Not For Your Eyes Only: FOVE VR wants to track your whole body
Time to monitor all the things
VR company FOVE has declared its desire to support full body tracking by integrating Valve’s Lighthouse technology.
Not met the FOVE yet? What sets this VR headset apart from the rest is its ability to track eye movements as well as those of the head. It’s a pretty neat device: we got our hands on it last month and were impressed with what it had to offer.
Now the headset’s developer is taking a cue from Valve by striving for even greater tracking coverage. At the moment the headset is in the prototype phase and the development project has a live Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds necessary for manufacturing. The total pledges currently stand at $438,000, but FOVE has said that if the $700,000 stretch goal limit is breached before the funding deadline it will integrate complete support for Lighthouse.
Next question: what’s Lighthouse?
Lighthouse is the tracking tech developed by Valve and used by the HTC Vive headset. In essence, it allows accurate positional tracking of any device by flooding the room with invisible wavelengths of light which are then used as a reference point by the receiver, be that a headset or wand. If you want the whole downlow then check out the above video.
If everything goes to plan, FOVE will simultaneously know what your head, eyes, and body are doing. That’s a lot of information to play with.
The VR startup has also declared that it will be supporting the OpenVR SDK and Valve’s Steam VR platform. Once again the spirit of an openness triumphs, and Valve will be adding another product’s uniqueness to its own environment.
If you want to support the project then dart over to its Kickstarter page where there are still 17 precious days on the clock. A rather reasonable pledge of US$375 (around £240) will nab you your own FOVE headset.
Justin Mahboubian-Jones
Contributor 
