Collabobo announced the revival of the Instrumentation Development project libsurvive, which focuses on the development of an open implementation of Lighthouse movements for virtual reality systems. The project had been inactive since 2022, leading the original developers of Libsurvive to retire completely and transfer project rights to Collabora’s Github repository. In order to oversee the project’s progress, two new Collabora employees from the virtual reality solutions department have been assigned as project maintainers.
Libsurvive is responsible for tracking the position and orientation of headsets and VR controllers in 3D space through 6 degrees of freedom (3 coordinates of position and 3 orientation angles) using the Lighthouse technology developed by Valve for the SteamVR platform and compatible with devices like HTC Vive. The Lighthouse technology utilizes infrared laser-emitting base stations that scan both horizontal and vertical spaces with synchronized pulses. Devices equipped with sensors interpret these pulses to determine their own position and orientation.
Additionally, Libsurvive can be utilized with devices supporting both the SteamVR 1.0 and SteamVR 2.0 platforms, and can serve as a driver for tracking with the Monado open source stack, which implements the OpenXR standard. When paired with the Libsurvive driver, Monado can be used in applications supporting OpenXR, such as openxr-plane for the Godot game engine. The code for Libsurvive is written in C and is distributed under the MIT license.