Lighthouse

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Lighthouse is a positional tracking system developed by Valve for SteamVR. It accurately tracks the position and orientation of the user's head-mounted Display and controllers in real time. Lighthouse enables the users to move anywhere and re-orient themselves in any position within the range of the SteamVR Base Stations. It is a key technology that enables SteamVR to create the first holodeck or full-room experience in Virtual Reality.

Valve plans to make Lighthouse freely available to all hardware manufactures.

How It Works

Central to the Lighthouse technology are the Base Stations, small rectangular objects placed in the room. They serve as reference points for any positionally tracked devices such as the HMDs and controllers. Base Stations perform this function by flooding the room with a non-visible light, the receptors on the tracked devices would intercept the light and figure out where they are in relation to the Base Stations. Multiple Base Stations (2 for SteamVR) allow the tracked devices to figure out where they are in the 3D space.

Each Base Station contains numerous LEDS and 2 laser emitters that spin rapidly. 60 times per second, the LEDs would flash and 1 of the 2 spinning lasers would sweep a beam across the room. The receptors, HMDs and controllers, are covered with photosensors that recognizes the flashes of light and laser beams. When it detects a flash of light, the receptor starts to count til one of its photosensors are hit by the laser beam. Lighthouse calculates When the photosensor is hit and Where that photosensor is located to find the exact position of the receptor in relation to the Base Station.