Manus VR are developing what they claim will be the first consumer virtual reality glove and have announced that their first developer kits are to go on sale at $250, developers can grab a pre-order reservation today.
Update: We incorrectly stated earlier that the Manus glove developer kit would ship in Q2, in fact pre-orders start then. The glove won’t ship until Q3.
We’ve been tracking Manus VR (previously Manus Machinae) for a while now, and last went hands on with their Gear VR edition of their virtual reality wireless gloves at EGX in September last year.
Now, the company have announced that their first developer kit edition gloves will ship in Q3 2016 and will set you back $250. Developers can put themselves down for a pre-order reservation now and for your money you’ll receive a pair of Manus gloves, plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine and access to the SDK for Android, Windows 7+, Linux, iOS 9, Mac OSX.
The Bluetooth connected gloves integrates per-digit sensors capable of detecting the position and extension of each, with accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer providing sensor data for tracking the movement and rotation of a user’s hands.
However, Manus say they’re working towards integrating Valve’s Lighthouse tracking technology, the same used on the HTC Vive’s controllers and headset, to provide absolute 6DOF positional tracking. True Lighthouse hardware integration isn’t there yet, but the developer kit units have a neat workaround – wrist mounted holders that let you strap a SteamVR controller to your hands thereby piggy backing that positional information.
The company have also recently released a video of a new title in development designed to demonstrate the Manus glove’s capabilities in virtual reality. It’s a new title developed in-house at Manus called Willow’s Pillow and follows the fortunes of Willow, a little orphan who woke up in a surreal dream world. Your job – to guide her to safety using your god-like hands to manipulate the world around Willow. Manus teamed up with several industry veterans including former Lead Animator, Peter Kortenhoeven, known from the Overlord series.
Manus VR are at GDC this year demonstrating their latest prototype gloves, Road to VR will be going hands-on with the units later in the week.
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer Jeremy Selan and tracking engineer Ben Jackson about the evolution of room-scale tracking technologies, as well as some of the oral history stories that include some of their favorite memories and types of experiences within VR. They didn’t talk about any specific future plans for things that they’re not ready to talk about yet, but Jeremy did allude to the fact that there’s a lot of latent hardware functionality that’s shipping with the Vive that can be turned on with a software update. We also speculate a bit about the potentials of using the front-facing camera to track static objects with fiducial markers, the desire to go beyond room-scale in VR, and using controllers to prototype tracking other body parts until Valve presents a solution that makes it easier and more aesthetically pleasing.
Valve today announced that it will provide royalty-free licensing to third parties interested in using the SteamVR ‘Lighthouse’ tracking technology to create new tracked objects like VR controllers and other peripherals.
Lighthouse is Valve’s system that provides the ‘room-scale’ tracking capabilities of the HTC Vive and it’s motion controllers. More than a year ago, the company said they planned to expose the inner-workings of the system and allow third-parties to create compatible peripherals.
Today the company finally revealed just how that will work: a royalty-free license to use the technology to create third-party products that interoperate with the Lighthouse system. Licensees will need to pay $2,975 to attend a training course, but other than that, there’s no licensing fees or royalties for using the tech, Valve says.
Valve is opening the Lighthouse tracking tech for companies to create tracked objects and peripherals, but for now they’re not allowing the creation of third-party basestations, the little boxes that emit lasers which are essential to making the tracking work. The company explains why in an FAQ about the tracking licensing:
For now we need to make sure that there is complete compatibility among base stations and tracked devices. Longer term, we do want the hardware community to help us evolve base station design and to help innovate in that area, but given our own limited bandwidth we need to push that collaboration out to some future date.
And further specifies that, so long as the license is followed, companies don’t need Valve’s permission to sell a Lighthouse-enabled product.
Yes, you can sell your own products wherever you want. No, you don’t need Valve’s review and approval to ship your product, but you do need to comply with the license to be able to use our technology, brands, names, or trademarks.
Valve will be providing a Lighthouse ‘Licensee Dev Kit’ to companies who apply to use the technology. It includes:
Dev Kit Contents
A modular reference tracked object suitable for attaching to prototype HMDs or other devices
Full complement of EVM circuit boards to enable rapid prototyping of your own tracked object
40 individual sensors for building your own tracked object
Accessories to enable custom prototypes
Tools
Software toolkit to assist with optimal sensor placement
Calibration tools for prototyping and manufacturing
Documentation
Schematics and layouts for all electronic components
Mechanical designs for the reference tracked object and accessories
Datasheets for the sensor ASICs
Hopefully the move will mean the possibility of an ecosystem of peripherals, and even Lighthouse-tracked VR headsets, giving users choice among headsets and among more specialized controllers/accessories, like guns, swords, wheels and more.
With Valve’s move to open up its Lighthouse tracking technology to third parties, Triad Semiconductor is soon to be selling specialized chips which companies can use to create new VR headsets and peripherals with SteamVR Tracking.
Last month Valve finally made the first big step in opening the Lighthouse tracking technology for third-party licensing. Lighthouse is the tracking system used in the HTC Vive headset; using two sensors (‘basestations’) placed at the corners of the tracked space and an array of sensors on the headset and controllers, the system allows for ‘room-scale’ tracking that’s fast and precise enough for virtual reality. Valve said they would license the tech to anyone for free and that it would not require that third parties seek its approval before using the technology.
Rendering of Valve’s SteamVR Tracking ‘Licensee Dev Kit’ tracked reference object
Valve created a ‘Licensee Dev Kit’ for SteamVR Tracking which includes a Lighthouse tracking reference device, along with sensors and boards to help companies start building new Steam VR Tracking enabled headsets and peripherals.
For those starting from scratch, Triad Semiconductor, a US firm which specializes in creating custom analog and mixed signal integrated circuits, is soon to be selling Valve-approved chips which form the foundation of the sensor array needed for SteamVR Tracking.
