I’ve ordered an HTC Vive headset from the HTC Vive site. They offered it at list price while Amazon had it listed far higher. Reading through what I could find on the APIs, it became clear that I’d do better getting the hardware and then seeing what I could accomplish. The docs look fragmentary enough that experiemtation seems more likely to be helpful than deep dives into the docs.

I’ve also been considering what could be done to locate items in three space with one or more web cams. Looking at OpenCV in a bit mroe detail than I did last time around, it looks like it has either become more capable or I didn’t look deeply enough. I’d like to see if I can manage depth cueing using two cameras and some processing. Being able to pick out hands (even hands in white gloves to give better discrimination against backgrounds) would be a wonderful adjunct to the VR goggle.

Given my Logitech camera appears to output H.264 encoded data, I was taking a look at support for codecs and it appears that there are at least a couple out there that are open source. Not sure I’ll need to mess with this (hoping that the windows APIs contain what I need) but nice to have just in case. I’d expect that pulling frames out of a stream may be a better idea than asking for single frames at a time. We’ll see.

Much to do and still in the depths of work on the upstairs at the moment. Just installed enough of the hard wood in the upstairs hall to allow the carpet guys to handle the hardwood/carpet transitions when they come at the end of the week.