One of VR's most annoying problems could be solved soon
/Trying to navigate a room while wearing a VR headset? A company named Occipital has a self-contained solution to that problem.
When wandering around with a VR headset on, I'm afraid of going too far without someone to spot me. The reason is simple: I can't really see where I'm going. Odds of tripping over a chair or a table are extremely high.
One company seems to have tried to solve that problem, and I tried out the result deep in the noisy VR/AR subsection of CES in Las Vegas.
Occipital, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, focuses on 3D scanning hardware and depth-sensing cameras: One of its Structure camera sensor arrays works with both an iPhone mixed-reality headset and an upcoming home robot. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive VR headset on me, outfitted with an in-development feature that let me see the room even with my headset on. The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift'scumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.