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I'll repeat a comment I made on Reddit: I was scanning the page trying to understand how you were doing positional tracking. Took me a while to realise that's
by andybak 6y ago
I'll repeat a comment I made on Reddit:
I was scanning the page trying to understand how you were doing positional tracking. Took me a while to realise that's what you mean by "Experimental room-scaling"
I'd suggest that this isn't the best wording. Call it "positional tracking" or "6DOF" or something.
The whole "room scale" thing was confusing at the start and isn't used much nowadays (Is seated 6DOF VR "room scale"? It's ambiguous and irrelevent for most purposes)
I'd also say that I think most people assume that being SteamVR compatibile implies having 6DOF tracking of head and hands. Most software simply won't work unless you have this. How experimental is experimental?
- SamBam 6y agoOh, I thought it was a cool mode that made your current room look huge or tiny. A sort of "Alice in Wonderland" mode.
- andybak 6y agoYeah. The term arose around the time the Vive was released to distinguish against the Oculus Rift. It was a fairly subtle distinction - the Rift at that time was optimised for front-facing experiences because it came with two cameras you usually mounted on each side of your monitor. If you moved out of their cone or occluded them by turning around too much then it would lose tracking so most games assumed you'd mostly be facing forward. The Vive on the other hand had tracking that was usually mounted in opposite corners of the room. Two trackers were more than capable of covering an average sized room and the only limitation on your movement was cable tangle. The Rift tracking got a lot better eventually - even with two cameras. The other meaning of the term is sometimes to distinguish between VR that can track the headset position (6DOF) as well as it's rotation (3DOF). But all serious VR is 6DOF nowadays. 3DOF is pretty much the domain of "slide your phone in this thing" VR or headsets that are intended mainly for viewing 360 video. So - two different meanings of "room scale" that mean quite different things.
- c22 6y agoI understood what they meant by "room-scaling" immediately and I've only ever used a VR headset one time about 4 years ago. On the other hand, I can surmise from my experience with robot arms that "DOF" likely stands for degrees of freedom, but I would have had no clue what "6DOF" meant in terms of VR.
- andybak 6y agoOK. Fair point about "DOF". But what do you understand "room scale" to mean"? Genuine question.
- slipheen 6y agoNot OP, but in SteamVR room-scale is typically used to indicate you can move around within a play area, and your avatar/camera moves as you do. Its the way the setting is named in Steam, and in SteamVR games. Example: https://www.vive.com/us/support/vive-pro-hmd/category_howto/setting-up-room-scale-play-area.html https://www.vive.com/us/support/vive-pro-hmd/category_howto/...
- c22 6y agoI imagined it to mean I could move around a constrained physical space while seeming to explore a larger virtual environment (thus "scaling" the dimensions of the room I was in). Admittedly the reference to a webcam that tracks your movements was an additional helpful context.
- andybak 6y agoThat is also roughly my interpretation. But that is different to the meaning used in the post itself. See my other comment below.
- vlovich123 6y ago3dof. 3 degrees of freedom. These are typically rotation - yaw/pitch/roll. You can look around. 6dof is 6 degrees. In addition to rotation you add translation (x/y/z) so that you can walk around the environment. Generally you can't get translation without at least first having rotation because humans are more sensitive to rotation.