What’s the future of SteamVR tracking?

It’s the beginning of a new year, and I started thinking about the future of immersive realities for 2025 and beyond. There is one question that is recurring in my mind: with the possible advent of the standalone Deckard headset with inside-out tracking, is Lighthouse-based SteamVR tracking still going to be relevant? Will it survive this year or the next ones? In this article, I try to summarize my thoughts about it.

[Note for the readers: For the sake of clarity and simplicity, in this article, I will consider SteamVR tracking outside-in because of the external beacons, even if the beacons are only lights, so the tracking is technically still inside-out. Plus I will use the terms OpenVR tracking and SteamVR tracking interchangeably, even if the two terms are not identical]

SteamVR tracking

When Valve launched its tracking system based on Lighthouses, it was a revolution, because it brought room scale and tracked controllers to VR, when Oculus wanted to put people playing with gamepads on a couch. Valve’s OpenVR was also incredibly well thought out, bringing with it an open ecosystem potentially compatible with many headsets and peripherals. Not to mention that the tracking was fast, accurate, reliable, and with amazing sub-mm accuracy. Soon the Vive Tracker was launched, and people were able to track objects, and especially their full body, in VR.

It’s been a revolution, the way to go to do proper VR until inside-out tracking proved to be good enough to support the creation of standalone headsets. Standalone headsets like Quest removed the cost of having an associated PC, and the hassle of having to configure a VR room with Lighthouse stations to install on the walls. At a cheap sub-500$ price, Quest opened up a new market that got the attention of millions of users, while leaving PCVR to XR enthusiasts who wanted the best experience possible.

Today SteamVR is still the gold standard for what concerns PCVR tracking and many enthusiasts have Lighthouses installed in their rooms to play VR games on their Valve Index, HTC Vive, or Pimax Crystal Light. But with the attention of the market going towards standalone and always more PCVR headsets experimenting with inside-out tracking, what is the future of this technology?

SteamVR strengths and competition

To understand how SteamVR is still relevant today and how it will play out in the future, let’s analyze what are the biggest strengths of this technology, and how its incumbents are working in this sense.

Precision

SteamVR Tracking supports sub-mm accuracy, and this is simply amazing. The thing is: you rarely need this precision in applications… I’m not even sure if the human brain has the perception of the hands’ position with such accuracy (I guess not considering the micro-tremblings of the hands). Anyway, sub-mm accuracy, together with the precision and speed of the tracking contributes to making this tracking not only precise but also very reliable, even when you are moving your controllers pretty fast. Anyway, we have seen now that controllers like the ones of the Quest can obtain pretty good performances, too, for what concerns speed and reliability (consider that people are playing Beat Saber at insane speeds with standalone headsets). This means that for most use cases, the precision of standalone controllers is now more than enough.

Tracking range

One of the superpowers of SteamVR is that it tracks your controllers everywhere they are: behind your head, behind your body, on the floor, up in the air, etc… Inside-out tracked headsets do have not this capability and there are things you are not able to do without SteamVR, like hiding your hand holding a virtual gift behind your back while you are in social VR.

But first of all, these are edge cases, and nowadays thanks to the big success of Quest headsets, many people are designing VR experiences to avoid these situations. Then, a smart positioning of the tracking cameras can cover a field of view that is large enough to serve most cases. Not to mention that new technologies will make the tracking-everywhere capability available also on standalone devices: think about the self-tracking controllers of the Quest Pro. They are pretty expensive and show their problems, but they prove that controllers may track themselves, with their tracking working in any condition, without worrying about the field of view, occlusion, or other problems. This would even solve the problem of controller-to-controller occlusion that is typical of any other system where the controllers are tracked from the outside.

Returning to inside-out tracked controller, I guess in the future some AI inference using body tracking data may help in estimating the pose of the controllers when they are out of range of the tracking cameras, too.

All these new technologies make the tracking range of SteamVR less unique.

Controller tracking

SteamVR tracking is meant to track controllers or tracking pucks. Now there is anyway always growing attention towards hand tracking. Some people are even convinced that long-term, controller tracking will be niche, and hand tracking will be dominant everywhere in XR. I agree with this statement about outdoor use of XR (for sure I’m not going to use controllers with my AR glasses while I’m in the streets), but for indoors, and especially some content like gaming, I still think controllers are (and will be) a must-have.

In any case, the growing attention towards hand tracking, which is not supported by pure SteamVR tracking but is supported by camera-based tracking, weakens a bit the position of the technology.

Body tracking

If you check online forums like Reddit, people mention that Full Body Tracking, e.g. in VRChat, is the strongest use case for Lighthouse-based SteamVR tracking. This is for sure true today, but there are already hints of this being less relevant in the future.

First of all, HTC has released the Vive Ultimate Tracker, which has onboard cameras and does not need base stations. It is pretty expensive and, according to some feedback online, its tracking quality is not comparable with SteamVR tracking, yet. But with time, for sure, both of these characteristics are going to improve.

Then, the Pico Trackers are proving that using the knowledge of the human body and some ML magic, it is possible to have a full body pose with very cheap and lightweight tags that do not need any external beacons. My quick hands-on with these devices left me impressed, because they were able to track my body pose incredibly well.

