An Affordable Optical Head Tracking System for Desktop VR/AR Systems

Abstract

We present an affordable optical head tracking system for desktop-like VR/AR environments. The generic and specific head tracking requirements for these type of environments are defined, as well as the relaxations such environments put on head tracking systems. The presented head tracker is based on two low-cost, commodity FireWire cameras that track a simple 3D dot pattern. It is shown that the tracker provides high accuracy, an update rate of 30 updates per second, a low computational load, and a moderate delay of 66 ms. It is competitive to commercially available, moderate-cost head tracking systems yet for substantially lower costs.