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Jack McCauley's Next Challenge: the Perfect Head-Tracker For VR (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes: He used a webcam and LEDs to do position tracking for the Oculus DK2, but Jack McCauley, co-founder of Oculus and now working independently, says that's the wrong approach. He likes the laser scanning system of the HTC Vive better, but says it's just not fast enough. McCauley thinks he can do better, using a design approach borrowed from picoprojectors. Speaking at this week's MEMS Executive Congress, he said better tracking of head position will solve the problem of VR sickness, not more expensive screen technologies.
It's not just about latency. If your display is near zero latency and you don't account for head movements, you're going to cause sickness. That is an inevitable consequence of binocular vision. Latency is >10 ms in human photoreceptors, and adaptation to head position is based on vestibular feedback downstream. Latency is not the limitation. Matching self motion to visual motion is the limitation. If these are mismatched, latency won't matter and people will get sick. I applaud the dude for realizing this.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.