Nexus Studios Launches Interactive VR Tracking Experience
Nexus Interactive Arts have used the release of Apple’s ARkit to developers to create an Inside Out tracking device for VR experiences.
The ARKit uses Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) to accurately track the world around it. VIO fuses camera sensor data with CoreMotion data. These two inputs allow the device to sense how it moves within a room with a high degree of accuracy, and without any additional calibration.Apple has created the foundations for Inside Out Tracking VR experiences using just a phone. And that’s a doubly more exciting prospect since the majority of Inside Out HMDS or Helmet Mounted Displays’s aren’t even available yet and come at a cost.
The ARKit is able to do the tracking and get the camera throughout to Unity very quickly and therefore it’s possible to do both Pass-Through AR (where the single camera feed is displayed to both eyes), as well as Inside Out positional tracking for VR at around 60 frames per second on an iPhone 7. That’s not enough for quick head movements, but as long as you are walking around and observing at a “gallery pace”, the tracking does a pretty good job of keeping you in the right spot. For safety, we display the tracking marker points as a point cloud while you’re moving around in VR to minimise the chances of bumping into things. So far we’ve not had
any accidents.
Using an iPhone7, Apple’s ARKit and a cardboard headset, it’s possible to do both Pass-Through AR (where the single camera feed is displayed to both eyes), as well as Inside Out positional tracking for VR at around 60 frames per second. The means that Apple has created the foundations for Inside Out Tracking VR experiences using just a phone, which makes it significantly more affordable than upcoming Inside Out HMD's.
