HTC Vive: Analysis and Accuracy Improvement

HTC Vive has been gaining attention as a cost-effective, off-the-shelf tracking system for collecting ground truth pose data. We assess this system's pose estimation through a series of controlled experiments where we show its precision to be in the millimeter magnitude and accuracy to range from millimeter to meter. We also show that Vive gives greater weight to inertial measurements in order to produce a smooth trajectory for virtual reality applications. Hence, the Vive's off the shelf algorithm is poorly suited for robotics applications such as measuring ground truth poses, where accuracy and repeatability are key. Therefore we introduce a new open-source tracking algorithm and calibration procedure for Vive which address these problems. We also show that our approach improves the pose estimation repeatability and accuracy by up to two orders of magnitude.