Latest HTC Vives Are Shipping with Tweaked Base Stations, Redesigned Packaging
As far as we’ve seen, every consumer Vive has previously shipped with Base Stations that have a 15-LED array which you can spot if you look carefully through the black front of the unit. The newer tweaked Base Station has a more rigidly aligned 9-LED (3×3) array. Beyond this we haven’t spotted any other visual differences, though it’s possible there’s some internal differences that we wouldn’t find without cracking… See More
the case open.
The original 15-LED consumer Vive Base Station | Photo courtesy iFixit (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Why the change? That’s a question we put to HTC, though they didn’t give us a specific answer.
“As you may know, we constantly are updating the hardware, but not making an specific announcements at this time,” an HTC spokesperson told us when we asked about the changes to the Base Station.
One guess is that the IR LED’s could be brighter, which could mean increased range. In side-by-side pictures, it does look that way, though as the images were captured with a visible-light camera, it’s quite possible that the new LEDs are not in fact brighter, but simply emit more light in the visible spectrum.
It has been said previously by Alan Yates—the Valve engineer credited with designing SteamVR Tracking (AKA Lighthouse)—that the range bottleneck of the system is the LEDs (which flash to serve as a ‘sync pulse’ that allows for a consistent timing reference, a critical part of the tracking calculations). The lasers can go out quite far while remaining eye-safe, but the LEDs can’t reach as far (whether it’s an eye-safe issue or not for the LEDs isn’t clear).
www.roadtovr.com/latest-vive-shipping-with-tweaked-base-stations-redesigned-packaging
wow that is awesome.... I LOVE IT it glows
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Interesting- thanks for the info on the change.... if it does turn out to be a ft in range increase via your quick range test with Craig... then I am going to be looking at clearing more out in the basement to make a bigger vr room area for Adam. Keep the info coming!!!
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