BraTrack

Abstract

Optical motion tracking systems are widely employed in virtual- and mixed reality applications enabling users to directly interact with 3D space. Important efforts have been made to make such technologies available to a larger group of users by significantly reducing their deployment costs. In this poster we introduce the result of a German-Brazilian cooperation: The first commercial low-cost marker-based optical tracking system developed in South-America. Despite using cheaper technologies and being low-cost which usually imply worse performance and accuracy, we developed a system with sufficient accuracy for professional use. There have been significant research efforts to develop cheaper tracking devices to provide interaction capabilities in virutal- and mixed reality. The Augmented Reality Tool Kit (ARToolkit) [1] is a good example of a very popular low-cost academic optical tracker working with any type of webcam. As a non-academic example of affordable tracking systems, Nintendo's latest video game console (Nintendo Wii) comes with the Wiimote interaction device containing a built-in motion tracker that allows for immersive interaction metaphors in home environments. However, most such available low-cost solutions lack in suitability for professional applications due to their usually insufficient accuracy, tracking range or latency time. The starting point of this project was PTrack [2], an academic marker-based single-camera tracker developed at Fraunhofer IGD. PTrack development has shown that an accurate optical tracking system can be built from components that are affordable for a much wider group of users, from the academic AR/VR community to companies’ developers. The performance and accuracy of PTrack were assessed through a comprehensive set of experiments which have proved the suitability of the system for professional applications. One of the main topics raised by PTrack as further research was an extension of the system into a multiple stereo camera configuration, which led to the present work.