VR lighthouse based tracking for lightguns

[Toasty833]

Lighthouse tracking, used with the HTC Vive and Valve Index VR systems, has an accuracy of within a few mm, and they come with 2 controllers out of the box. It wouldn't be too hard to 3D print or strap some gun sights to the top of a controller, define your screen area and positional offsets, and create a lightgun with no distance requirements by just ignoring the headset.

There was an attempt made here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/751j8d/vive_controller_as_a_mouse_pointer_v03/ to do something similar, but unfortunately SteamVR has since updated and I can't get the software to work to see if the accuracy is good enough for use as a light gun. Current LCD systems all require a minimum distance of about 1.5x screen size to work, which isn't so bad on smaller screens, but if you want to play on newer 4k screens you might have to stand very far away. With a tracked gun, it doesn't matter where the gun is in relation to the screen, you can be an inch away and get the same performance.

[Toasty833]

Went looking around for this kind of thing again today, and found https://imgur.com/gallery/vBaXSkW, using openVR (https://github.com/asingh57/openvr_lightgun). Very user unfriendly, but I managed to get it working with my Vive wand. In terms of tracking accuracy, it's fantastic, dead on the same mark every time, very low latency. The problem is with calibration, the tool is very basic and doesn't really let you dial in the screen position properly, a proper GUI could offer crosshairs and multi-angle shooting to define the screen much more accurately. And this was clearly early software. I also couldn't get it to compile so I had to use the debugging version with clicks disabled, but I wasn't really expecting it to be feature complete, I just wanted to know what kind of accuracy was possible.

https://imgur.com/a/ZVay1zS is a quick example of the tracking quality from about a foot away, which isn't possible on any existing LCD based setups to my knowledge. The alignment issues are all down to the shoddy calibration, what's important is how well it follows the movement.