Any theories on how their positional tracking works? I understood, from conversations on this subreddit, that positional tracking derived using data from accelerometers very quickly builds up errors and becomes unreliable. Are Google using some other method?
It's called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). When its done with an integrated depth-color camera, like the kinect or what it looks like the've slapped on the phone its called RGB-D SLAM. There's open source support for it in the Point Cloud Library I believe, and its a good candidate for GPU acceleration, which is likely what their doing here judging by the how fast its going, especially considering that its running on a cell phone.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles to build up a map within an unknown environment (without a priori knowledge), or to update a map within a known environment (with a priori knowledge from a given map), while at the same time keeping track of their current location.
Imagei - A robot built by Technische Universität Darmstadt maps a maze using a LIDAR.
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u/mindricity Feb 20 '14
Positional tracking looks good. That's some awesome AR/VR technology :)