My free idea for gear vr head tracking

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JDuncan
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My free idea for gear vr head tracking

Post by JDuncan »

I read a few days ago about how Mr.John Carmack is trying to make head tracking for gearvr, so I gave it some thought and found a way and decided to share it.

A while ago I made an idea for how to use mirrors and lasers to redirect a picture to the eyes from a tv.
Basically you send a laser to a rotating mirror on a base and using angled mirrors you can send the laser to the eye you just need a way to find the eye and the rift served that purpose to find the eye.

Now with the gearvr you don't have the fancy camera setup you need a stand alone solution.

What I realized is you have the unit circle in trigonometry with the hypotenuse at 1, and the variable opposite and adjacent angles.
This is a way to think of how to do head tracking, if you have the hypotenuse at 1 all the time then you just track the adjacent and opposite lines as they move in the circle and this is also head motion.

How I think this can be done, is three things;
you have one part to track the horizontal, one part to track the vertical, and one part to make sure the horizontal is properly tracked.

- you have a tube, in the tube is a pole in the middle of the tube so if you stood the tube upright the pole in the middle would be upright too, like a bone in the arm and the tube would be the flesh around the bone.

How this is used to track the vertical is the tube around the pole tilts as the person moves their head.

On the inside of the tube is lights and on the tube is a camera.
As the tube tilts the camera points to different lights. This can track vertical motion.

- on the top of the tube is a compass that points north.
On the compass is a laser that sends lights to sensors on the inside of the tube.

As the head turns the compass points north but the tube turns horizontally.
The sensors count how much the laser moved over the sensors to track horizontal motion.

- the secret sauce is how do you make sure the horizontal is tracked because the compass laser might bob around. You have to find a way to keep the compass pointing one way all the time, this is the rudder on the boat that keeps the boat going one way so to say.

How I suggest this is done, and there may be fancy electronics that make this suggestion redundant, is you attach a stick to something the person is sitting on, or on their body like right at their neck bone that doesn't move as they turn their head, and connect that stick to the compass so the compass always points in one direction.

This is the secret sauce that makes the whole thing work.

Now if there is some fancy electronic that could do this then use that instead.
Then this whole thing can be put into something that looks like a pop can and put on top of the head and be used for head tracking in the gearvr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyUgH_NB5Zg
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JDuncan
Cross Eyed!
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Re: My free idea for gear vr head tracking

Post by JDuncan »

I drew a rough sketch of my idea, the limits of my drawing ability. This is just a rough idea but it's got the basic form of what I thought of. The sensors that get light from the compass are in a circle not just one sensor, they are in the tube circle facing the laser.

other than that the idea is in the picture I drew in the first post, I edited it to add the picture.

The shoulder attachment holds a strip against the neck bone the top bone that then touches a stick that juts out to the shoulder attachment and to the top of the head. This serves as the rudder that holds the compass and bar in the tube still as the head tilts and rotates.
JacobVR
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Re: My free idea for gear vr head tracking

Post by JacobVR »

I think there is (much?)easier solution: Sony Xperia phones (don't know about other android phones) have an app caller AR Fun. What it does - using phones camera, compass, accelerometers, and trigonometry ;) it maps surrounding area into 3d scene, that is then augmented by 3D effects. It all happens real-time, it quickly remaps area if you change effects, and it only takes couple of seconds. I guess you can use same methods to calculate heads position using camera, same sensors, and trigonometry.
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