All right, our next talk is full by the tracking in SlangVR by SlangVR.
Hello, everyone. It's been 15 years since I was presenting anywhere, so sorry.
My name is Erin. I'm from SlangVR. We do that. I will explain more a bit later.
There's a lot of people. I expect not many of you know what is SlangVR because I see a lot of older faces.
So what does SlangVR do? You take a bunch of small records like that. Put your on your body like I have or like my partner on the photo.
And those trigger connect to a server on your computer or your phone or your headset.
I never worked with Google Slash show. We have Wi-Fi or like I do right now.
We cast them to point four gears on goal. And it all feeds each trigger uses inertial measurement units, inertial measurement units to track their own rotation.
And the server does a magic, which then turns you into I'm a girl, which can be used for VR motion capture.
And we hope for more professional motion capture in the future, but for now you can do stuff like that.
And this is a bad tracking quality, but this is mostly due to interference.
So this is the gist of it. How it happened?
I'm a lot to swear here. So here's the slangVR is a testament to the phrase background and find out.
In late 2000, I bought a headset, which cost two, which cost only 250 dollars, which is pretty cheap for a headset, especially when it came out.
And it was cool, I liked it, but I need more immersion. So I was looking for stuff that can track my body to have my avatar move with my body.
And turns out the only good option was to buy Wi-Fi records, which is like house tracker, which was the previous presenter explained, is a whole different system.
The total cost of entry would be $700, which is like three times more than the headset. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. Let's see what else is there.
And until there wasn't much in there, it was mostly a few rough open source projects, specifically kidnapped.
But one of them was an app called overdrag, which is Android app, you can install on your phone, put your phone on your waist, and it's going to track the rotation if you're waist.
And it sounds kind of useless, but actually it increases your immersion because you can estimate the position of your heap, which makes your avatar not just move like that.
But you can actually bend and VR, which already gives you a lot more immersion and a lot of your friends in VR can see more of that.
So I joined their server and was like, hey, why don't you need to use the phone for this? It's used as VIFI, it's used as I'm you, I have ASP board line around, I have around the mind view line around, can I just connect it together and see if it works.
And I ask people like, hey, can you give me like a safety check before order more parts to try and in an hour no one responded, but I was like whatever, I'm going to order it.
So yeah, and while stuff was going like one tracker works fine, it was an easy open source project.
So the problem is that only support is one tracker because who would strap more phones to your body?
There's some people did, which is which time you are supports, you can replace any tracker with your phone.
It's not recommended, don't do that.
So I was like, hey, I need to convince the creator of the old drag to support for like 5 points, so you can have track your legs because you need to track each joints since it's only rotation, not position.
And like, hey, it's open source, you can do it yourself.
Well, I did.
Now I'm any mobile phone.
And without everyone was like, hey, that's kind of cool because a full set of those was like 100 bucks.
It's not very precise as why, well, it can be, it is now, but back then it was pretty junk, but people got really excited about it.
And this was the first, not the first choice, but this was what I did.
It's the server written on Java using swing, which is if anyone knows swing, you would understand, it's very awful UX.
It has purple outlines, so it was kind of pretty, but people said, yeah, but did I mention everything is open source.
It was open source from the start, the project started and open source communities from open source up.
So I put everything open source and people that super excited because when you combine open source and VR, you get you attract the most.
Creative engineers in the world, Furies.
And Furies did that, which sadly the project was 640 pixels, so you can see how pretty it is, but it is better than that.
So we got people to rewrite everything, almost everything and redo the whole UX and proper type script in React.
I help people get react and I also get react and I was like, no, we don't use react, let's keep swing, it's so cool.
Turns out it's easier to support react, now we look pretty.
That took a few years, but that was a journey, so everything is super open source.
If you're interested, this is our stack, we have a lot of layers from here.
I'm not sure if you can read it.
So, I would say a request, and all right, so this is funny, it tracks only when they step, because I don't have a headset.
