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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 hardwa

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.
jb55 10y ago
> I know I saw a few devices (like gloves) at SIGGRAPH that attempted to reverse engineer tracking with the base stations I'm attempting to do the same thing at the moment: https://github.com/jb55/libvive https://github.com/jb55/libvive. I got basic stuff like buttons and gyros working. Right now I'm wrapping my head around some of the trigonometry that makes the lighthouse tracking work. Hopefully I'll have an open source reference implementation soon.
- crazyloglad 10y ago
  great! One big annoyance with all the SDKs fighting it out right now is how much extra (and often closed source) junk they pull in that replicates things you likely already have, with quite invasive integration with your rendering pipeline to boot. Access to lower level primitives rather than integrated solutions is definitely a nice thing.

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.

jb55 10y ago

> I know I saw a few devices (like gloves) at SIGGRAPH that attempted to reverse engineer tracking with the base stations I'm attempting to do the same thing at the moment: https://github.com/jb55/libvive https://github.com/jb55/libvive. I got basic stuff like buttons and gyros working. Right now I'm wrapping my head around some of the trigonometry that makes the lighthouse tracking work. Hopefully I'll have an open source reference implementation soon.

crazyloglad 10y ago
great! One big annoyance with all the SDKs fighting it out right now is how much extra (and often closed source) junk they pull in that replicates things you likely already have, with quite invasive integration with your rendering pipeline to boot. Access to lower level primitives rather than integrated solutions is definitely a nice thing.