The appealingly-named TS3633 is a tiny ‘light-to-digital’ integrated circuit which takes input signals from a photodiode (like the small sensors seen scattered across the HTC Vive headset) and converts them into useful data for processing by the SteamVR Tracking algorithms.
Triad’s VP Marketing & Sales, Reid Wender, told me that Valve architected, approved, and certified the chip as SteamVR Tracking’s light-to-digital solution.
“This chip is Valve’s idea. The team at Valve worked with Triad to define the functionality of this chip. The Valve team consists of an incredible group of algorithmic-genius-makers. I use that weird term because the guys at Valve don’t just sit around thinking up cool product ideas and algorithms but they also immediately start hacking/making the ideas into reality on their bench-top,” he said. “Valve has an awesome vision of making SteamVR Tracking available to the world for a wide variety of precision tracking applications from room-scale virtual reality to embedded robotics control.”
Wender says that Triad is the first company to create an integrated circuit like the TS3633 for SteamVR Tracking, and that the company plans to begin selling it later this month.
In quantities of as little as 50 the part runs $0.92, and once you bump up to an order of 1,000 units the cost comes down to $0.49. A SteamVR tracked headset might have 32 sensors on it, meaning the chip would add about $15.68 to the bill of materials. Granted, you still need photodiodes and a few more components for each sensor, and that’s before considering other materials and components in the headset or peripheral.
A tiny integrated circuit like the TS3633 alone isn’t very easy to work with, at least as a starting point. So Triad is also creating the TS3633-CM1 which is a castellated module containing the TS3633, photodiode, and resistors, forming a complete SteamVR Tracking sensor for easy prototyping. The CM1 runs a steeper $6.95 each in quantities of 10, but it’s just a prototyping module rather than a finished product component. Triad says the CM1 will also become available later this month.
Wender gave a high-level overview of the structure of a Lighthouse tracked object:
A number of Light to Digital Sensors (Photodiode + TS3633). Typical tracked objects have between 20 to 32 such sensors. Smaller numbers of sensors can be used for more ‘casual’ tracking applications.
A digital function block to aggregate the envelope signals from each TS3633. Current systems use an FPGA that can accept up to 32 such sensor inputs.
An IMU. The location information from the IMU gets fused with the light-to-digital angle information.
A microprocessor to take the data from the FPGA and IMU, form packets and then send the information to a Host Processor (currently a Windows PC or Linux PC) over a USB or proprietary 2.4GHz link.
A Host Processor running SteamVR software to serve as the “position engine.” The position engine computes the position and the orientation of tracked object.
Wender acknowledges that at this stage, creating a new device for SteamVR Tracking is still fairly complicated and accessible to many beyond engineers. With that, he says that Triad is working to create a more hacker/maker friendly approach for “simple tracked objects.” He teased that we’d hear more about this in the near future, but I suspect he may be hinting about a self-contained SteamVR tracking module which could be affixed to arbitrary objects for easy tracking.
It’s only been a month or so since Valve opened their SteamVR Tracking technology to third-parties; given that short time, we expectantly have yet to see any products with the tech hit the market, but Triad’s new chip offerings will likely accelerate things going forward.
A new chip that Valve is recommending for use in future SteamVR headsets and accessories brings improved performance and significant power reduction compared to the first generation solution along with potential manufacturing savings.
Each divot has a Lighthouse sensor at its base
An essential component in the first generation HTC Vive is the cratered sensors that cover the headset and controllers. Each of these sensors consists of a photodiode and discrete circuit which detects and interprets pulses of light from the Lighthouse ‘basestations’. Elegant as the system is, there’s room for improvement in the sensor design; a new chip that Valve is recommending for use in future SteamVR tracked headsets and peripherals brings enhancements ranging from reduced costs to improved performance and power savings.
That chip is the TS3633 integrated circuit from Triad Semiconductor, a US firm which specializes in creating custom analog and mixed signal integrated circuits. We learned recently that Valve worked with Triad to architect the chip, and that it sits next to the photodiode as an interpreter of the raw signals from the Lighthouse basestations. The TS3633 is now available for purchase from Triad, and we’re learning more about what improvements it brings to the table for future headsets using SteamVR Tracking.
Cost
While first-generation VR headsets are impressive, they’re still priced in the enthusiast realm with the Oculus Rift at $600 and the HTC Vive at $800. Like the smartphone, widespread adoption of VR headsets will come as the devices, and the components in them, mature and become less expensive and easier to manufacture.
The first generation HTC Vive—the first (and so far, only) VR headset using SteamVR tracking—uses a discrete circuit sensor design consisting of 41 individual components. The TS3633 cuts that number down to 9, which means more streamlined manufacturing.
Triad’s VP of Marketing & Sales, Reid Wender, explained that the chip is cost-optimized for high volume manufacturing. For a complete system (including headset and controllers), which has around 80 sensors, the chip reduces component placements by 2,560 over the 41 component per-sensor design of the first-generation Vive. That brings savings in component placement and also opens the door to simplifying circuit board designs which can further reduce cost, says Wender.
An example circuit layout for a sensor using the TS3633
Less components can also mean better reliability which can cut down further on tangential costs that go beyond the price of a device’s components alone.
“The more components in a system the more likely there will be a manufacturing yield problem or field reliability problem,” said Wender. “The circuit boards that these devices are implemented on are relatively expensive. Removing the 2,560 placements means that the final assembly will have a higher yield and require less expensive manual rework. And, fewer components means better reliability in the field and lower warranty costs.”
Wender explained that the Triad chip is more capable across a range of abilities that are important to the SteamVR Tracking technology, ultimately delivering improved tracking performance.
“The TS3633 excels on several technical characteristics such as detected pulse width versus distance, more sensitivity for longer range detection, better off angle detection, improved optical sync detection, improved start of sync detection, and improved centroid location,” he said. “All of these technical improvements equate to a more robust SteamVR Tracking experience with observably improved user experience.”
