Can Vive Puck be the positional tracker for GearVR?

After Vive announcement of the Tracker (the “Puck”) at current CES, there has been a lot of hype surrounding it. Everyone has started thinking about possible applications, fantasizing about awesome Vive installations with lots of Trackers. I love enthusiasm of VR community.

One thing that people has started thinking about is using Trackers to implement positional tracking for GearVR. So one person could have a positional tracked GearVR with just the simplicity and the little cost of a puck: $50-100. And imagine using this Puck-tracked-GearVR with VRidge and use GearVR as a wireless replacement for the Vive. There are 5 millions Gear VR in this world and even more Cardboard headsets… and having now a simple solution to offer them positional tracking is huge!

How to use Kinect with HTC Vive

When I talk about the full body virtual reality system ImmotionRoom that we’re developing at Immotionar, the first question that people asks me is always “Why Kinect? Kinect is dead”. I’ve already answered to this question, explaining that yes, it is slowly dying, but Kinect is still the best off-the-shelf infrared body-tracking sensor that we can find on the market (due to the mega-training samples fed to its algorithm). So, while we hope that other competitors like Orbbec and VicoVR will reach its quality level, we have still to use it… and this is the same reason why lots of research projects still employ the kinect.

But then there is another important question people make me: “I’m a Vive user… and Vive and Kinect interfere a lot. I like your videos about full body virtual reality, but I will surely not be able to use it…”

Well, let’s be honest: this is true.

Leap Motion goes mobile

With a post written on its blog, Leap Motion has made a huge announcement: Leap Motion will go mobile.

This should not sound as something completely new: Leap Motion already had some kind of Android SDK and some kind of mount that you could use with Cardboard.

DODOcase advanced Cardboard viewer: as you can see, there is a strange Leap Motion mount in front of it (image credits: Road To VR)

The problem of this solutions was that they were far from being complete: you had somehow to connect a PC-dedicated device to the USB port of your smartphone and somehow mount it on your headset. In some cases, like with my Gear VR innovator edition (with no external USB ports), you were unable to use Leap Motion at all.

The difference between Kinect v2 and v1

Yesterday we of Immotionar have announced the support of Kinect v1 for our full-body virtual reality system. To implement it, I had to work with this sensor, after more than 2 years of work with only the v2 version. A curious fact is that i had never worked with Kinect v1 before, I started directly with the v2… so I made the path in the reverse way of all other people. But… how are this sensors different?

Well, first of all if you look at them, Kinect v2 seems a more refined version of Kinect v1, but its defect is that it is bigger and has lots of annoying cables and power converters, while Kinect v1 is surely more lightweight and easy to carry and to install.

About technical specifications, this chart found on the great blog Zugara is a good resumée:

A great comparison chart of the difference between the two Kinects. The only missing thing is that both Kinects now are fully working on Windows 10 (Image by Zugara)