Positional tracking question...

My understanding of how the positional tracking will work is it will simply be tracking where our head is, as in the real world when you move your head closer to an object to get a better look at something while your body remains in one place. As I develop my objects with collision detection, I need not worry about "fine tuning," because when the user moves near an object or surface they can only approach as close as collision detection allows. My environment therefor can be ready to go on day one without caring one bit about positional tracking; as long as it's there on launch day so people can get a good look at details.

to get a better look at something while your body remains in one place

oh I thought it was a world position tracker, kind of like the hydra except attached to the rift. meaning that if you lean from side to side so that it could be utilised with ik of the spine for a character for minimizing motion sickness. It may not be needed day one but that depends on what your making and the flow of your interaction, but I suppose we'll find out what it will be like well before release anyway, was just curious.

Talking of head tracking, I was playing Ciess , you know, that game that won the VR Jam 2013. And in that game you sit in a sphere and look around. It says in the instructions that a swivel chair is recommended and the reason for that is to reduce the feeling of nausea that can occur if you use the gamepad to rotate the sphere instead of you spinning around on the chair. Anyway I agree with the nausea bit if using the gamepad but there are no feelings of nausea when you look around and swivel on the chair. So this got me thinking. When the Rift gets positional tracking then I can see a way of using the Rift to move your position in the game without causing feelings of nausea as follows ( and I guess you could try this with one Razer Hydra strapped to your head or neck if you can program it into your game) : Move your torso to the left/right/forward/backward slightly and you will keep moving in that direction in the game until you move yourself back to the center position. Off course you could have it programmed that you only move if a button is pressed on the gamepad as you start to lean in the direction you want to move. Just a thought.

That's just where I'm coming from, it will just make the user experience much better as there are always people who don't follow instructions and will wonder why they feel sick.

I remember reading that positional tracking could be accomplished with an accelerometer and magnetometer, if I remember correctly, and being the rift has both I was wondering if positional tracking could be done already with the current dev kit if you do the math yourself using the sdk. I was just wondering if position tracking was already possible with the dev kit because of this and just needing to be made user friendly in the sdk or were there going to be hardware additions to cater for it, hence my question about having access without the need of the release rift.

"medrift" wrote:
Move your torso to the left/right/forward/backward slightly and you will keep moving in that direction in the game until you move yourself back to the center position. Off course you could have it programmed that you only move if a button is pressed on the gamepad as you start to lean in the direction you want to move.

Wow, this is actually a brilliant idea! Don't know why i didn't think of that before..

I think it could be a very intuitive control scheme for movement which would "almost" free one of your hands (only one button press required), should work in a similar way to the Wii Balance board solution shown somewhere in this forum. Also it could really help solving the motion sickness issue some people experience, since one of the main problems is acceleration, not constant velocity. Thanks for sharing!

"genetransfer" wrote:
I remember reading that positional tracking could be accomplished with an accelerometer and magnetometer, if I remember correctly, and being the rift has both I was wondering if positional tracking could be done already with the current dev kit if you do the math yourself using the sdk.

Accelerometers can indeed be used for positional tracking, but the problem is that they "drift" very fast; you need an absolute reference (like an optical tracking system) in order to correct for these accumulated errors.

Carmack himself confirmed this just a few days ago via Twitter:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1mpsd4/carmack_about_positional_tracking_optical_at_a/

"PatimPatam" wrote:
Accelerometers can indeed be used for positional tracking, but the problem is that they "drift" very fast; you need an absolute reference (like an optical tracking system) in order to correct for these accumulated errors.

ok thanks, that puts that to rest anyway.