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Jack McCauley's Next Challenge: the Perfect Head-Tracker For VR (ieee.org)

Posted by timothy on from the it's-on-your-head dept.

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.

4 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. "not more expensive screen technologies"? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    Sure, we need better tracking, with higher temporal and spatial resolution, and lower noise. But to get low-enough latency from position sensing to image display, you need high performance at every stage -- position acquisition, image computation, data transfer to your display, and display refresh rate. If the total of all those latencies exceeds the maximum tolerable delay, you lose. If you're going to get sick with total delays of 10 ms, and your display refreshes at less than 100 Hz, there's nothing you can do -- until you get a higher-refresh-rate display.

    1. Re:"not more expensive screen technologies"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What on earth do you mean by "traveling at 1 MS[sic]"? The units in question here are milliseconds (ms); they are not a velocity, or angular velocity, or anything that makes sense in the way you are attempting to use them.

  2. Re:How is laser scanning not fast enough by Pinky's+Brain · · Score: 2

    Sure, a 1500nm range IR laser plane scanned at a couple 1000 RPM with good interlocks. Why not?

    That range gets absorbed inside the bulk of the eye by the way, which is why it's slightly misleadingly known as eye-safe. Longer wavelengths dump most of their energy on the cornea and shorter wavelengths dump most of their energy on the retina, so they have much lower damage thresholds.

  3. Re:How is laser scanning not fast enough by Pinky's+Brain · · Score: 2

    Oops, I'm a couple orders of magnitude off with the timing, I guess even 10ns resolution would be more than enough.