Scalable Optical Tracking - A Practical Low-Cost Solution for Large Virtual Environments

Abstract

Navigation in large virtual reality applications is often done by unnatural input devices like keyboard, mouse, gamepad and similar devices. A more natural approach would be letting the user walk through the virtual world as if it was a physical place. This involves tracking the position and orientation of the participant over a large area. We propose a pure optical tracking system that only uses off-the-shelf components like cameras and LED ropes. The construction of the scene doesn’t require any off-line calibration or difficult positioning, which makes it easy to build and indefinitely scalable in both size and users. The proposed algorithms have been implemented and tested in a virtual and a room-sized lab set-up. The first results from our tracker are promising and can compete with many (expensive) commercial trackers.