Oculus Rift Drift

[willpower2727]

The yaw drift is still present however. Any advice on correcting for it? Should I try and re-calibrate the magnetometer? Apply a stronger magnetic field?

[mape2k]

I would not advice you to apply a strong magnetic field. This could potentially do more harm than good.

Are you using the Oculus together with the camera (which is supposed to go on top of the monitor)? If not, the slow yaw drift is a normal behavior of the Oculus and can not be corrected.

We are having the same issue here, as we are using the Oculus together with a Vicon Tracking System inside a large room. Thus, we cannot use the camera and we get a slow yaw drift (1-4deg/min) whenever the Oculus is not in motion.

[willpower2727]

Our lab is for gait studies, subjects typically walk back and forth on a 9 meter walkway which renders the position tracker that came with the oculus useless. Not being able to get around the yaw-drift, which I agree can't be corrected, I attached a cluster of markers to the hmd and use the marker data to update the orientation of the view in "live mode". It's not as nice as the 1000 Hz gryo, I use a kalman filter to try and reduce the jitters but at least there is no yaw drift. I suppose if I felt outgoing I could continue to use the gryos and use the marker data to correct the yaw once in a while.

[Jeff]

If you have two position trackers fixed to the HMD on the left and right you can use vizconnect's optical heading tracker to correct yaw drift. In vizconnect, first add the two position trackers and orientation tracker. Then add the optical heading tracker and use this to drive the viewpoint

[mape2k]

We are having similar issues here. We attach markers to the Oculus for tracking the position of the participants inside a large room and use the Oculus gyroscopic data for yaw, pitch and roll of the viewpoint. For now, I just have a function running that checks disparities between the Oculus' yaw information and the one provided by the optical tracking system. If the difference between the two measurements gets too high, a warning is issued to the user.

Also not really ideal. We tried experimenting without the Oculus gyroscopic data at all and only using optical tracking but this gives jerky results. If we try to filter that head movement sensation becomes sluggish quickly.

[willpower2727]

For pure optical tracking we experience some "jitter" as you say. I tried two types of filters, a kalman and a moving average with a narrow time window to avoid lag.

Our system is Nexus 2.2.3 with Vizard 5, there are lots of variables within the Nexus system parameters alone that could contribute to how noisy your data is. I've attached a graph of what my filters do to the raw data. I decided the kalman was the best compromise between smooth tracking and minimum lag. The experience isn't too bad but not as nice as the gyros.

[mape2k]

Thanks for sharing your results. Looks interesting, we might consider implementing a kalman filter to the yaw data. Are you using your own implementation or is the filtering done by the Nexus software package?

[willpower2727]

Jeff's suggestion of using two position trackers and the optical heading in vizconnect might work well, but I can't test it since I have Vicon Nexus 1 and 2, not Tracker. If I had Tracker I'd try it out for sure.