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How to connect VIVE with 4 base stations


Petrov

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Hello, Community

 

Recently bought my second vive and i tried to extent my play area with the base statioins from the second vive, so i tried to connect four of them. First i tried to go with bluetooth for two of them, the others on cable.I tried so many different chanell combinations for each pair of basestations.Also i put each pair on cable connection.

After alot of tinkering steamvr recognize all of them in green anyways the connection was unstable, they goes random from grey to green in steamvr tab.I tried to run room setup, but the headset is not recognized no matter where i'am in the player area.Also i update firmware for all basestations.

 

So my question is it possible to play Vive on 3 or more basestations ? If yes how i could do that ? 

 

Have a nice day !

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Hi,
thanks so much for the quick reply.
We are planning to use it for a educational purpose.
The project for which we hope we can use more than two lighthouses (so we can have a single player with a backpack PC walking around the real dimensions and not teleport at all) is aimed for training mainly students.

We are currently Sony partners and Enterprise EPIC users and we mostly need dev solutions.

We already saw that steamVR can detect multiple lighthouse couples, but as I mentioned it simply gets unstable.

 

If there is a inhouse version of the software which allows having a larger play area (larger than the 5m diagonal) is there a way for us to apply for it so that we can test a real size factory dimesion.
What we basically aim for - functionality wise - is more or less the same walking capabilities as seen on this Ghostbusters experience


Please let me know if you think we might have some kind of a solution to the multiple lighthouses
issue.

I'd happily discuss the project in greater detail on a less public forum because all the NDAs we are currently under.

Best regards,

Daniel

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Hi Petrov,

what you're aiming for will not be possible with the current-generation Vive (7m diagonal with synch cable is the maximum that was still stable for us). However, that is something that is currently in the works with SteamVR 2.0 tracking, which will require new hardware.

 

The new Lighthouse base stations are scheduled to go into mass manufacturing next month. They will feature a laser that will carry information about the base station ID that the laser is coming from. In combination with the newly developed ASICs, sensors on the devices will be able to distinguish multiple base stations that way, which means that compatible devices could theoretically be used in the following ways:

 

  • Place side-by-side areas without interference or the need to visually separate them
  • Add more base stations to the same area to mitigate occlusion between players
  • Create a grid of areas that the players can walk through seamlessly (<- this is what you want)

Right now, there is no official schedule on the delivery of any new HMDs or controllers that carry the new ASICs. Furthermore, HTC is currently still in the experimentation phase to find a solid way to implement the functionality in the firmware. Thus, no schedule yet. Right now, for anything that exceeds the above measurements, the best stable solution would be OptiTrack, which comes with massive hardware costs, however.

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,

This isn't a software limitation of the current SteamVR tracking iterations, it's a hardware limitation. In short, the current system is based on measuring the timing of "flashes" and "sweeps" emitted by the lighthouse. The "flash" is the bottleneck for both size of the tracked volume as well as the number of lighthouses that can concurrently be employed. Steamtracker 2.0 technology will encode information in the sweep that will eliminate the need for a flash and enable daisychaining but the technology isn't consumer available yet. For a detailed breakdown of how lighthouse technology works see 

 

In the interim,  you can use two lighthouses connected via sync cable to extend the range of the lighthouses for staging and development purposes. Note that when you do this, occlusion and coverage become increasingly important to keep in mind. You can also go with IR tracked systems like Optitrack but expect to pay at least $100K USD for a moderate sized tracked volume. Partially why Steamtracker 2.0 is so exciting is that it will reduce the price for larger tracked volumes by at least 100 fold and make warehouses scale volumes very easy and affordable to track. 

 

Feel free to PM me if you have futher questions. 

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  • 3 months later...
  • 9 months later...

Hi!

 

I tryed to use 2 Htc Vive headset with 2 base station 1.0 but the result was completly unstable and I was not able to play, probably because the distance between the 2 base station was also at the limit of the 5 meters allowed.

I was wonderind, would it be possible to use 2 base station 1.0 on 2 corners and 2 base station 2.0 on the other 2 corners. On the area I would be using 1 headset htc vive + q headset htc vive Pro. 

Would all this be possible and working well? 

Thanks for your answer.

 

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