Fove, the impressive eye-tracking VR headset that’s smashed through their Kickstarter goal, has revealed plans to investigate ‘Lighthouse’ positional tracking from Valve as a $700,000 stretch goal. The company today is also announcing that they will support the OpenVR SDK, bringing support for the headset to SteamVR.
While Fove’s VR headset has impressed us on many fronts, including the company’s unique selling point of eye-tracking, one crucial missing piece that we haven’t seen yet is positional tracking on the headset.
See Also: Hands-on: FOVE’s Eye-tracking VR Headset Was the Next Best at CES
Positional tracking is the ability to sense the headset’s movement through 3D space, rather than just rotation. This capability is important for both VR comfort and immersion, and Fove’s major competitors have all shown the function to an impressive extent. The company has said from the start that they intended to include positional tracking in the development and consumer versions of the headset, but just what tech would be used to achieve the tracking was unclear.
Back in March, Valve revealed their own solution to positional tracking, the so-called ‘Lighthouse’ system which relies on on-board sensors to detect laser signals from base station units mounted around the environment. The Lighthouse system provides a ‘room-scale’ tracking volume with high precision. The company said that they would like to “give away” Lighthouse in the hopes that it would become an industry standard for tracking in VR.
Fove announced today that if they reach their $700,000 stretch goal on Kickstarter, they’ll “pursue development integration of Valve’s Lighthouse technology into their developer kits,” which is a bit non-committal, but that’s most likely because Valve itself hasn’t yet set a clear structure for how external companies can make use of Lighthouse.
FOVE Kickstarter Campaign
Not tied to any stretch goal, Fove also announced their intention to support Valve’s OpenVR SDK, making the headset compatible with SteamVR titles.
The Fove Kickstarter campaign sits at $439,000 currently, an impressive 175% of its initial goal of $250,000. The company has announced two lesser stretch goals as well.
- $500,000 – A fully-functioning FOVE Minigame. We will extend one of our demos into a minigame! Chosen by you, our backers, between Eye Contact RPG, Space Shooting, Horror, or Cyclops-style shooting. We will release all source code as part of the SDK.
- $600,000 – Advanced Gaze Analysis. We will develop ways for researchers to collect data for gaze patterns, saccades, and more. We will release the system in a series of SDK updates.
The company has said from the beginning of their campaign that they would include positional tracking on the Fove headset, but up to this point haven’t suggested how it would be achieved. Given that Lighthouse may eliminate the need to design their own positional tracking system, we’re left wondering if they won’t be pursuing Lighthouse integration even without reaching their $700,000 stretch goal.
The team maintains that “if supported, The Lighthouse base stations and any additional controllers will be sold separately from the Kickstarter bundle,” though the headset itself would presumably include the Lighthouse sensors.
Disclosure: At the time of publishing, FOVE is running advertisements on Road to VR
