VorpX & camera-less DK2

[Poccapx]

So i’ve got hold of an Oculus DK2 recently. It’s working really well overall, but my unit is lacking its camera, so there is no positional tracking, no way to zoom in by leaning forward (as well as some side drifting after a certain amount of time).

Therefore, i’ve been thinking of how some positional tracking could be added to such a setup. Maybe one possibility could be in using a Trackir unit, or similar. For instance, this, together with OpenTrack or FreeTrack. Naturally, this would be way less accurate, but with some calibration it could still be better than no positional tracking at all.

I’m especially interested in using my DK2 for VorpX and Virtual Desktop, but positional tracking would likely improve the experience. Is this possible? Would VorpX be able to receive positional signals from other sources other than Oculus’ camera? Or would it all be down to plain joystick/zoom keys simulation?

[Ralf]

There are two other tracker implementations besides Oculus/OpenVR available in vorpX. One for Hillcrest sensors and one for Threespace devices, both stemming from the very early days of vorpX with a do-it-yourself headset – and never been used again since then.

It might be possible to still use them with a DK2 halfway (sans async timewarp) with an .ini edit, but I’m not really sure about that. You also would need one of these two tracking sensors to test – with unclear chances of success. Makes probably more sense to try getting a camera. Maybe Oculus still has a few replacements units.

Your OpenTrack idea would only work for games with TrackIR support.

[Poccapx]

But it would still be possible to at least map the movements from this Trackir-like unit, via OpenTrack as joystick, to simulate forward/backward body movement, wouldn’t it? If yes, then this would be a kind of positional tracking in VorpX, without Oculus’ camera.

[Ralf]

Even if you manage to get such a thing working somehow, which probably would require programming a custom extension to TrackIR to translate the absolute tracking position to relative gamepad movement, you would face an unpleasent latency due to the heavy filtering that almost all games do on gamepad input. There also would be no way to express y-axis movement (up/down) as gamepad input.

vorpX has a fallback mode for rotational tracking that can emulate joystick movement for games without mouse look, even that isn’t exactly great. For positional tracking something like that would probably be almost unusable.

If you like to tinker, this might be an interesting excercise, but I wouldn’t expect anything really useful from such an experiment.

[Poccapx]

Since it seems to be a similar device, but not real Trackir, OpenTrack/FreeTrack would have to be used – and these are quite configurable on their own. Y-axis is not really needed however, since internal sensors on the DK2 provide that quite well. It’s essentially only leaning towards/from the screen which isn’t captured at all (and of course drift correction, which, however, is impossible to solve with this method, as i now see it).

I do indeed like to tinker, and will try to report back regardless of how it goes, since it’s quite intriguing :))

[Author]

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