Bulgarian based Quark VR have met with Valve representatives to demonstrate their almost wireless prototype for improving the experience of users of the Vive. Their device is a small receiver that you wear on your body which transmits all necessary signals up to the Vive so you will not have any wires connecting your body to a PC, backpack or otherwise. As the device uses WiFi to transmit the signals there is the possibility that this could introduce lag into your VR experience, something which can have a very negative effect on your carpeting and walls. Drop by Ars Technica for more information on this project.
"A Bulgarian VR startup is promising a fix to the problem, though, saying that an untethered, wireless solution for the HTC Vive will be ready for demonstration sometime this fall."
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Important to note that this
Important to note that this is NOT a high-bandwidth low-latency wireless hardware technology. Quark’s technique streams encoded and compressed video over WiFi, takes the massive latency hit involved in that, then compensates by post-warping (Timewarp) on the client device (e.g. a smartphone) using a later IMU sample. This compensates for head orientation latency (except for lateral head movement, which will open holes in the geometry due to looking ‘around’ unrendered edges) but not for actual game motion, e.g. your hands will lag tens to hundreds of ms behind their actual movements.
Higher bandwidth spectrum are
Higher bandwidth spectrum are being released for consumers which may have much lower latency and higher data bandwidth.
Will they be using them for this prototype?