supported many more lighthouses and a higher scan rate (since you don't require TDM anymore).
corysama 10y ago
SteamVR Tracking HDK FAQ https://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247404603033/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/36067124...
Vexs 10y ago
Wow, this could be exciting, I'm really glad valve followed through on their word of opening this up, and it seems they've done so in a pretty good way. Providing an open standard for tracking is fantastic.
prawn 10y ago
What happened to Neal Stephenson's plan to make a sword-fighting game? Did it fizzle out? Maybe he could make use of this.
- headcanon 10y ago
  That's correct; he was funding it himself initially and failed to get the backing he needed to get it off the ground. It was an idea a little too early for its time IMO, so maybe this will be the catalyst for a renewed effort!
- draugadrotten 10y ago
  This one? https://uwm.tv/about-us/ https://uwm.tv/about-us/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3_m6Bn21Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3_m6Bn21Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBhvUgxfUjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBhvUgxfUjk
  - markild 10y ago
    Never heard of it. Is it related? I believe this is the kickstarter video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuWCEpcTbww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuWCEpcTbww

202 points by Impossible 10y ago

Interesting that Valve isn't looking for royalties here. Any speculation as to what the strategy behind this release is?

yodon 10y ago
Valve looks to be using VR to grow Steam as a platform
randyrand 10y ago
yes, notice it is steamVR tracking not openVR tracking. They likely have a clause you need to make a steam game to get access.
- berberous 10y ago
  Q. Can I sell my product wherever I want? Do I need Valve to approve my product? A. Yes, you can sell your own products wherever you want. No, you don’t need Valve’s review and approval to ship your product, but you do need to comply with the license to be able to use our technology, brands, names, or trademarks. Source: http://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247404603033/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247...
haydenlee 10y ago
Valve makes money selling software. The more accessories on their system (SteamVR) the more software will be sold.
drak0n1c 10y ago
They probably want this tech to benefit robotics and other autonomous research.
carlosdp 10y ago
Valve isn't looking to be in the hardware game in the long-term, with the exception of expediting new technology like they have done with HTC and the Vive for room-scale VR. They want as many room-scale capable devices on the market as possible because they are confident most of those games and such are going to be sold on Steam. They are not locking down the tracking technology (although in the short-term, you still need HTC Vive base stations, but that's just for now) and the OpenVR standard can be implemented by anyone and there are already integrations not just for the Vive and Rift (with SteamVR), but also OSVR.
aaronsnoswell 10y ago
Own the platform.
- leoc 10y ago
  More to stop Oculus from dominating VR with its own platform and blocking out or disadvantaging Steam. Valve was very friendly with Oculus until the Facebook acquisition (or maybe shortly before).
Raphmedia 10y ago
As an Oculus user, based on Valve work for the VR community, I will very likely move to the Vive for GEN II.
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  And there it is - you are the strategy. They're pushing for an open vr ecosystem, as they realise both that it's important to the medium as a whole as it encourages experimentation through greater access, and equally importantly, they realise that that matters to you. At this point they're setting up a playing field where oculus will be pretty much compelled to put down their dreams of platform and exclusivity, and all will benefit, particularly the guys who run the ubiquitous game marketplace. Oculus can have a glorious future as a hardware manufacturer, which is where they started, too.

gfosco 10y ago

There is a pretty high barrier to entry here with a required $3,000 per-person training program. I'm not sure why that is necessary, unless it's really difficult to work with.

forrestthewoods 10y ago
Probably because its not ready for mass hobbyists. If it was cheap their manufacturing wouldn't be able to keep up and Reddit would be super pissed their pre-order took 6 months and the SDK was janky as hell.
carlosdp 10y ago
They don't want a bunch of people making bad hardware. They would rather put safeguards in place to help ensure that early builders actually implement the tracking well rather than have a bunch of devices that do it poorly and reviews saying it's the tracking tech that is bad. It also reduces cost of support as, theoretically, each company should have at least 1 person who is well versed in the technology for troubleshooting.
jestar_jokin 10y ago
Not to mention, it's in-person training, so anyone outside the US is effectively excluded.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  I am sure you can come visit and take the training, though perhaps you mean it's more expensive for non-residents of the US to attend. It's more expensive for people living in other countries, certainly, but perhaps you could work out a deal where you become a certified trainer yourself and go back to your country to offer discounted officially-sanctioned training to folks in your region. Look for opportunities rather than problems.

revelation 10y ago

Seems the wrong way around for a lot of applications, I want the objects to be the dumb emitters and have a central base station that has a low-latency, synchronized (!) state of their positions. Otherwise all the effort on low-latency seems wasted on a device that has no low-latency path to getting the information out.

sbierwagen 10y ago
The tracked objects almost always have buttons on them that the user presses to interact with the world.
carlosdp 10y ago
I disagree. That's the model the Rift uses, but that means that as you add devices, the extra computation of position lies on the PC (or mobile device, or w/e). With this Lighthouse system, the positional computation is distributed amongst each device and they report their computed position, so it scales way better as you add devices.
- bhhaskin 10y ago
  I think it is definitely for scaling. Also you can add any number of devices that are independent of each other. Like for instance using two Vives in the same room, but use the same base stations.
yodon 10y ago
Edit: I misread your proposal - I thought you wanted more intelligence in the peripherals. It sounds like you're actually proposing putting the light source on the tracked device. I suspect Valve made the decisions they did in part looking towards a wireless future where sensors can operate far longer on batteries than light sources can.<end edit> UNC Chappel Hill developed a system like you describe a number of years ago [0]. The position-evaluation software they developed was amazingly cool but the size of the tracker (a bit larger than a golf ball) and the cost of the tracker were both far higher than the cost of the SteamVR sensors, while the cost of their "light houses" was much less than the cost of Valve's lighthouses. The UNC system works great in the case where you want to track a small number of high value devices in an extremely large office-building style environment but it scales much less well if you want to track a large number of inexpensive peripherals in a room sized environment. The approach you describe is great for many applications, but packing the complexity into one or two reusable base stations as both Valve and Oculus have done scales much better for a consumer market that is in part interested in additional "inexpensive" aftermarket peripherals. [0] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/scaat.pdf https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/scaat.pdf