I had suspected that increasing the size of the sensor’s photodiode would be an obvious way to improve tracking performance and range, but Wender explained why this might not be the ideal approach with a useful analogy:
You can think of the system as radio system with a link budget. The basestations are the transmitters and the tracked objects are the receivers. Extending this analogy, the photodiode takes the place of the antenna that would be there in an RF system. The Triad TS3633 is the front end of the receiver that provides ‘lots of amplification, filtering and extracts the signal from the noise.’ So, instead of simply making the photodiode larger (slower, more expensive overall system) it may be a better-engineered system (lower jitter, higher performance, lower cost, smaller size) to have a somewhat smaller, faster photodiode and get more sensitivity & gain from the Light-to-Digital converter IC.
Valve have revealed that their room-scale tracking technology SteamVR has now been licensed to over 300 companies, many of which plan to release products integrating the tech in 2017.
Valve’s pseudo-annual developer focused event ‘Steam Dev Days’ will kick off tomorrow and the gaming giant has already teased some of what attendees at the Seattle based show will see. Running for two days at the Washington State Convention Centre, the event is developers-only for the most part with no press access.
According to a press release from Valve, the company are gearing up to show off “new VR peripherals” which will be made available for “demonstration and design collaboration with attendees.” Precisely what these peripherals are we don’t know, but Valve states that its SteamVR Tracking tech, the laser-based system which provides room-scale tracking capabilities to the HTC Vive, now has over 300 companies signed up as licensees for technology.
It seems Valve’s vision for SteamVR tracking uses is broad to say the least, with the company claiming that those 300 licensees span multiple, somewhat disparate industries ranging from “entertainment VR to automotive to televisions and toys.” Further, Valve says we can look forward to seeing many of these products appear in 2017.
Shortly after the announcement that the SteamVR Tracking technology would finally begin to open up to third-parties, semiconductor firm Triad Semiconductor announced that it was collaborating with Valve to create the ‘light to digital’ chips that form an important foundation of the sensors and make the impressively accurate tracking and which Valve recommends for use in products integrating SteamVR Tracking.
For Oculus’ part, the company has said previously that they planned to open up their own ‘Constellation’ tracking technology to third parties but hasn’t announced any progress on that effort for more than a year.
Valve meanwhile has said that they want to make SteamVR Tracking ubiquitous, ‘like wifi’, and seems in the best position so far to make that happen.
Valve opened up their SteamVR tracking technology for third-party development in August, and since then, 50 developers have completed the mandatory training course provided by Synapse, the first company to enter the field.
Synapse says that most of the participants have been interested in gaming specifically, but some have expressed interest in applying the technology to the automotive industry, science, sports, education, and general consumer electronics.
Synapse has received more registrations for the training course than originally anticipated, so they’ve added additional slots for the course in November and December. A representative for Synapse said that there are currently no plans to continue the course past December, so interested developers should sign-up as soon as possible to get in the remaining classes.
Synapse will also be presenting a compressed version of their training course at SXSW as part of the VR/AR track in March of 2017.
At Valve’s annual Steam Dev Days event earlier this month, the company laid heavy emphasis on making their Lighthouse room-scale tracking technology available to companies wishing to integrate it into 3rd party products. Valve stated that claiming that those 300 licensees span multiple industries ranging from “entertainment VR to automotive to televisions and toys.” Further, Valve says we can look forward to seeing many of these products appear in 2017.
Shortly after the announcement that the SteamVR Tracking technology would finally begin to open up to third-parties, semiconductor firm Triad Semiconductor announced that it was collaborating with Valve to create the ‘light to digital’ chips that form an important foundation of the sensors and make the impressively accurate tracking and which Valve recommends for use in products integrating SteamVR Tracking.
Valve is continuing to improve upon the design of the ‘Lighthouse’ Base Stations, the laser-beacons that form a crucial part of the SteamVR Tracking system. Future iterations are expected to become dramatically simplified, reducing size, noise, and perhaps most importantly, cost.
VR is awesome, but it’s still expensive. Until costs come down significantly, the sort of experience you can get from the HTC Vive isn’t likely to see mainstream consumer usage on the scale of the smartphone. But, just like the smartphone, it’s likely that we’ll see significant reductions in price as the market and the devices mature.
One step toward getting there is making the tracking technology less expensive. Valve’s SteamVR Tracking (AKA Lighthouse), which is employed by the HTC Vive, relies on a pair of laser-beacons called Base Stations. Each Base Station houses motors, lasers, LEDs, and an array of electronics to control it all. Judging by the $134 cost of a replacement Base Station on the Vive’s accessory page, the component may be the single most expensive part of the Vive system beyond the headset—and you need two of them.
So it makes sense that Valve is focusing a lot of attention on continuing to hone the Base Station design into something that’s more simple and affordable. At Steam Dev Days last month, the company showed a glimpse into the future of the Base Station, including a design insight that could dramatically reduce the cost.
Each current Base Station uses two motors to sweep laser lines across the tracked space; one line sweeps along the X axis and the other line sweeps along the Y axis, allowing independent tracking of each direction. Each motor also needs its own laser diode, optics, motor controller, wheel assembly, etc.
But, as Valve Engineer Ben Jackson pointed out at Steam Dev Days last month, it’s actually possible to get X and Y axis information from a single spinning motor. The key insight is generating a ‘V’ shaped pattern with two lines from the same motor, instead of one axial line per motor.
Left: the present two motor layout. Right: the single motor layout. | Photo courtesy Ben Jackson / Valve
And that of course means that one of the motors, and all the components it’s reliant on, can be removed from the Base Station. As Jackson put it, “What better way to make [the Base Station] lighter, quieter, cheaper, and more power efficient, than to chop out half the parts?”
Reid Wender of Triad Semiconductor, who has been working with Valve on SteamVR Tracking since 2014, says he expects the system will see “rapid cost reductions” due to changes like this.
