More than one headset in same room

[schwaBAM]

So I have 2 headsets, one is an index and one is a  regular vive (not a pro).  Anyways, you can see the photo of the space I have.  I set up 2 sets of 2 lighthouse stations in the room and the vive had trouble tracking.  My controller will randomly go 10 feet to my left, or stutter uncontrollably, etc.   The index does fine.

Any suggestions?  I ran a sync cable but it does not help any.  Curious if changing any settings will help (like the base station codes?)

(See photo)

In the photo, the index is closer to the couch and has no issues.  The closer base station is for the vive and loses tracking a lot, even with the sync cable.  Other base station for the vive is to the right.  Approx 12ft apart. 

 

Thanks!

@VibrantNebula

[schwaBAM]

Things I've tried:

 

-Sync cable

-Uninstalling all vive drivers/products

-Redid the room setup many many times (sometimes its smooth, most times it loses tracking on the part of the room closest to the index base stations)

-Moved base stations farther away and rotated them (redid room setup)

-Opted in and out of beta

-Disabled camera

[schwaBAM]

The headset does NOT lose tracking at all.  The controllers float off, or are 10 feet in front of me.

[HackPerception]

@schwaBAM - It sounds like you're hitting a limitation of SteamVR 1.0 tracking. SteamVR 1.0 tracking relies on "optical sync" - the basestations emit a bright "flash" in IR that tells the sensors on the HMD and controllers to reset their clocks to t = 0 which is followed by a "sweep" from a laser directly afterwards. The hardware and SteamVR are able to measure the time between when a flash is seen to when a laser sweep is seen which can then be used to mathematically solve for the position of the device relative to the stations. Here's a video that describes the system in detail if you're curious.

The end result is that:

• You can't have more than 1 pair (2 units) of 1.0 basestations in the same room from each other unless they're physically partitioned away from each other by a material opaque to near-IR. The range of the IR flash is ~30+ feet (10+M) so you can only get away with not physically separating the tracked volumes if you're room is rather massive and the playspaces are far apart from each other.
• You can't have 1.0 and 2.0 stations operating simultaneously within line of sight of each other (in most deployment scenarios). Devices like Pro and Index can accept data from both 1.0 and 2.0 stations - as soon as it sees an IR sync "flash" it will anticipate BS 1.0 tracking data accordingly.

It's super weird that's it's only affecting your controllers - the sensors in the controllers should be the same as in the HMD (discrete sensors) if they're the first gen controllers. Not sure what's up with that. That's more consistent with a reflection problem -  you can ID reflection issues by generating a SteamVR system log, opening it up in a text-editor or in SteamVR's system report viewer, and searching (ctrl-F) for the term: "back-facing". Here's what a reflection looks like in logs:

• Sun Jun 26 2016 23:02:09.676 - lighthouse: LHR-4E8EF209 H: Dropped 32312 back-facing hits, 2069 non-clustered hits during the previous tracking session

The easiest solution would be to only use 1 set of 1.0 stations when using both devices at the same time - you'd have to squeeze the play volume for both HMD's into the supported range of a pair of 1.0 stations. The OG Vive can't accept signals from a 2.0 station so the 1.0 tracking is the limiting factor in this scenario.