carlosdp 10y ago

It's awesome that Valve is doing this! They have said from the start that they were going to open up Lighthouse (the codename for the tracking system) to hardware manufacturers and this is the first part of that follow-through. Should be exciting to see what kinds of devices come out of this. I know I saw a few devices (like gloves) at SIGGRAPH that attempted to reverse engineer tracking with the base stations, so this should speed up their development considerably. I wouldn't be too surprised if we see at least an announcement of wireless Lighthouse-tracked gloves for VR by the end of the year. It's not just controllers or HMDs either. I expect to see a beer coozy with tracking so people can pick up drinks on a desk while remaining in VR, and maybe a collar for pets so you don't step on your dog/cat while the headset is on. The possibilities are endless!

orginal__idear 10y ago
>I expect to see a beer coozy Yes, the killer app. I've been hoping for this myself.
- ethbro 10y ago
  VR: Pepsi. Real world: Coke. Brain: shattered.
  - girvo 10y ago
    I wonder if that would "change" the taste of it?
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Taste is difficult to measure but perception, yes. Look for the blind pepsi campaign from the 80s.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      It certainly holds true for red vs. white wine. Not being able to see the colour makes it very hard for most people to reliably tell the difference, if you avoid the dead-giveaway heavy reds.

gravypod 10y ago

If there is one thing I CANNOT wait for is these new VR systems being applied to CAD/CAM software. The ability to move tools and remove material in 3D from items and move them around as you feel fit will revolutionize the world of CAD software. I'm saying this as someone who is attempting to get into doing some CAD modeling but having an EXTREMELY hard time getting into it. It really is software made for engineers by engineers.

Impossible 10y ago
Since a little before the launch of the Vive, I've wondered if early VR adoption would have been better off if the focus of the platform holders was on content creation tools instead of hardcore games and 360 video. There are many examples of content creation tools available or in development in the form of art and music tools. Tiltbrush and Medium are awesome for example, but most of the applications available are much more on the toy side than the professional tool side currently.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I feel the same exact way. Not only for the design aspect but for debugging and data visualization as well. Imagine simulating a 3D representation of a nuclear power plant and overlaying information from sensors in pipes into a 3D model. Rather then thinking of "Sensor 19932324Z is malfunctioning" you can think "All of the pipes intersecting at point X are having a shared problem" When dealing with large and complex systems it is a HUGE issue to deal with data visualization. 3D representations of data basically completely solves that problem for many systems.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    But is VR all that relevant, compared to an interactive 3D rendering on a regular screen?
    - gravypod 10y ago
      Yes because I feel the mode of interface is entirely different. Looking around with your face and using you legs to walk (with a correct treadmill setup) will be much better for human computer interaction in my opinion.

kelvin0 10y ago

SO I guess you can only track within a range of 5 meters? Any way to daisy chain the base stations to have higher coverage? This is an awesome tech, soooo many applications!

ben174 10y ago
Well, the Vive does exactly this with two base stations. So, I'm guessing: yes
lsaferite 10y ago
Well, the current TDM system has a limitation of 2 lighthouses. If you read into how it works, each lighthouse sends out an IR floodlight pulse follow by a horizontal and vertical laser scan. Each lighthouse has a single IR detector to be able to sync these scanning events (or you can use a cable). As far as I've read, the system is running a 60Hz (due to the laser scanner RPM) and as far as I can tell they can't really get the current TDM based system past 2 units without decreasing scanning frequency and theoretically decreasing tracking resolution. What I find interesting is the idea of switching to a FDM system. I don't know enough about the current hardware to know if the IR detectors are capable of FDM (I think they've discussed this in interviews though), but if they are then you could have a system that supported many more lighthouses and a higher scan rate (since you don't require TDM anymore).

corysama 10y ago

SteamVR Tracking HDK FAQ https://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/360671247404603033/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/507090/discussions/0/36067124...

Vexs 10y ago

Wow, this could be exciting, I'm really glad valve followed through on their word of opening this up, and it seems they've done so in a pretty good way. Providing an open standard for tracking is fantastic.

prawn 10y ago

What happened to Neal Stephenson's plan to make a sword-fighting game? Did it fizzle out? Maybe he could make use of this.

headcanon 10y ago
That's correct; he was funding it himself initially and failed to get the backing he needed to get it off the ground. It was an idea a little too early for its time IMO, so maybe this will be the catalyst for a renewed effort!
draugadrotten 10y ago
This one? https://uwm.tv/about-us/ https://uwm.tv/about-us/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3_m6Bn21Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN3_m6Bn21Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBhvUgxfUjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBhvUgxfUjk
- markild 10y ago
  Never heard of it. Is it related? I believe this is the kickstarter video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuWCEpcTbww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuWCEpcTbww