philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

17Jan/18Off

Occipital has a self-contained solution to room navigation

The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift'scumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.

Inside-out tracking, as in-headset room-tracking tech is called, has been in place on Microsoft's VR headsets and upcoming hardware like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream as well as AR devices like the Microsoft HoloLens, but Occipital Tracking aims to make that tech even better for VR with far more room-aware scanning.

Much as Apple's ARKit or Google's ARCore can scan a room and sense edges and surfaces using a camera and the phone's motion sensor, Occipital's tech pinged my demo space and found glowing points in space that formed a map. The test demo alternated between the real world via pass-through cameras and a fully closed-off VR world with edges of the room overlaid. The VR hardware I tried had stereo cameras, but Occipital says the tracking will work with a single camera, too. It really does seem like ARKit/ARCore for VR.

Like a rough sketch, I could make out a table's edge, a line and corner indicating another obstacle (a chair).

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/occipital-hopes-to-fix-vr-room-tracking-problems-ces-2018/

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