We are standing at the precipice of explorations into VR.
I was originally hoping to be able to exploit the usage of the giant MOCAP stage at FIEA. However, One of the most important elements, getting the track data to the game has to be solved yet. I was hoping to use Vicon pegasus to do the lion’s share of work. However, a week has gone by and I still can’t get the UE4 plugin to work correctly. This has many implications.
The first of these implications is that we can’t use the tracking on the mocap stage. This would mean we would need to use the Vive’s tracking capabilities. There are some unknowns about this. Out of the box, how large is the range? There is a video where the folks at stress level zero are experimenting with about a ten yard difference between the length of the lighthouses:
This might work for the iMyth Prototype. However, we would not be able to use props and sets.
There is also another thought that the lighthouses can be hooked up to create a matrix of light emitters. This video interview with the lighthouse creator, Alan Yates, hints at some of the unlimited opportunity.
By this video, in concept, there could be an infinite number of lighthouses providing an infinite amount of coverage. Once again we have the same problem of not being able to use props. However, the video also hints that sensors can be placed on objects and the sensors could report their position. This would take some, ‘hacking” to figure out. However, i Imagine some kind of prop/set system could be created.
There is one final possibility which I know nothing about. There is the possibility we could use the vicon cameras as lighthouse surrogates. That means we could already have an array of lighthouses already in place. Once again, this implies that props and sets could not be tracked.
Right now, I’m thinking that the best solution will need to be a home brewed variance from Blade to UE4. We would need to abandon pegasus and write our own solution. Could this be done? Vicon thinks it can be done. We now would need to find an engineer to do the work for us.