So, we have six different languages in the project, six C, C++, Rust, Java, Kotlin, five, nice.
And it's very close, it's very hard to support, so we are at least removing Java.
Why Java? Because I started coding from Minecraft, and that was my best language when I started this, so it was Java, but Kotlin is better.
Is anyone interested for me to explain that? Okay, so we have our server that runs on the backend, on Kotlin.
And the GUI is actually a separate app, which is a very modern in this world, it's web app.
But it's not trying chromium, at least it runs towering, which is a fancy wrapper to whatever the operating system has, which is web view on Windows and web key to another thing.
Which non-server-fotent on TypeScript and React. So, that's a software, no, no, but that's not all.
You can see the trackers, we have two different, they feed data into the server through one through Wi-Fi, those through USB.
But that's not all, server does the magic and some apps, you know, have to work.
Some apps can talk directly with our server through a few protocols that we support, like VMC, OSC, which is open sound control, which was invented to control lights for stage performance.
But now is used for everything, basically.
And, but VRChat, which is the main VR social app, actually uses custom open sound control.
We also support that, there is also VMC, which is also, which is what I'm using right now, which is also open sound control.
But, it's also different, and then there is our own solar XAR protocol, which based on flat buffers, which actually monada uses from the previous presenter.
So, we can, our server can talk to monada with that.
And, of course, for VR, you may only want to use steam VR, steam VR, which is a wrapper, which is a host on Windows for all the VR applications.
And, we talk to it, we have a separate driver for it, which is written on C++, and also talk through our custom protocol.
And, then, it talks to games, but we also have another app that talks to steam VR again, and talks to our server.
Why, too, because steam VR is weird, it needs the driver and the app level have different data, so we need both of them.
Yeah, it's a lot.
Some of those more maintained than others, some less, but we are trying.
Now, this is possible only because we are super open source from the start.
I alone wouldn't be able to handle it, because running a business like this is a lot of stuff, and I'm okay programmer, not that good.
So, we got a big community of contributors, and everything we do is completely open source under super permissive licenses, like a patch 2.0 MIT, and like all our software.
And, all our hardware is also open source, that's why we have a lot of clones, which is fine.
It's actually helped us at the start, because people were able to make hardware before we released our own, which sounds disastrous for any commercial company, but for us it was a blessing, because they tested our system.
They found that it works, they found the problems with it, they found the problem with our hardware that we almost put into production.
So, we were able to fix it, and that was great thanks to all of them.
We have a new generation of hardware coming, which is based actually on the community design that community originally started, because they're like, hey, this is great, but there are other microcontrollers, there are other IMUs.
That more energy efficient, that more, more precise.
So, they, for them, for their hardware, they added support into our ecosystem, and then we took what they did, and we also built on top of that to make our next generation.
So, it's a nice symbiosis.
Yeah, we have a lot of consumers.
Our GitHub is, you can see, but there's 186 consumers on GitHub, which I think is pretty big.
Half of them probably are translators, because the system we use uses GitHub accounts, but we have a lot of people who contribute, and we are super proud of the nerves that we built,
and get passionate about open source VR, which, great that we had monada before us, because we were very stand with what they do.
And as I said, we are open hardware, so we have a very big DIY community.
So, if you have a microcontroller and IMU right around, you can probably make slime VR trackers.
From whatever you have, like, that's how I started. You saw the ESP board to the start.
Just don't build a bomb, because they have batteries inside people.
No one has been hurt. I hope not that least people have been hurt, not by our trackers.
But it's just a blessing, but it's so beautiful.
Yeah, we have a big DIY community, and they innovate in our own space, and we innovate in their spaces.
So we provide the communication, we provide, we provide, we open our design, and they build a lot of their stuff.
They make it smaller, faster, more energy efficient, and use different IMUs, and we try to support all of that.
So, where to find us our site is slangware.dev, or you can join our Discord slangware.
