By Lewis Leong
Valve, the company behind the excellent HTC Vive VR headset, is making its positional tracking technology royalty-free. SteamVR Tracking is Valve’s technology that allows VR headsets like the Vive to be tracked accurately.
What this means for you is that more VR headsets will soon be able to accurately track you using the Vive’s base stations. This will lead to more full-body VR experiences as developers can accurately track your entire body. Valve also hopes this will help VR gain more traction by lowering the cost of entry for developers.
“We believe that the largest value for our customers and for Valve will come from allowing SteamVR Tracking to proliferate as widely as possible. The existence of more SteamVR-compatible devices will make the SteamVR community more valuable for customers and developers,” says Valve in a FAQ.
While SteamVR Tracking is royalty free, developers looking to use the tech will have to shell out $3,000 for a developer kit and in-person training in Seattle, Washington. The dev kit includes two base stations, various sensors and other tools to start making games and VR experiences.
The Oculus Rift also includes tracking technology but hasn’t made its technology free to …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Gaming