Evaluation of Virtual Reality Tracking Performance for Indoor Navigation

HTC Vive VR system was originally designed for entertainment. It is capable of high-accuracy indoor tracking and is relatively inexpensive compared to other professional indoor tracking systems. Recently, there is an increasing trend to use HTC Vive tracking system towards scientific research and educational applications. However, the tracking accuracy of position and orientation of a target can be significantly affected by the configuration of lighthouses (base stations). In this work, we proposed a simplified error model of the target position and orientation, which takes into consideration the lighthouse configuration, the relative location of the target, and the accuracy of the sensors. It can be used to optimize or evaluate the geometric distribution of lighthouses and receivers for specific applications.