HTC has not yet decided on who they are sending their first 1,000 Vive Tracker units before the consumer launch later this year, but they seem to have gotten a little bit trigger happy and have released the ‘HTC Vive Tracker Developer Guidelines‘ to the public.
The document will help developers to prepare their titles for use with bigger and better accessories, and details not only the hardware guidelines but also some pretty strict design recommendations when it comes to mounting of accessories.
The Vive Tracker is apparently wirelessly connected to it’s own separate dongle, which will need to keep any form of non-essential metal from the device’s antenna in order to continue operating at maximum throughput. While the controllers connect wirelessly to the headset which then sends it’s data through the cables, the new dongle will use USB 2.0 to connect to the host PC and track objects.
The documentation also suggests that the puck operates on a 270 degree field of view in order to let the antennas sense the base station correctly. The accessories should also be made with non-reflective materiel so that tracking lasers are not bounced off of the hardware and tacked in the wrong space.
There’s quite a bit of detail present in the document, and we’re obviously not going to go through it all, so check it out for yourself here if there are any questions you still want answered.
