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Some of the most annoying parts of today\u2019s virtual reality hardware are all the wires and the sensors needed to accurately track the headset. With all-in-ones, all of that hardware has to find its way into the headset and track your location in a low-power way.<\/p>\n
Today, Occipital<\/a> is showing off a tracking platform<\/a> optimized for all-in-one headsets that will allow users to traverse spaces without external sensors using low-cost integrated cameras and IMUs.<\/p>\n With this effort, the company is aiming to achieve SteamVR-level accuracy \u2014 currently the gold-standard in VR tracking \u2014 to inside-out system using the technologies its spent nearly the past decade working on.<\/p>\n Occipital, which already sells a $349 depth sensing camera, acknowledges that in some ways it might be seen as \u201ceating its own lunch,\u201d but sees inside-out tracking on consumer devices as a future it wants to be a huge part of. Last year the company introduced Bridge, a $399 iPhone-based mixed reality headset dev kit built on the company\u2019s depth sensor.<\/p>\n For a lot of device manufacturers the multi-camera sensor rigs are one of the more costly individual parts of their setup. With Occipital\u2019s platform, developers can make due on a lot less.<\/p>\n What\u2019s perhaps most notable is that they\u2019re opening up their six-degree-of-freedom platform for free to hardware developers operating on less than 10,000 consumer devices, with pricing moving up from there for bigger clients.<\/p>\n Further interesting is the platform\u2019s capabilities in regard to monoSLAM, or single-camera tracking and mapping. With a cheap ($5-10) wide-angle camera and a cheap IMU, Occipital has built a platform allowing VR hardware manufacturers the opportunity to build simple and effective inside-out tracking into their headsets.<\/p>\n I demoed the software using a single-camera and IMU solution attached to the front of an HTC Vive, and, even without SteamVR base stations in the room, the cheap camera built up a point cloud of the space while defining the lines and edges of surfaces around me. Despite a good deal of sudden shifting, the tracking system did a remarkably good job at staying stable.<\/p>\n The company still says that when it comes to tracking, the more cameras, the better, but this represents a real shot at making a single camera and IMU get all the heavy-lifting done. The company is focusing their efforts on all-in-ones but isn\u2019t looking to smartphone-based mobile VR at the moment, though they didn\u2019t rule out the possibility either.<\/p>\n The video below gives a good impression about what a single camera setup would look like on the company\u2019s tracking platform.<\/p>\n