Photo courtesy Ben Jackson / Valve
Chopping out half the parts will definitely have a dramatic impact on component and manufacturing costs, but Wender points out that a more simple system, with a single motor instead of two, is easier to calibrate and also likely to be more reliable, which could further reduce support costs.
So what might costs look like with these improvements taken into account? Let’s rough out some guesses with a little back-of-the-envelop reasoning:
The current cost of the HTC Vive is $800, and it includes the headset, two Base Stations, and two controllers (I’ve tossed out a few of the smaller pieces like the Link Box for the sake of this guestimate). Just going by known prices on the Vive’s accessories page (which are almost certainly more than the out-of-the-box cost), the Base Stations contribute $270 and the controllers $260, leaving $320 for the headset itself (again, that’s probably far off, but we’re more interested in the relative figures. Halving the cost of the Base Stations would bring their contribution down to $135, reducing the entire package to $665, about 17% less than the current price.
Once more, this is a very imprecise guess, but the point remains that, if the Base Station is the biggest cost to the system aside from the headset (which stands to reason from the present cost on the Vive accessories page), smarter Base Station design could make a big dent in the overall cost of the system, and that’s before considering any other improvements like Triad’s new SteamVR Tracking chip, and more optimizations that are surely in the works.
A big question arises however: Would Valve and HTC put new, cheaper base stations into the existing Vive package, or wait until the launch of an entirely new headset? For now, only time will tell.
We speak to Trinity VR about their Vive Tracker powered Diamond FX project which aims to provide realistic virtual reality simulations for major league baseball teams, all powered by years of real pitching statistics.
One of the more off-beat uses of HTC’s newly announced Vive Tracker came from Trinity VR who have taken the Vive Tracker, as announced by HTC at CES this week, slapped it onto a real baseball bat and were using it to demonstrate their baseball simulator.
Ben Lang spoke to Trinity VR‘s Chief of Product Julian Volyn (see full video interview at the top of this page) to find out a little more about the project and it transpires that the developers only had around 3 weeks to integrate Diamond FX with HTC’s new Vive Tracker. Tellingly, and positively for HTC, Volyn states that in comparison to their previous solution – essentially strapping a SteamVR controller to the bat – the new tracker really allowed the company to increase tracking fidelity and weight distribution for added realism.
As for Diamond FX itself, Volyn says it’s a serious simulation designed very much for professional use, a statement that seems to be backed up by the impressive statistics the application is built on. “It’s a simulation and training platform looking at professional teams and minor league teams,” says Volyn, “What we’re able to do is create scenarios with real world pitchers and simulate their real world play styles..” How is this done? Years of statistics it turns out. “We’re able to do this through a system called Pitch FX. Pitch FX was installed in major league stadiums in about 2007, it’s collected 100s of 1000s of data points for every pitch thrown for the past 7 years and we’re able to take those data points and reverse engineer those pitches.” What this means of course is that teams who use the system will be able instantly recall and replay over and over again individual pitches taken from real matches.
Of course, all that data isn’t much use if it can’t be presented to the player in a useful way. Diamond FX was therefore built for virtual reality and, using a motion tracked bat (see the aforementioned Vive Tracker) bring the real player’s motions into the simulation, playing performance out against the virtual pitches. “In a player development of training sense, there’s not a ton of opportunities for a player to go up against any given pitcher in a season. What we’re able to do is create large sample sizes through .. nobody gets tired, in our simulation ”
We’re almost constantly surprised by new and interesting uses we’d never considered for virtual reality here on Road to VR, even after reporting on the technology for over 5 years. Trinity VR have managed to do it again with Diamond FX and with that excellent statistical grounding fused with this new generation of tracked motion controllers and VR, they seem to have a really compelling product which it would be hard to imagine wasn’t attractive to both minor and major league players alike.
During a Valve Q&A session on Reddit, Valve’s Joe Ludwig, who has been closely involved with the company’s VR efforts, confirmed development of a manufacturing line for the new base stations, and that they’d “start showing up later this year.”
“The controller production line is still going strong and churning out controllers. The next line we’re building is for the base stations we talked about at Dev Days,” he wrote, responding to a question about the company’s work with automated manufacturing. “Using automation allows us to keep production local, which means our employees can be much more hands-on with the manufacturing process. That works a lot better with how Valve works, so we’ll probably keep doing that going forward.”
The base stations that ship with the Vive today have two rotors with are used to sweep lasers in a vertical and horizontal line across the tracked volume. Those lasers are detected by sensors on the Vive and used to determine its location in space.
The major difference in the new base stations is the move from a dual-rotor to a single-rotor design. Instead of a horizontal and vertical speed achieved with two rotors, the new base stations will use a single rotor with two diagonal sweeps leaning in opposite directions.
Valve says that the same precise positional tracking information can be derived in this way, with the added benefit of greatly reducing the complexity of the system. As Valve engineer Ben Jackson put it, “What better way to make [the Base Station] lighter, quieter, cheaper, and more power efficient, than to chop out half the parts?”
According to Reid Wender of Triad Semiconductor (who worked with Valve to create components for Lighthouse tracking), the new approach could lead to “rapid cost reductions.”
Reduced price would be a welcome change; today’s Lighthouse base stations cost $135 each when bought directly from HTC, so they’re surely adding a nice chunk to the Vive’s $800 price point.
Valve today announced plans to begin selling SteamVR Tracking base stations directly later this year; the first units on offer are expected to be the new single-rotor models the company recently teased. Valve is also making it easier to develop new tracked products and accessories with SteamVR Tracking by removing the requirement of a $3,000 introductory course.
When Valve opened up their SteamVR Tracking (aka ‘Lighthouse’) technology in 2016, the company did so in a quite open way: anyone could use the tracking tech in their own products, royalty free, and didn’t need any sort of certification or approval from Valve to launch those products. There was just one catch though: people hoping to use SteamVR Tracking in their devices would need to attend a $3,000 introductory course in Seattle.
