Position Tracking for Virtual Reality Using Commodity WiFi
This enables ubiquitous VR tracking for users, reducing reliance on dedicated infrastructure.
The paper tackles the problem of cumbersome VR position tracking by proposing WiCapture, which uses commodity WiFi to achieve 0.88 cm accuracy compared to infrared systems, offering higher range, occlusion resistance, ubiquity, and ease of deployment.
Today, experiencing virtual reality (VR) is a cumbersome experience which either requires dedicated infrastructure like infrared cameras to track the headset and hand-motion controllers (e.g., Oculus Rift, HTC Vive), or provides only 3-DoF (Degrees of Freedom) tracking which severely limits the user experience (e.g., Samsung Gear). To truly enable VR everywhere, we need position tracking to be available as a ubiquitous service. This paper presents WiCapture, a novel approach which leverages commodity WiFi infrastructure, which is ubiquitous today, for tracking purposes. We prototype WiCapture using off-the-shelf WiFi radios and show that it achieves an accuracy of 0.88 cm compared to sophisticated infrared based tracking systems like the Oculus, while providing much higher range, resistance to occlusion, ubiquity and ease of deployment.