VIVE Trackers for Virtual Production

[Greg Corson]

You probably know a lot of people use VIVE trackers for budget Virtual Production studios.  The problem is that we see a lot of jitter in the tracking data particularly when the trackers are moving slowly.  For doing TV work they are almost ALWAYS moving a lot slower than for a game, when they are tracking a camera on a tripod, the jitter you see is really annoying.

I'm wondering if anything can be done about this, particularly now that you can get to the trackers through OpenXR.  All that is needed is a little noise reduction or low pass filtering and these things would be great, right now they jitter so much you can only reliably use them for handheld camera shots.  Unfortunately, the sampling rate we get the data at from OpenXR is too low and the noise too random to do good filtering on the application side.  Noise is random 0.6mm peak-to-peak which doesn't sound like much but is very visible.

I'm sure these have been tuned for fast-twitch gaming, in virtual production you rarely move fast or suddenly.  Most people use trackers either for games or Virtual Production, not both...how about a firmware designed for Virtual Production that gives a smoother output?  We can even tolerate up to a tenth-second of latency without problems, because we already have to delay the tracker data that much so it matches up with the video processing system.

Lots of people would certainly love HTC if they could do this, because the next best tracking system available STARTS at $6000!

[edstoica]

hey greg,

even if this is from january. it is still so true.

if there would be a "Virtual Production" mode for the trackers, that would be so great.

the current noise and jitter makes all our dreams fall apart :(

[Ari Golan]

Hi,

Two years later, have either of you found any solutions? We have the exact issue doing very slow dolly moves...