In the end, I can also mention that Meta is experimenting with the use of AI to track the human body using just the onboard cameras of the headset and the controllers (if any): the accuracy of these solutions is still not reliable enough, but who knows what the future will reserve us in this sense in the next 5-10 years (the usual magical timespan, according to Vitillo’s law of technology).

Motion capture

If you want a cheap system for motion capture you can use Vive Trackers and full-body VR to record animations of yourself moving. For sure SteamVR can be useful to create a cheap animation studio in your home.

But thanks to AI advancements, it is now possible to do motion tracking with regular cameras and without wearing any device on your body with good accuracy. We also used such a system when we were doing concerts with VRROOM, and the results were surely good. Not to mention that even in this case, the Vive Ultimate Tracker or the full-body solution with Pico Trackers may substitute Lighthouses in the future.

Object Tracking

You can attach a Vive Tracker to an object, to have it reliably tracked for you in VR. This is used for instance in LBVR arcades to let you have a gun in your head while you are in VR.

Even in this case, SteamVR trackers may be substituted by Vive Ultimate Trackers or Pico Tracker, removing the need for lighthouses. But Vive Ultimate Trackers do have not the same accuracy, and Pico Trackers need to be in sight of the Pico headset, so this solution may not work in all cases if you need to grab an object and keep it outside the tracking range of the headset. So short term, object tracking is still best with Lighthouses, but long term, other solutions may have comparable performances. Consider that anyway object tracking is only relevant in out-of-home entertainment since no one is going to use props in VR at home.

Compatible peripherals

Valve’s OpenVR is an open standard and many peripherals have been built to be compatible with it. On this side, it is still a unique ecosystem, even if more widespread standards like OpenXR have nowadays created standardization in XR as a whole.

SteamVR is also very useful for those companies that are creating a VR peripheral and want to focus on developing their unique characteristics without wasting time on positional tracking. Many VR gloves have come out using Vive Trackers for positional tracking, so that their companies could work on finger tracking and haptic feedback.

The other positive side of SteamVR is that you can mix and match controllers with headsets (e.g. having a Vive headset with Valve controllers). Theoretically, this could happen also with other technologies if companies would like to open up for that (practically, this never happened, though).

LBVR

The Location-based entertainment industry has been one of the first great adopters of SteamVR headsets. Thanks to its accuracy, robustness, compatibility with external peripherals, and support for full body tracking and object tracking, it was the perfect fit for this market. But now also this industry is moving to standalone headsets, which guarantee faster setup and cheaper costs while guaranteeing tracking in large areas and multiplayer colocation.

Headsets compatibility

When HTC Vive came out, it was a revolution for the virtual reality field: Oculus tried to copy its tracking system, but the Constellation tracking was not comparable… and I say this as a Rift CV1 owner. SteamVR has been the gold standard for tracking for a while, with other headsets implementing it: even nowadays, the headsets from BigScreen, HTC Vive, Pimax, Varjo, and Somnium, are all compatible with SteamVR.

But while until a couple of years ago, for a PCVR headset outside-in tracking was a must, nowadays many companies are working on their inside-out tracking, too. Of the aforementioned brands, for instance, Pimax and Varjo have their camera-based tracking for hands and controllers, with SteamVR being optional. Vive launched its last lighthouse-tracked headset (Vive Pro 2) more than 3 years ago, and its last Vive Focus Vision device is optimized for PC usage while being a standalone headset. This means that SteamVR is still supported because of its quality, but that most companies are working to have their tracking solution that does not require base stations. And when these solutions become as accurate as SteamVR, then Lighthouses will probably be abandoned. Consider that most PCVR headsets are used by simmers (i.e. people who play games about racing or piloting airplanes), which usually require seated playing, so the room-scale accuracy of SteamVR is not needed.

Even Valve, the company that started it all, is rumored to launch its standalone Deckard headset that should work with inside-out tracking… (even if it could provide a faceplate for SteamVR)

The Destiny of SteamVR tracking

All the above considerations make me think that the SteamVR tracking technology is destined to be abandoned by most of the XR space, being substituted by camera tracking and AI algorithms. Freeing the users from having to set up a room to use XR (and from the cost of lighthouses) is such an advantage that many companies will go for that route.

Anyway, it won’t happen tomorrow because out there there are still many Lighthouse-tracked headsets like the Valve Index and because many of the inside-out tracking solutions out there are still not reliable enough. It will take some time, maybe another 5 years, maybe even more, but in the end it will become less and less relevant. I don’t think it will completely disappear, though: it will still be relevant in some niches, especially enterprise ones: for instance, Vive has created a solution to use Vive Trackers for mixed reality cinema productions and there it could still be a valid help.

But most of the consumer XR space, including the PC one, will most probably let it go. The hardware to support it will still be carried on by startups for which it can be a lucrative market. I think it may happen something similar to the Kinect For Azure: Microsoft didn’t consider its market profitable enough, so it licensed its algorithms to a startup making depth cameras called Orbbec, which is much smaller, so the revenues coming from this market are good for it.

All technologies are destined to become obsolete, and Lighthouse-based tracking won’t make any exception. But it will have a special place in the history of VR (and in our hearts) because it changed the paradigm of how we interact with VR technology.