Hardware

Hardware Installation

The system consists of the following hardware components:

• VR/AR headset with built-in or externally attached IMU

• Hand controllers such as the VIVE Pro hand controllers

• External tracked objects with optical markers attached to it, such as the steering wheel of a seating buck

• Optical tracking system, preferably an Advanced Realtime Motion System (ART), either installed in large room scale installation, seating buck (Sitzkiste) installation or in-vehicle installation

The optical tracking system software (e.g. ART DTrack) needs to be installed as defined by the optical tracking system manufacturer. Please take care that the floor of the tracking space is calibrated vertically. A water balance built-into the calibration equipment should assist with that.

If you are using LP-RESEARCH marker holders for your HMD or hand controller holder, please refer to section HMD holder and hand controller assembly instructions.

Optionally, in case an external IMU is used for HMD tracking, this IMU needs to be installed inside or on the headset. It needs to be attached to the PC running LPVR via a USB connection.

Please make sure of the following before installing LPVR:

1. Your HMD is connected and powered up

2. Your optical tracking system is connected and powered up

3. (Optional) Your controllers are powered up and paired with your system

4. The LPVR dongle is inserted into a USB plug on your PC

5. Optical markers are attached to your HMD and (optional) hand controllers.

Software

System Requirements

1. LPVR in its current version runs exclusively on Windows, from Windows 10 upwards.

2. SteamVR must be installed and operational. Make sure your SteamVR version is newer than 1.9.16. Please also make sure that you are not using SteamVR 1.16 which has a known bug that will lead to subpar performance. Please refer to this page on how to gain control over SteamVR versions.

3. Currently LPVR natively works with the Advanced Realtime Tracking (ART) optical tracking system.

4. This driver plugs into SteamVR. You will not need any modifications to your Unity, Unreal or other SteamVR application code. Use the standard SteamVR interfaces to support headset tracking.

Driver Installation

In the following section we will describe how to setup LPVR-CAD.

• Make sure your optical tracking system software (e.g. DTrack) is running and can see the optical markers attached your HMD and hand controllers. For more information on how to configure your rigid bodies refer to section System Calibration.

• First, we need to download the installer for the LPVR-CAD middleware. Log in to your LP-Research user account to access your dedicated customer area here:

https://lp-research.com/customer-area

If you haven’t received login credentials from us yet, please contact us at support@lp-research.com. The screeenshots below show how to download the installer files from the customer area.

• Insert the LPVR dongle into a free USB port of your computer.

• Quit SteamVR in case it is running.

• Unzip the archive you downloaded and run the LPVR-CAD installer. The figure below shows the output of the installer after successful completion.

• Once the driver has finished installing it should automatically start SteamVR. SteamVR should now display the LPVR status icons as shown below.

• In case it shows up, please ignore the request for doing a room setup as shown in the following image.

• At the end of the installation, the LPVR configuration page should be opened automatically. Please be sure to bookmark the location, so that you can access it easily. If it didn’t open, please point your web browser to http://localhost:7118/ to open it. Please make sure to enter the address exactly as shown here. We have tested the UI on Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Users have reported problems on old (pre-Chromium based) Edge browsers. Below we show what the configuration page will look like on a newly installed system.

• 

  The main part of the page contains status visualization and configuration parameters. At the bottom, links to “Expert Mode” (manual configuration by entering configuration parameters in JSON format) and to this documentation are available.

• Adjust tracking system settings. Make sure the port number is correctly set in DTrack and that its port is accessible in the network from the computer you are installing this driver on.

NOTE 1: When after changing the configuration parameters always make sure you press the Apply Stettings button to apply the changes.

NOTE 2: If you prefer the z-axis pointing upwards, set the coordinate system parameters in DTrack to “Normal” and adjust the room directions in the LPVR tracking system configuration to e.g. the following:

SteamVR always uses Y as up direction, and the DTrack coordinates will be transformed to match this convention on output.

Headset

Adjust HMD tracking parameters. The body ID must be equal to the ID of the tracking marker on the headset in DTrack. Make sure that the rigid body of the tracking marker is aligned in the right way with the HMD. Please see section Adjustment of the HMD rigid body for detail information.

Hand Controller

Adjust hand controller parameters. Make sure the hand controller rigid body is set up in the correct way. Check section Using the VIVE Hand Controller for further information. The serial numbers indicated in the hand controller configuration section can be found in the SteamVR System Report.

Tracked Objects

Add tracked objects, if needed. Tracked objects as shown in the figure below 5 are physical objects (e.g. a steering wheel in a seating buck) with an optical tracking marker attached to them. The pose calculation result from that tracking marker is passed to the user application via the LPVR driver and exposed as SteamVR tracked object. In this way, VR setups that originally use VIVE trackers to track user objects can be converted into more accurate camera-based tracking arrangements without or with only minor modifications to the user application.

An optical marker attached to a physical object is tracked by the optical tracking system. The tracking result is fed into the LPVR driver. The LPVR driver exposes this information as standard SteamVR tracked object.

The LPVR control panel status field should show output similar to the screenshot below. If your configuration was successful and DTrack is tracking. You should now be able to use any SteamVR application.

Temporarily Disabling the Driver

Go to SteamVR’s Settings. Select the “Startup / Shutdown” pane and then “Manage SteamVR Addons.” In the list, set the slider next to LPVR-CAD to “Off” and restart SteamVR. To reenable it, change the setting back to “On” and restart SteamVR.

System Calibration

Please continue with the calibration instructions.