Turn Your Living Room Into a Holodeck With a Rift, a Printer and a Phone

Positional tracking is hard. Especially if you want to move through your virtual world as a physical space. Aaron Rasmussen has a solution and it’s an elegant one. His Atlas project promises to make your home a VR playground using your smartphone and printed markers.

“The beginning is a very delicate time.” A quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune which has been rattling round my head recently, specifically with regards to where we find ourselves, here at the dawn of the rebirth of Virtual Reality. The Oculus Rift opened Pandora’s box and out popped 1001 different challenges for developers and inventors to try and solve. The biggest among them, how to allow your body to move around a virtual space along with your mind. Positional tracking is the goal here and we’re a long way from reaching any sort of consensus on how it can be achieved.

Harnessing VR

Aaron has a solution though and it’s an elegant one at that. Everyone has a smartphone, so why not use it for something more than facebooking cat pictures and use it’s processing power and high quality camera to provide high fidelity tracking data. Using special markers that can be printed in the home onto sheets of normal paper, you can layout your own virtual playground on the floor of your living room. When your smartphone is strapped into the Atlas harness, the phone is angled towards the floor. When the Atlas software is loaded into the phone and paired with a backtop (a laptop in a fancy backpack), the markers provide positional information used to track your movements in space. You’ve just built yourself a Holodeck!

Read the full article: http://www.roadtovr.com/2013/08/12/atlas-turn-your-living-room-into-a-holodeck-with-just-a-printer-and-a-phone-7460