Base station 1.0 and 2.0 on at the same time?

[bradcarvey]

Can I have basestation 1.0 and 2.0 on in the same room.  I want to be able to use the Vive and the Vive Pro in the same room, without turning basestation on and off.  Will this work and if it works will it effect the tracking.

 

Brad Carvey

[HackPerception]

, 

No, you can not have 1.0 and 2.0 basestations operating in the same area without interference. The Vive Pro will detect signals from both basestations types whereas the original Vive will be unaffected by the 2.0 stations. 

 

Depending on your tracked volume, it's really easiest to just run both off of a pair of 1.0 basestations. 

[bradcarvey]

That's what I though.  I have 4 base station 2.0 mounted in the corners of as 16' x 20'.  Tomorrow I will get enabling the 2nd 2 base stations.  Tracking has been perfect with 2 2.0 base stations.  I want to have 4 2.0 basestations, before I start testing with 2-4 headsets.  I have Omen X compact Desktop (Backpack computes) that have custom short cables for the Vive, so I wil have to control the power to the base stations, when the portable backpack headsets are used.  BTW, the Omen X does not require a link for the Vive and also has a power connector for the Vive headset.  Very nice solution for portable room scale VR experience, although I have the 1.0 basestations place closer together.

[yokkey]

Would it be possible to add a switch to those which support 2.0 base stations to ingore 1.0 signals? If as you say, those which only work with 1.0 will ingore 2.0 signals, I have slight hope that having one support 2.0 to ignore 1.0 can be done. If such an hybrid environment could be made, it saves us from reinvesting in 2.0 stuff. Though from a buisiness stand point, it would be more favourble for HTC or Valve to have us buy more...

Thanks,

 

[HackPerception]

 -  SteamVR doesn't have the best UX support currently for using multiple stations in a single space. It uses the first 4 stations it detects during a session when you attempt a room setup - when using more than 4 stations in a room, we generally recommend that you unplug the stations that you don't want included in your calibration file and running roomsetup with power supplied to the 4 stations you want to use in your setup. It's the most robust way to achieving the desired setup - especially when you're trying to have each HMD paired to a dedicated pair of stations. 

 

 - It's not a sales - tactic; it's a limitation that's rooted in how base-station fundamentally works. When a IR "flash" is detected, it tells the sensor board on the HMD to start a countdown and then starts recording how long it takes for each one of the remaining sensors on the HMD to receives a laser sweep (

). The sensors themselves have integrated optical-to-digital sensors which detect IR data, amplifies the signal several orders of magnitude to a readable output, and then encodes and compresses the signal for downstream processing. This IR flash occurs 60 times per second, per basestation (120hz when interleaved) - there's simply no way to get around the IR flash from a hardware prospective. If the HMD sees any high intensity IR source, it treats like a 1.0 IR flash signal and the HMD sensors are being told to expect 1.0 signaling. Any bright signal basically gets amplified by the circuitry to be a "high" value. When the headset's sensors see the Sun - it reads it as a persistent sync signal because the sun is an IR source - this is why light-house doesn't work in sunlight. 

 

    See

for advanced info about how base-stations work - he details how 2.0 tracking encodes data into the laser sweep to eliminate the IR flash.