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

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