POL360: A universal mobile VR motion controller using polarized light

Abstract

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.We introduce POL360: the first universal VR motion controller that leverages the principle of light polarization. POL360 enables a user who holds it and wears a VR headset to see their hand motion in a virtual world via its accurate 6-DOF position tracking. Compared to other techniques for VR positioning, POL360 has several advantages as follows. (1) Mobile compatibility: Neither additional computing resource like a PC/console nor any complicated pre-installation is required in the environment. Only necessary device is a VR headset with an IR LED module as a light source to which a thin-film linear polarizer is attached. (2) On-device computing: Our POL360's computation for positioning is completed on the microprocessor in the device. Thus, it does not require additional computing resource of a VR headset. (3) Competitive accuracy and update rate: In spite of POL360's superior mobile compatibility and affordability, POL360 attains competitive performance of accuracy and fast update rates. That is, it achieves the subcentimeter accuracy of positioning and the tracking rate higher than 60 Hz. In this paper, we derive the mathematical formulation of 6-DOF positioning using light polarization for the first time and implement a POL360 prototype that can directly operate with any commercial VR headset systems. In order to demonstrate POL360's performance and usability, we carry out thorough quantitative evaluation and a user study and develop three game demos as use cases.