Lighthouse tracking examined

To my surprise and delight, I recently found out that Valve has been releasing Linux versions of most of their SteamVR/OpenVR run-time/SDK for a while now (OpenVR just hit version 1.0.0, go get it while it’s fresh). This is great news: it will allow me to port Vrui and all Vrui applications to the Vive headset and its tracked controllers in one fell swoop.

But before diving into developing a Lighthouse tracking driver plug-in for Vrui’s input device abstraction layer, I decided to cobble together a small testing utility to get a feel for OpenVR’s internal driver interface, and for the Lighthouse tracking system’s overall tracking quality.

Figure 1: The Lighthouse 6-DOF tracking system, disassembled.

Figure 1: The Lighthouse 6-DOF tracking system, disassembled (source).

Continue reading