Out of the box

This unit is well made, clean and simple. All the connectors are located for easy connectivity and ease of reach. The only thing we would change on the design aspect of the unit is to move the power switch button from the left side of the unit to the front, replacing the small red led that can be seen on the top right corner. Besides that, the unit looks good and well assembled. The main unit case is all-metal so it feels robust and durable. The emitter and receiver units are made of plastic that is moulded by VR-Space Inc. themselves. They have a professional look and feel. The 3 receivers modules feature a small removable sliding clip beneath them so they can be mounted on objects and removed rapidly, leaving the clip in place for the next use. The plastic clip has VelcroT glued under it so it can be attached to many clothes types. This is particularly handy to put it on a VR glove or an HMD helmet. Just glue the opposed VelcroT element to the other device and you are ready to track their movements. VR-Space Inc. also provides a few VelcroT bands in the box so you can strap receivers directly to your arm or your hands.

Installation

Highlights:

• Less than 15 minutes
• Easy software set-up although an install shield interface would make it even easier
• The tracker test & control application allows the user to see tracking position and orientation data from the 3 receivers right after installation.

The installation process is very easy and only takes a few minutes. The only improvement we could suggest is to provide a Windows friendly install shield interface. Our unit came with a CD-Rom disk that included the necessary .INF and .SYS Microsoft Windows installation script files. The Wintracker unit must first be connected to the power outlet and the host computer via a USB cable. Once the host computer is powered on and logged in the Microsoft Windows environment, the user simply turns on the Wintracker unit. The user is then asked to point the location of the new device driver files. Since there is no install shield interface provided, the user must manually point the folder where the .INF and associated files reside. Once this is done, the device installs itself within a few seconds. To make sure all is fine, we recommend rebooting the host computer after this step.

Once installed, the user can immediately read the 6DOF data (the 6 degrees of freedom data components, which are the x, y, z, heading, pitch and roll) coming from the tracker main unit. To see these data, all that is required is to run a small utility provided on the CD-Rom disk called "VR-SPACE Tracker Test & Control Application". Here is a typical display of that program while acquiring data coming from the tracker unit.

This utility proved to be a very useful debugging tool while implementing our own test programs. The tracker test utility can be run concurrently with your own application. This lets the user see the raw values returned by the tracker unit at the same time he is reading the tracker data inside his own application. It also provides quick access to the most frequently used functions such as the "reinitiate tracker" command, the "distance adjust" command and the "continuous" or "single" output commands. The user can manually send commands to the main unit using the "send" field as seen above.