Position Tracking in Virtual Reality Through Stereo Cameras

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One of the current problems with Virtual Reality (in addition to price and access and…) is that it is hard to move around in the virtual space. Many VR programs solve this by controlling your vantage point, making them more like interactive immersive movies. Which are often still pretty cool, but if you want to move around in an immersive environment, you usually need some heavy duty hardware to track your movement. Stereolab is aiming to change that with a $449 stereo camera that mounts to the top of your VR headset. Still not cheap, but as this article explores, someday this functionality may be built into our phones (the iPhone 7 is rumored to have a stereo camera). The video above is an example of how the camera itself captures depth, which is an interesting concept in itself (as the video says, what if each pixel could capture depth as well?). Obviously this is still an idea in its infancy, but add this to eye tracking software in VR headsets, along with VR biosensers (when do we get haptic feedback gloves and smell emitters from Ready Player One?)… virtual reality is getting a lot more immersive by the day.