One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the Starship Schrodinger's Destiny project.
I found Slime VR, which do a set of five trackers for around the same price of a single one of the light-house-style trackers anyway!
They just dead-reckon distances from accelerometers and then try to compensate for how badly that works with a skeleton model and some constraints.
They're fully open and free-software. Make your own trackers if you know about printed circuit boards and accelerometers and things. Or make a company that makes them if you like.
Or since I don't want to do any of that, just 'pre-order' them.
I Ordered some of them. Trouble is, that it is a 'pre-order'. Join the queue mate. Could be a while.
So it was good when, as I sadly packed away the broken lighthouse, I found in the place that I would store them a backup lighthouse! I bought it when I bought a whole second-hand Vive set coz my old headset failed.
Hurray! The lighthouses live for a while yet. I even have another spare backup to go.
The SlimeVR actually arrived fairly quick though in the end. Just a few weeks. Less than a month for sure.
The software didn't work on Linux/Debian/XFCE 😦 or even on Gnome when I tried that instead. 😢
I spent an actual whole day failing to get that working before I gave up and joined my first tech-support Discord to seek help.
Discord sucks. I have no idea what is happening. Why are people using this instead of a nodebb or something? I dunno. Can't wait to quit it again when this is all working.
One of the reasons I'm so loath to 'join a community' to get access to a support forum is that the community don't own their own support forum. Madness.
Anyway, after the annoying unhelpful robot, some cool helpful person on there said to try the new beta: it's GUI is built with Electron, but that sucks less than Tauri/Webkit which is why the GUI won't work for me.
And that did indeed work.
I was hoping the five trackers could be set up on each foot, hips, and elbows.
But the system to avoid sensor-drift and compensate for the errors you get from dead-reckoning needs a particular skeletal model. A five-set of trackers have to be: Ankles, Knees, Chest.
And I definitely need Hips.
My characters dance. 💃
So had to pre-order some more.
The next one is Hips, so maybe 6 would be enough, but after Hips come the 'foot' attachments: They can be mini-trackers which don't have wi-fi themselves, and cable-connect to the ankles. Makes them cheaper.
Then after feet you can do Elbows with another couple.
They go on further than that, you can use 20 apparently, but I just ordered enough to get to the 10 (two of which are the minis that attach by cables to others)
So that's my advice on these so far: Get the ten-tracker set: the five tracker set takes all five just to do legs really. If you gotta dance, you need hips and elbows!
And use the beta software, at least on Linux: the stable release can't draw it's window for some reason.
I am pleased though. They seem like they'll be good enough and when the project is opened this year the hardware cost barriers to entry of anyone else using it will be much less than I thought.
