The Manus VR team demonstrate their latest experiment, utilising Valve’s laser-based Lighthouse system to track their in-development VR glove.
Manus VR (previously Manus Machina), the company from Eindhoven, Netherlands dedicated to building VR input devices, seem have gained momentum in 2015. They secured their first round of seed funding and have shipped early units to developers and now, their R&D efforts have extended to Valve’s laser based tracking solution Lighthouse, as used in the forthcoming HTC Vive headset and SteamVR controllers.
See Also: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Steam VR’s Lighthouse Tracking System
The Manus VR team seem to have canibalised a set of SteamVR controllers, leveraging the positional tracking of wrist mounted units to augment Manus VR’s existing glove-mounted IMUs. Last time I tried the system, the finger joint detection was pretty good, but the Samsung Gear VR camera-based positional tracking struggled understandably with latency and accuracy. The experience on show seems immeasurably better, perhaps unsurprisingly.
It’ll be interesting to see where Manus take this experimentation from here. Architect of the Lighthouse tracking system, Valve’s Alan Yates, has said that the intention is for anyone who wants to license Lighthouse should be able to, as long as said use isn’t implemented in such a way that “violates the standard”. Manus are one of the first companies to work towards doing that, it’ll be interesting to see how easy they find the process.
