How to use Vive Trackers without Vive headset

Some days ago, I gained lots of karma points on reddit sharing an interesting UploadVR article that talked about the need to have a Vive headset in order to use Vive Trackers. The article (that you can find here) reports that, to a question asking if it was possible to use the Trackers without a headset,

A member of the Vive staff replied: “Not at this time, you do need to have the HMD to use the tracker or the controllers normally.” We’ve reached out to HTC to confirm this is indeed the case.

Lots of people complained about this, while lots of others answered on reddit “it’s obvious. What’s the purpose of having a Vive tracker without a Vive headset?”. The question has sense, because if you want to use Vive Trackers, most probably you want to do something with SteamVR tracking and a Vive headset… so this is a non-issue. But, but… Vive Trackers is a completely open tracking ecosystem, and when you create an open ecosystem, you have to think that people could use it to do lots of unthinkable stuff.

Vive announces Tracker (and Audio Strap) at CES 2017

This is the week of CES, so, after Christmas vacations were there has not been even a single news about VR, we’re being flooded by super-interesting news.

We were all waiting for Vive announcements and HTC is not disappointing us at all. There will be no Vive 2, but 2 big things have been announced today: the Deluxe Audio Strap and the Vive Tracker.

Is Kinect dead?

At Immotionar, we try to give full body avatar to the user using external sensors. At the moment we use Microsoft Kinect v2 for our prototype and the question that all people ask us is:

Why do you use Kinect, if Kinect is dead?

Well, I’m actually getting bored of answering this question… and that’s why I’m writing this post to provide a complete answer to it. And being Halloween, talking about dead things is the right topic for today 😉

So, is Kinect dead?

During the nights of full moon, you can see the ghost of a 3-legs Kinect in the forest

Well, the answer is not so easy.

HTC Vive 2 will cost less than the first version?

Some days ago I read a super interesting article on RoadToVR: it was about a new kind of sensors that could reduce the overall cost of Lighthouse technology of the HTC Vive. You can find it here.

I published the article on reddit, where it gained a lot of interest… 466 karma points! W00t! A record for me! But why is this so important? And what are we talking about?