Lynx released an open-source 6DoF positional tracking system that should work on any Android headset with a Qualcomm chip.If you're unaware, Lynx is a French startup that in 2020 announced Lynx R1, a standalone mixed reality headset with an open periphery design. Had it shipped on time, in 2022, it would have been the first consumer standalone headset with color passthrough. But after repeated delays it was beaten to market by Meta Quest Pro, and by the time most backers had received their headset, Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro had shipped too.One of Lynx's core stated principles is to be as open as possible, including open sourcing whatever it can. Now, the company has released a ready-made 6DoF positional tracking system for Android. It should already work for any headset using a Qualcomm chipset, and can be modified to work on any ARM hardware. 0:00 /0:34 1× Lynx's 2018 prototype of ORB-SLAM2 and Leap Motion hand-tracking. To be clear, the Lynx R1 by default does not use this open-source solution. Qualcomm, the company behind the chipsets that power every non-Apple standalone VR headset on the market, also provides a closed-source positional tracking system if companies want. While bigger companies like Meta and Pico roll their own tracking system, smaller companies like Lynx often just use Qualcomm's provided software.For Lynx, the exception to this is a small number of customers who work in environments where the software analyzing camera imagery needs to be open source."Open-source SLAM algorithms are very good, and have been good for the last 8 years or so. There is a large choice to pick an algorithm with a good range of sensor configurations. The real problem with 6DoF has been the productization of it: including it in the runtime, managing edge-cases, recovery, etc."- Lynx founder Stan LarroqueFor these customers, and in pursuit of its principles of openness, Lynx adapted the industry-standard ORB-SLAM3 algorithm to run well on Android and leverage the hardware acceleration of the Hexagon DSP on Qualcomm chipsets.DSPs are specialized chips designed specifically for sensor and image processing. Leveraging the DSP offloads much of the computational work away from the CPU, greatly reducing the performance cost of positional tracking. This approach is used on all shipping standalone XR headsets.Oculus Quest ‘Significantly Faster’ Than Oculus Go, 6DoF Tracking ‘Doesn’t Affect’ PerformanceOculus Director of Ecosystem Chris Pruett revealed in a forum AMA yesterday that Oculus Quest will be “significantly faster” than Oculus Go: Quest is significantly faster than Oculus Go from both a CPU and GPU perspective. Part of this is just the raw performance of the chipset itself, but aUploadVRDavid HeaneyLynx says the result is an open-source library that takes in 640×400 camera inputs and outputs a 6DoF pose at 90FPS on a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1, the Qualcomm chipset in Quest 2, Pico 4, and Lynx R1.You can find the documentation for Lynx's adaptation of ORB-SLAM3 for Android XR headsets on its website.