HiveTracker: 3D positioning for ubiquitous embedded systems

Recent advances in positional tracking systems for virtual and augmented reality have opened up the possibilities for ubiquitous motion capture technology in the consumer market. However, for many applications such as in performance art, athletics, neuroscience, and medicine, these systems remain too bulky, expensive, and limited to tracking a few objects at a time. In this work, we present a small wireless device that takes advantage of existing HTC Vive lighthouse tracking technology to provide affordable, scalable, and highly accurate positional tracking capabilities. This open hardware and open software project contains several elements, and the latest contributions described in this paper include: (1) a characterization of the optical distortions of the lighthouses, (2) a new cross-platform WebBLE interface, and (3) a real-time in-browser visualization. We also introduce new possibilities with an adaptive calibration to estimate transformation matrices of lighthouses, and an FPGA approach to improve precision and adaptability. Finally, we show how the new developments reduce setup costs and increase the accessibility of our tracking technology.