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While Oculus started off with a focus on seated virtual reality experiences, Valve has always focussed its efforts on ‘room scale’. At the moment, SteamVR supports two Base Stations for detecting 12×12 feet playspaces. With SteamVR Tracking 2.0, this will be upgraded to support four base stations and up to 33×33 foot play areas.
Valve’s Joe Ludwig announced the upgrades last week as part of an update on the newer sensors the company is working on. At launch, these new base stations will only work in a two sensor set up but at some point in early 2018, this will be ramped up to four sensors.
With four sensors, Ludwig expects to be able to cover a single room play space of “roughly 10×10 meters”, which is 33×33 feet. Valve may support configurations beyond four sensors at some point but there is no roadmap for this just yet.
Valve’s new base stations have been of particular interest over the last year. The company has managed to make them cheaper to manufacture, which could help bring down the high entry cost of VR. These newer stations are going to start shipping out to ‘licensees’ in early 2018, in this case, that would be companies like HTC and LG, which are both producing SteamVR headsets.
KitGuru Says: If Valve can finish up work on its new base stations and the Knuckles VR controllers in 2018, then we may see another round of headsets from the likes of HTC and others using the SteamVR license. Then again, with Steam Dev Days off the table for this year and next, that may be a bit too optimistic.
this may be a nit, but the basestations are not sensors. the sensors are in the controllers and the headset. the basestations are beacons, the sensors detect the swept light from the beacons and use this information to calculate location in the VR space, far more accurately than camera-based tracking systems do…
That’s all nice and well, but in Europe practically no one has enough room to make use of a 12x12ft play space let alone 33 x 33ft.
Its more for commercial use. You can now have a large open area like a gymnasium for heavy multiplayer games. Couple this with wireless headsets and you can have huge VR multiplayer sessions. More-over, at home use, you’ll be able to support a larger room, and/or have better tracking for multiple headsets. Currently if you want to rock two headsets in one house, you’d use it in another room, or play carefully in the other players playspace.
The older units are still completely viable to use, and you may even be able to pick up the older 1.0 models for cheaper as 2.0 tracking rolls out. Old hardware (Headset/controllers) will work with the new basestations, but the new hardware will not work with the old base stations. So even if you just wanted to upgrade your basestations, thats an option, you’ll just miss out on some of the improved tracking on the new hardware.
Industrial use makes sense, but home use just is not viable in Europe where Americans seem to forget that their master bathrooms tend to be larger than most peoples master bedroom.