The SteamVR Tracking base stations that ship with the HTC Vive
Today, Valve says the course will no longer be a requirement (though it will still be available). Anyone who wants to develop new products using SteamVR Tracking can do so as easily as buying the necessary hardware components and downloading the development software.
“After working with numerous third parties and updating the tools, Valve is opening more direct access to the technology and course work, available free of charge in English and Chinese. The full, in person training courses are still available for those interested,” the company wrote in a statement issued to Road to VR.
Valve also announced plans to sell the SteamVR Tracking base stations—the little beacons that project lasers to created a trackable volume—directly later this year. That’s a shift from the status quo, where the base stations come packaged with HTC’s Vive headset, or are bought as a standalone accessory from HTC.
Valve pioneered the tracking tech and this new move seems to indicate that the company plans to continue to be the driving force behind its advancement and adoption. Going forward we may find that HTC primarily drives the development of the Vive headset while Valve—who worked closely with HTC on Vive—retains control of the underlying tracking technology.
Upgrades to the SteamVR Tracking base stations will simplify the internal components
New SteamVR Tracking base stations were teased by Valve in late 2016 and the company confirmed previously that they would become available in 2017. The new models will move from a dual-rotor to a single-rotor design, which could bring “rapid cost reductions,” according to those involved with Valve’s tracking technology. Currently the standalone base stations sold by HTC cost $130.
As evidenced by the decision to begin selling SteamVR Tracking base stations directly later this year, Valve aims to continue driving development of the technology. A look at the latest engineering sample of the next-generation base station model shows a new design approach that simplifies the device down to a single rotor and enhances tracking.
During a recent media briefing at Valve’s headquarters in Bellevue, WA, the company spoke about their ongoing development of three first-party on VR games, their pragmatic view of the young VR market, and also showed a glimpse of the next-generation SteamVR Tracking (AKA Lighthouse) base stations—the small beacons which form the foundation of the tracking system.
In late 2016, Valve showed a glimpse of an early prototype of the new single-rotor base station which was largely derived from earlier models. At Valve’s media briefing this month, PC Gamer captured a closeup of a much evolved engineering sample (seen heading this article), which Valve’s Joe Ludwig confirmed is “where we’re at right now” in development of the device, though cautioned that “anything about this could change” before it begins shipping later this year.
An early prototype of Valve’s laser-based system that would become SteamVR Tracking, circa May 2014
The simplification from a dual-rotor design to a single-rotor design—which smartly condenses horizontal and vertical laser sweeps into a single sweep—may be more significant than it seems at first glance.
“It’s cheaper, it’s smaller, it’s lighter, less noise, lower power, and we think it will be able to track a little better, have a little better field of view.” said Ludwig, who works closely on Valve’s tracking technology. “Basically the next-generation. Better in every way.”
Indeed, an increased field of view is suggested by the design alone, which has a curved front and LED array (used to flash an invisible syncing light), that could emit light more intensely over a wider area. We’re interested to see how much improvements in the base stations combined with advanced sensors will enhance tracking performance (and reduce cost).
Valve’s Chet Faliszek confirmed today via Twitter that the new SteamVR Tracking base stations will be backwards compatible with existing devices like the HTC Vive, and ostensibly with third-party SteamVR Tracking devices currently in development.
Better tracking and a wider field of view are exciting developments for any VR tracking technology, but Valve says that today’s ‘room-scale’ tracking is just the beginning. The company has in the past said that the technology could support more than two base stations at a time. At the media briefing, Valve president Gabe Newell said that the company expects “house scale” tracking in the future, thanks to the ability to “knit together these [tracking] volumes into an arbitrarily large volume.”
Valve is increasingly opening its SteamVR Tracking technology—that which powers the HTC Vive’s room-scale tracking—to the world. The royalty-free system requires no permission from Valve to be embedded and launched as part of third-party products. And now one of the final barriers to entry has been removed: anyone can buy the development hardware to begin building products with the tech.
Earlier this week Valve announced they would no longer require attendance of a $3,000 intro course in order to begin using SteamVR Tracking technology (formerly known as Lighthouse) for product development. The documentation and SDK would be made available online for free.
And now the final piece of the puzzle is here: formerly at the intro course participants were given SteamVR Tracking development kit, a curious hammer-looking device which had the essential SteamVR Tracking components inside. But now anyone can buy those components in the form of the official SteamVR Tracking HDK from Triad Semiconductor, a company who has worked alongside Valve to develop components used in SteamVR Tracking systems.
The SteamVR Tracking HDK starts at $595 and becomes cheaper as order scale increases, down to $500 for 100 units. Each kit contains the following components:
Watchman Core Module iCE40
The Watchman Core module supplies all of the processing power for a SteamVR tracked object.
EVM Application Board
The Application EVM board is a “batteries* included” companion to the Core module. This board breaks out the 80 pin interface connection of the Core module into user accessible ports. (*Note: Due to global regulations for shipping Lithium-Ion batteries, we are unable to provide battery packs at this time.)
“Chiclet” Sensor Module
The Chiclet Sensors are designed to be a small form factor TS3633 based optical sensor designed for placement anywhere inside a tracked object, even in very tight spaces. The schematic is identical to the TS3633-CM1 module but the overall PCB size is reduced to just 6mm by 10mm. The connection interface is a 4pin 0.5mm pitch flat flex connector for point to point signal routing back to the Sensor Breakout board.
Sensor Breakout Board
The Sensor Breakout provides the simple but valuable function of Fanning out the 100 pin connection interface of the Watchman Core module to 32 individual 4 pin connectors that may interface to the Chiclet flat flex connectors. This breakout board has 16 sensor connectors on the top side and an additional 16 sensor connectors on the bottom.
Steam Wireless Dongle
Four packs of 8 4in Flex Cables (32 cables total)
2.4 GHz Antenna with u.FL Cable
The first batch of SteamVR Tracking HDK kits is planned to ship in mid-April. Anyone can buy the hardware, but it should be noted that you do need to be a SteamVR Tracking Licensee (free) in order download the SDK required to program the components. You can find more info about that process at the official SteamVR Tracking website.
