Improved Tracking Using a Hybrid Optcial-Haptic Three-Dimensional Tracking System

The aim of this paper is to asses to what extent an optical tracking system (OTS) used for position tracking in virtual reality can be improved by combining it with a human scale haptic device named Scalable-SPIDAR. The main advantage of the Scalable-SPIDAR haptic device is the fact it is unobtrusive and not dependent of free line-of-sight. Unfortunately, the accuracy of the Scalable-SPIDAR is affected by bad-tailored mechanical design. We explore to what extent the influence of these inaccuracies can be compensated by collecting precise information on the nonlinear error by using the OTS and applying support vector regression (SVR) for calibrating the haptic device reports. After calibration of the Scalable-SPIDAR we have found that the average error in position readings reduced from to 263.7240±75.6207 mm to 12.6045±8.4169 mm. These results encourage the development of a hybrid hapticoptical system for virtual reality applications where the haptic device acts as an auxiliary source of position information for the optical tracker. Keywords—virtual reality; Scalable-SPIDAR; support vector regression; hybrid tracking system