IF YOU’VE BEEN holding onto your trusty iPhone 6, 6S, or 7 and wondering when a cool VR headset will be available for it, this is your lucky day. The Occipital Bridge headset looks like it’s well worth the wait, as it’s more powerful than any other phone-driven headset on the market.
That’s because it’ll have positional-tracking capabilities other mobile-driven headsets lack. The Bridge comes from the same company that created the Occipital Structure Sensor, an iPad and iPhone add-on that uses infrared to scan objects and gauge distances automatically.
In fact, the Structure Sensor is also the main component of the new Bridge AR/VR headset. It’s built into the front of it, mapping your surroundings and making it possible to do what’s called “inside-out positional tracking.” It can sense and create depth maps of objects as close as a foot and a half and as far as 11 feet away. It won’t drain your battery quickly, because the sensor has its own rechargeable battery that runs three to four hours per charge.
Positional tracking is what makes higher-end hardware such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR such fundamentally different devices compared to phone-based headsets like the Gear VR and Daydream View. With positional tracking, you can roam around inside a virtual world laterally and vertically.
But positional tracking usually requires an external camera or beacons to track your movement. Thanks to its advanced built-in sensors, Bridge does it all in one self-contained package. You just drop in an iPhone, and Occipital’s sensor rig is powerful and accurate enough to create detailed 3D maps of your environment. It’s a big deal.
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Source: Wired