Now of course at ~$500/unit, it’s unrealistic to build a consumer product at those costs. The SteamVR Tracking HDK is meant only for prototyping and pre-production development. I asked Triad Semiconductor’s VP of Marketing & Sales, Reid Wender, about the process of going from the HDK to manufacturing a full-blown product at scale.
“[The] next step [following the prototyping phase] would be to take the schematic design (included for free in the SteamVR Tracking SDK) and layout a printed circuit board (PCB) optimized for your application. This would likely be a small rigid PCB for the core module features and some number of flexible PCBs (maybe 2, 4, or 6 depending on your Tracked Object physical design),” Wender said. “You would then send this design along with the electronics component list to a contract manufacturer (CM). The CM would […] procure the electronics and assemble them onto the PCB. You would receive a quotation of a finished factory cost for each assembly based on your production volume. Higher volume of course would mean lower price.”
While the SteamVR Tracking HDK hardware will work with the Base Stations which ship with the consumer HTC Vive (or can be bought standalone from the company), Valve plans to sell upgraded Base Stations directly later this year.
The popular forms of mobile VR headsets, such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View and Cardboard, are currently limited to rotational head tracking, meaning that you can look around comfortably from a single vantage point, but movements of the head through 3D space (like leaning forward or backward) cannot be tracking. Positional tracking adds not only comfort but also immersion to virtual reality, and is a feature of all major tethered VR headsets. However, achieving the same on mobile VR has proved challenging.
As a highly desirable feature for mobile VR headsets, positional tracking has been a priority for Oculus’ internal development for a long time, and various alternative solutions such as VicoVR and Univrses are beginning to appear. While the future points to self-contained, ‘inside-out’ tracking, already found on Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headsets and Google’s Tango technology, Utah State University students Brady Riddle and Sam Jungertat have created a positional tracking solution for Gear VR that uses Valve’s well-proven SteamVR Tracking system.
Three infrared sensors, detecting the flashes from an HTC base station (Lighthouse technology), are attached to the front of the Gear VR headset and connected to a microcontroller, which collects the timing data. The data is sent to a computer via UDP packet over Wi-Fi, and the results are displayed using the game engine Unity, as shown in the brief demonstration video heading this article.
Though this project was academic in nature, it does point to one potential solution for positional tracking on mobile VR headsets—a system which would use rotational tracking as a baseline, but then be able to add positional tracking via the SteamVR Tracking technology when at home and near base stations.
The Vive Tracker, a ‘puck’-like device designed to attach to objects to track them in VR via the SteamVR Tracking system, went on sale this week after 1,000 units went out to developers earlier this year. One developer aptly demonstrated the tracking performance by juggling a trio of Trackers in VR.
We’ve seen people juggle virtual objects in VR, but what about real objects that are tracked using the SteamVR Tracking system? Thanks to the high-quality tracking performance of the HTC Vive tracker, that’s apparently now a possibility.
Steve Bowler, co-founder of Cloud Gate Studio, shot a quick video of himself juggling three active Vive Trackers while wearing the Vive headset. Even as the devices are spinning through the air and being occasionally occluded by his hands, they appear to maintain robust tracking the entire time. For juggling of course, it isn’t just accuracy of the objects that’s important, but also the latency.
Bowler must be quite confident in the Vive Tracker’s capability, as that’s $300 worth of equipment being juggled. And while some seasoned jugglers might be able to juggle spheres with their eyes closed or blindfolded, the irregular shape of the Vive Tracker and the way it spins through the air makes it all the more challenging. As we see in the video, it appears Bowler is relying quite heavily on the information he’s seeing through the headset (the location, direction, and speed of the Trackers through the air) to accomplish this task.
For $99 each, the Vive Tracker became openly available for sale this week, though with the accessory ecosystem just getting underway, it’s still at this point recommended only for developers. Later this year HTC is expected to push the device more widely to businesses and consumers.
In August of last year, Valve created the SteamVR licensing program to allow any developer to create their very own SteamVR tracked object. At that time, Valve partnered with Synapse, a Seattle-area product development firm, to provide a mandatory training program for all SteamVR licensees. Road to VR met with Synapse’s electrical engineering program lead and SteamVR Tracking instructor, Doug Bruey, to talk about the tracking system and how it will be used by companies in the future.
From his experience teaching the SteamVR Tracking course, Bruey has an inside view on what companies are doing with the technology and when we might begin to see the fruits of their labor.
Road to VR:
How many students went through the SteamVR tracking training course?
Doug Bruey:
We had 15 courses with 149 attendees from 113 different companies.
Road to VR:
What was the mix of the students by their respective industries?
Doug Bruey:
It was really varied. I would say it’s 50% from gaming, but from the earliest classes we saw people from a variety of different markets. We’ve seen people from the automotive industry, advertising, athletics, gaming, computers, education, hospitals, industrial training and farming. We’ve had a couple different NASA contractors come through who were working on training simulations and setups for astronauts. There’s usually a pretty big part of the class that will be working on gaming and gaming accessories but the other half will come from other markets that you may not have expected.
What’s the best guess for when the first product will come out from one of these course graduates?
Doug Bruey:
I would guess that you might expect to see something announced at the end of this year. The typical product cycle being about 18 months. Since people started taking this course in the fall of last year, once they get back and get started, I would expect you might start to see some products being announced and released towards the end of this year and beginning of next.
Road to VR:
Getting to Seattle is a difficulty for some VR startups. Is having a remote course something that you would consider providing in the future?
Doug Bruey:
It’s something that we’d be willing to do if there were people in who are interested in bringing us out. In March, Valve announced that the course is no longer required for licensees because the documentation has been dialed in well enough and the tools have been refined enough that people can pick it up and get the work started up on their own. Since that happened, we’ve seen a drop off in demand for the course because people don’t have to take it. They can go off and do it on their own.