This is where we hand out mainly.
We just have blue sky in YouTube, or, yeah, if you have anything like business related or collaboration related,
which out of our support, it will get to correct people.
And I move so far from there.
Let me move myself.
Actually, what I can do is that.
Oh, see?
Now, my head is wrong direction, because I was looking wrong.
Let's call it a set.
The one issue with IMU tracking is that if you know I'm used, it's the drift.
So, like rotation, and especially if the right-to-back position is not,
it's like the precision drops a lot over time.
We have a lot of ways to mitigate it.
So, for normal use, we get like 40 to an hour use.
Of course, it's not like house trackers.
So, we have five minutes left.
Which means I'm ready to the questions, but also.
I know there are people from community here.
We do have a burst of a feather room, which check out our Discord.
I forgot to reach one exactly.
It's a new building.
We will be there, so if you want to hang out, come by.
Yes.
Have a good afternoon.
Have you been speaking to that?
Yeah.
Thank you so much for your report.
Three questions.
First one, do you have a quick start guide?
Second one, what is the hardware?
Is it hardware in or something?
And third one is...
I forgot.
Is it possible to have been using for a VR chat or something?
All right.
I'll give you that.
How do you do it?
How?
Okay.
One, one.
Okay, it works.
Yes, we do have a quick start guide for both day-by
and official ones.
Docs.slimeyard.dev is where you start.
Both, if you want to make your slimes or if you want to use...
Find the someone made.
The hardware is for previous generation that uses Wi-Fi.
We use expressive chips.
We support all of them.
It's built on Arduino framework.
But we use platform I.O.
So we don't use Arduino.
We use platform I.O.
But it is Arduino based.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, VR chat.
Of course.
VR chat is our main is literally what it was built for.
What I'm showing right now is actually like...
More experimental use case, which goes mocap mode,
which makes it track without headset
by counting my steps, basically.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
All right, my questions.
Go.
Yeah, thanks for the talk.
Very cool project.
I was wondering, since you benefit so much from the contributions
back from the community, why didn't you pick a copyright license
that enforces companies who would take your stuff
and add something to it to contribute it back as open source.
That's a good question.
I really hate GPL.
And all copyright licenses.
I don't think that free software,
if you will place a burden on it.
I understand why it quite exists.
It's a good thing for like, subject Linux.
But for us, we wanted something easy.
And it's a mixed bag.
Some people give back, some people don't.
We're trying to build the community that based on
sharing on the open source.
So, most people try to do try to give back.
And I think the software should be free in general,
like MIT and Apache is what I personally stand for.
So, that's why it's that.
And a lot of our maintainers also think similar.
All right.
Time for maybe one more question.
Cool.
By the way, and the next speaker, please come over to the station.
Hi.
I see a lot of, like, your demo.
And the presentation was about having a,
I guess, like, a laptop or a server or something nearby.
Has there been any use or any consideration for doing,
like, a mobile or something that you could put in,
like, a backpack or something.
If I wanted to say, like, record myself out, like,
skateboarding or snowboarding or something like that.
I don't want to display.
I just want to record and then play back later.
Yes.
So, you actually can do that already.
The slender server runs on Android.
We do have some plans to get to iOS,
but the ecosystem is very complicated.
And it can run on any, like, Raspberry Pi on,
have set itself for standard sets.
So, you can run slender server on pretty much anything.
And if you have a, you need the Wi-Fi hotspot.
If you use the Wi-Fi slimes, or you need a dongle.
But it works.
And the server itself supports,
recording into a motion capture from at which calls BVH,
which does record all your movements.
It might, it's still experimental,
even though it existed for three years.
Because not many people use it.
But if people are interested in that,
and start using it, there will be more development
than it.
And we are really, we really want to try to push the motion capture of SlangVR
forward more.
So, yeah, you can do that.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Unfortunately, we are at a time, so you can.
Thank you.