Position Tracking for Virtual Reality Using Commodity WiFi

Manikanta Kotaru, Sachin Katti; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 68-78

Today, experiencing virtual reality (VR) is a cumbersome experience which either requires dedicated infrastructure like infrared cameras to track the headset and hand-motion controllers (e.g., Oculus Rift, HTC Vive), or provides only 3-DoF (Degrees of Freedom) tracking which severely limits the user experience (e.g., Samsung Gear). To truly enable VR everywhere, we need position tracking to be available as a ubiquitous service. This paper presents WiCapture, a novel approach which leverages commodity WiFi infrastructure, which is ubiquitous today, for tracking purposes. We prototype WiCapture using off-the-shelf WiFi radios and show that it achieves an accuracy of 0.88 cm compared to sophisticated infrared-based tracking systems like the Oculus, while providing much higher range, resistance to occlusion, ubiquity and ease of deployment.