Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Tech that’s Saving VR: Inside-out Tracking”.
Virtual-Reality enjoyed hype levels over 9000 just a few short years ago. Only to have a lot of the fanfare died down shortly thereafter and justifiably so. A lot of people had understandable misgivings about things like comfort cables and the cost of entry. If only there was a technology that would make it possible to create a cheap, easy and wireless platform that provides all the benefits of enthusiast grade VR without the drawbacks.
Well, that is exactly what markerless inside out tracking promises to provide. Now, although it’s true that devices like the windows mixed reality, headsets and Lenovo’s mirages solo have used markerless inside out tracking for a while they’ve, never achieved the status of the more premium offerings from companies like HTC oculus for Sony. Fortunately, for VR lovers, things are changing as late-model headsets with this technology like the oculus quest and oculus rift, s have almost completely closed.
The gap and HTC revealed at CES this year that the vive cosmos will be taking advantage of markerless inside out tracking as well. So it’s safe to say, then that the heavyweights have entered the ring. But what exactly is inside out tracking and specifically markerless inside out tracking – and why is everybody jumping on the bandwagon well put simply inside out tracking, is a way to track the position of a head mounted display or hmd in three-dimensional space up until recently, the biggest Six degrees of freedom, vr platforms, the rift and the psvr have been using either inside-out tracking, with markers or even the opposite approach outside in tracking, which uses external sensors or cameras to determine where the headset is located. And while these methods are very accurate and some with very minimal latency they’re, not without problems, so the center towers require a line of sight with the HMD and controllers at all times, meaning that if you don’t have a clear play space or you haven’t, set up The sensors properly they could get occluded and tracking and whatsmore setup can be a total hassle. If you don’t have a dedicated VR area, where you can just set it and forget it, you got to push away your furniture, mount your sensors, define your play space and finally step into the virtual world. But even if you have plenty of space – and you don’t mind the set-up time, you will still need external sensors and either a Playstation, 4 or AV are capable PC, each of which drive up the cost of entry markerless inside out tracking, on the other hand, has All of the required sensors embedded within the headset itself, allowing the HMD to track its own position, resulting in a simpler, quicker and generally cheaper way to get immersed in VR. So it sounds great right, but how does all this inside out trickery work? The answer, of course, is slam tech, I’m serious. Actually, it’s called slam technology UC slam stands for simultaneous localization and mapping, which describes the problem that the head-mounted display has to solve.
That is creating and constantly updating a map of the environment that it’s in, while simultaneously tracking its own location within that map. It does this by using a combination of physical sensors, like cameras, accelerometers and gyroscopes, to continuously detect information about itself and the world around it. This data is then passed over to the software, that’s responsible for processing it and generating a 3d mapping of the environment. Now, while solutions to slam were originally developed for other applications like robotics and self-driving cars, it’s now being used for hardcore vr gaming.
Who cares about the advancements of collective human knowledge when you could be playing, but it’s no guarantee? That’S super hot or any VR experience for that matter will be better with inside out tracking, like I said before, the reason that anyone would care about all of this. At all is if they want a cheap, easy and Wireless VR platform that has all, or almost all, of the benefits of an enthusiast, great experience. The issue here is that, in order to make it Wireless, everything has to run on mobile hardware. So if you’re, a member of the glorious PC gaming, master race or even an ordinary ps4 gamer VR games running on mobile hardware, is going to be a step down for both of you in terms of both fidelity and immersion, plus both the Mirage, solo and oculus Quest feature piddly refresh rates in the mid 70 Hertz with the rift s at 80, Hertz, the original vive at 90 and the valve index at a whopping, 120 Hertz or even 144 in its experimental mode. So if you suffer from simulation sickness at reduced refresh rates, you might not want to buy into the markerless inside out just yet making matters worse. Occlusion is still a problem when it comes to inside out tracking.
The difference here is that, instead of stuff getting between the sensors and the headset inside out, occlusion happens when the sensors on the hmd get blocked. For example, you might be aiming down the sights of a rifle with one of your hands right up against your headset or, if you simply look away from the controllers or put them behind you to grab an arrow out of your quiver. The controller will try to continue tracking based on their last known position, but it might be with lower resolution data so the longer the disruption, the more out of sync with reality, things can become plus the image processing.
That’S done on captured footage, while impressive, isn’t perfect and inside out tracking doesn’t really work outdoors, because sunlight can interfere with the sensors. These issues, though, do not amount to a death sentence for inside out tracking as processing power, sensor, performance and slam. Tech continue to improve. We’Ll see a lot of these early problems become less and less pervasive, and there’s also room for software to make more efficient use of the processing power that we have using still in development techniques like pho V, ated rendering to get heavier games running on lighter Hardware. So with all that in mind, there is still absolutely hope for VR to go truly mainstream once they make headsets that don’t make you look like an idiot speaking of mainstream FreshBooks cloud accounting is a fantastic if you’re a mainstream type like like a small business owner Or our freelancer FreshBooks works from anywhere and with the FreshBooks mobile app you can create professional-looking invoices on the go. You can snap pictures of your receipts, so you don’t lose them. You can stay on top of important conversations and you’ll never miss an update. For example, you can see when a client has viewed their invoice or when an invoice has become overdue.
So start your 30-day free trial right now at freshbooks com forward, slash tech, quickie, we’re gon na have that linked below. So, thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and don’t forget to subscribe. .