We think the course can really accelerate the development effort and make sure that companies are really on the fast track for things they need to learn up front and to avoid any pitfalls. But we are a product development firm as well as a technical training firm, so if people are able to pick up the documentation and run with it and do the work they want to do, then the more power to them really. This technology will have wider access in the marketplace because there are fewer barriers to getting started.
Doug Bruey at the Synapse SteamVR Tracking training course
Road to VR:
You’ve produced some prototype hardware for the course and that seems like something that people would still like to have access to. Is there any way for people to purchase or acquire that from Synapse?
Doug Bruey:
We’ve developed prototype circuit boards and built that into a [tracked] reference object. Licensees get access to all the design files and they get access to everything they need to build it up themselves. If they want to buy hardware off-the-shelf, that reference design has been picked up by Triad Semiconductor. That is the group that developed the ASIC for the photo-sensor and you can buy those and the circuit boards themselves directly from Triad Semiconductor. We’ve developed the designs and Triad is producing them for retail.
Last year at Steam Dev Days, Valve unveiled the knuckle controllers. Is that something that Synapse had a role in developing?
Doug Bruey:
Insofar as the new controller from Valve is based off of the electrical and firmware architecture that Synapse helped develop: we’ve definitely been involved in that way. But the product development, in terms of its ergonomics and its mechanics and controls and all the things that make that a unique product, that is a Valve effort.
Road to VR:
What are you excited for in the future of virtual and augmented reality?
Doug Bruey:
I’m excited to see how it moves into other markets and what kind of solutions it creates in places that nobody expected. Just like gaming is the tip of the spear in the performance of PCs, people take advantage of that in order to improve completely different computing areas. I see the same thing happening with VR.
On the market side, gaming is going to drive VR forward and once it becomes commercially viable at a consumer price point, then people with fantastic ideas in therapy or medical devices or cinema or any of these other areas, then they are going to get access to that technology because it will be reduced to a price that they can afford to play around with and develop on. At that point, we’ll see whole new solutions pop up in those areas. I’m really interested to see where VR finds its unique place in these other market verticals.
The other part of the other part of it that I’m really interested to see is where it’s going to drive technology, too. We have these ultra-high resolution displays on our laptops and our brain thinks “Wow, I can’t tell the difference between them anymore because my eyes can’t see the pixels.” Where does the display technology go from here? I think it’s interesting how we are going to need something like 16K displays because our eyes are so close to them. In order to get that retina-display resolution in a VR setting, we are going to need even higher resolutions.
The other thing is there are different video compression methods that are needed. Right now, for Netflix and other online video distribution platforms, latency isn’t a problem, so they can use compression methods that work across multiple frames. They get incredibly high compression ratios in order to deliver that content, but with VR the drive is always going to be how do I get that tether off of my system? How do I become as unencumbered as possible with no wire and hopefully no backpack on my back? If you do that and you want to communicate that video wirelessly, especially when you get up to 4K or higher, it’s going to be an incredible amount of data. It also needs to be delivered with incredibly low latency, down below 25 milliseconds or so, and so you can’t afford to wait to offer up multiple frames for your compression algorithm. You need to be able to do your compression in a smarter, lower latency way. I think we’re going to start to see some really interesting development in VR compression and ultimately gaming in general.
VR is going to again be the tip of the spear, it’s going to be driving the lowest latency possible. But then who knows what people are going to find use for that in other applications, from gaming to anything else that is trying to deliver really low latency video.
New footage of Valve’s new ‘Knuckles’ controllers has emerged over the past few days, as developers begin to test out the new device. The ‘next-gen’ SteamVR controller prototypes represent a major advancement over the current Vive motion controllers, with five finger tracking and an ‘open hand’ grip.
The new controllers have been shipping to select developers, with prominent VR studio Cloudhead Games being one of the first the receive packages, which they’ve been keen to share on social media. A short video (heading this article) was released to their YouTube channel, presented by Cloudhead’s CEO and Creative Director Denny Unger, showing the simple package and intuitive hardware design.
Unger points out that you can grab and use them just like the Vive controllers, but the “magic happens” when you pull the cord to tighten the cinch that allows the user to fully release their grip. This short clip from Cloudhead shows the sort of advantages that can bring:
Playing around within the default SteamVR Home environment using a ‘five finger’ hand model option for the avatar, Unger highlights the capacitive sensors on the grip that allow for individual finger detection, and the trackpad that offers a more granular control of the virtual thumb position. The studio has been closely associated with Valve’s new design from an early stage, having been asked to create a demo for the first prototype hardware at its announcement at Steam Dev Days last year.
Other short clips of the controllers in action show developers rolling their fingers across the grip and ‘flipping the bird’, along with reactions and ‘unboxings’ from other notable VR studios such as Owlchemy Labs, Radial Games and Vertigo Games; see a collection of these Twitter ‘Moments’ here. Valve have not revealed their plans for a consumer version of the Knuckles controllers at this time.
Valve plans to manufacture and sell new SteamVR Tracking 2.0 base stations in 2018. The new base stations will bring a number of improvements over the current tracking beacons, including the ability to support more than two base stations for a huge tracking volume.
Valve’s Joe Ludwig announced via the SteamVR Tracking HDK board today an update on the company’s progress in developing new SteamVR Tracking base stations which will be compatible with SteamVR Tracking headsets built with the TS4231 sensor. The update asks SteamVR Tracking licensees to submit their expected demand for 2.0 base stations month-by-month through 2018 so that Valve can gauge how to ramp up production.
At launch, the 2.0 base stations will only work with the current base station limit of two, but in early 2018 Valve says they’ll expand the system to work with up to four base stations which “should cover a single room play space of roughly 10 × 10 meters [33 × 33 feet].” Ludwig writes that the company is investigating functionality to support even more than four 2.0 base stations, but isn’t committing to a roadmap at this time.
