Some of the inner workings of Valve’s Lighthouse base station, an infrared laser-emitting device used for ‘room scale’ positional tracking, were revealed today by Valve developer Joe Ludwig.
Ludwig’s SVVR Conference talk entitled “OpenVR and You” addressed a number of issues dealing with the open source nature of the SteamVR platform—even including how the Lighthouse tracking system base station basically works. Nope. Not elves.
“The way this works is: 60 times a second it flashes a global strobe of light followed by one of the laser sweeps, and then it flashes again and follows the other laser sweep. Between the flash and a sweep hitting a given sensor—we can time that—with that timing information we then know the angle of that sensor relative to that axis on the base station. So you do that in two axes for each sensor on the device where they’re all rigidly attached together.” – Joe Ludwig
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