The 2.0 base stations won’t be compatible with existing HTC Vives since they use a different method for sync timing, but newer headsets and tracked devices in the works will benefit from the 2.0 base stations which will be “smaller, quieter, lower power, more reliable, and less expensive than their 1.0 counterparts,” and offer better performance, according to Valve. An update from June talks more about details of forward/backward compatibility roadmap between base stations and sensors.
Image courtesy Valve
Valve expects 2.0 base stations to being shipping to licensees in early 2018, but notes that supply will likely be limited initially. OEMs will order the 2.0 base stations in bulk (at $60/unit + shipping) from Valve and repackage them as part of their products. HTC currently sells replacement 1.0 base stations for $135/unit + shipping, which could give us some indication of the cost savings from the new base stations.
Though the bulk units sold to OEMs won’t include any mounting solution, Ludwig writes that Valve is “creating a custom wall/ceiling mounting solution,” which they’ll talk more about in 2018. It isn’t clear if Valve plans to sell 2.0 base stations directly to consumers, though so far it looks like the company plans to work only with OEMs.
Virtual Builds, a company spinning out of ASIC engineering firm Noisefigure Research, is a new entrant now selling SteamVR Tracking development hardware. With a full DIY kit starting at $200, Virtual Builds aims to make SteamVR Tracking more accessible for VR hardware companies and individual developers makers alike.
With goal of making SteamVR Tracking a royalty-free and openly accessible tracking system for VR and more, Valve allows other companies to manufacture compatible hardware and provide engineering support to customers that need it. Triad Semiconductor was among the first to offer a SteamVR Tracking HDK for sale, and now Virtual Builds is offering their own development kit
Starting at $200, the Virtual Builds ‘Pebble Kit’ is said to include everything one needs to construct a basic object compatible with SteamVR Tracking. The kit can be used as a starting point for hardware developers to prototype and design VR products that integrate the tracking technology, or for hacker/makers who want to experiment with the tracking technology for other uses. The video below shows the process of putting together the Pebble Kit’s various sensors, ribbons, and boards into a fully functional tracked object supporting SteamVR Tracking 1.0 and 2.0.
Virtual Builds’ CEO, Jerry L., told me that the company also offers its engineering expertise to clients looking to design and productize devices integrating SteamVR Tracking, which could be anything from a VR headset or VR controller, to very different products like tracked keyboards, peripherals, or robotics. The company claims to offer guidance at all levels of development, all the way from sensor placement and debugging to large scale production needs.
“Our hardware is not just prototyping or development only,” Jerry L. told me. “You can order from us for your entire development and production goals. Our team of engineers
will set up the necessary commercial manufacturing chain depending our your desired quantities and product.”
A sampling of Virtual Builds’ SteamVR Tracking wares. | Image courtesy Virtual Builds
The presence of Virtual Builds as another developer and vendor of SteamVR Tracking hardware is a good sign for the adoption of the tracking technology. Not only does it mean that companies sourcing the tracking hardware have more options to choose from, but it’s also likely that Virtual Builds will compete with others like Triad Semiconductor, leading both companies to improve their offerings and drive costs down.
Update (4/26/18): A prior version of this article stated that SteamVR Tracking was “license-free,” but was intended to say “royalty-free.” This has been corrected.
GameFace Labs, a company that’s been in ongoing development of an ambitious standalone VR headset over the last few years, has finally opened pre-orders for its dev kit, a system built around NVIDIA’s powerful Jetson TX2 computing platform. Priced at $600, the device is fully self-contained running a custom Android operating system, but can also be tethered to a PC for full compatibility with SteamVR content, including support for SteamVR Tracking.
GameFace Labs has been working on its vision of the ultimate standalone VR headset for several years, and while the company missed its former goal of getting dev kits in developers hands by the end of 2017, they appear closer than ever to getting something out the door. Today the company announced the start of pre-orders for its dev kit, priced at $600, which is says will begin shipping out in just a few weeks time. The company expects the consumer version of the headset to launch toward the end of 2018, and tells Road to VR that developers who purchase the dev kit will also be sent a consumer unit when complete.
The GameFace dev kit is built around NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2 module, a powerful system designed for AI-heavy devices, which includes a pair of 2GHz CPUs and a Pascal-based GPU with 256 CUDA cores, all together rated for 7.5W TDP. That’s some heavy duty computing power compared to other standalone headsets available today—though we’re curious to know what battery life will end up looking like.
And while the headset is shaping up to be a powerhouse of its own, GameFace calls the device a “hybrid,” and says it’ll be the first such headset which can also be tethered to a host PC to natively play SteamVR content thanks to its built-in SteamVR Tracking hardware. Last year the company demonstrated the headset’s SteamVR Tracking tech to Road to VR, which can track the headset while being used for tethered SteamVR content or standalone content run locally on the headset via Android.
The GameFace Labs dev kit might seem a bit odd compared to other standalone headsets on the market today, but could prove to be a compelling buy for developers—at $600, a single headset which could be used for both mobile and tethered VR development could offer value compared to buying separate headsets for developing on each. And for consumers, the ability to play content across Android and PC ecosystems with a single device would be a standout feature next to other headsets available today—though GameFace will either need to build strong developer traction for its own mobile content ecosystem, or link up with Google (Daydream) or HTC (Viveport mobile) ecosystems to have easy access to compelling content on the mobile side.
Developers interested in the dev kit can pre-order by signing up to become a GameFace Labs developer, though requests will be selectively approved by the company for the time being. The company says developers won’t be charged until their headset ships, and expects that to begin in the next few weeks.
Now, the company have announced that their first developer kit edition gloves will ship in Q3 2016 and will set you back $250. Developers can put themselves down for a pre-order reservation now and for your money you’ll receive a pair of Manus gloves, plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine and access to the SDK for Android, Windows 7+, Linux, iOS 9, Mac OSX.
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer 
