Mercedonius
Mercedonius is an immersive installation consisting of mixed reality audio, mixed media, and physical computing. Headphones, with an attached Vive Tracker, afford 6 degrees-of-freedom binaural audio. This piece explores a malleable relationship with time, allowing the listener to synchronize, de-synchronize, and re-synchronize with objects in the space through interactive audio.
To implement head-tracking I used the Vive Tracker (https://www.vive.com/uk/accessory/tracker3/) mounted to Bluetooth headphones. The device is usually used for tracking wrists, knees, or handheld objects, but it provided a straightforward method to track head position and orientation with stellar accuracy.
I used this Max object suite (https://github.com/worldmaking/Max_Worldmaking_Package) which had the ability to interact directly with SteamVR. Usually Vive requires Unity or Unreal to function, but this plugin allowed me to program the entire experience in MaxMSP. I followed this guide to use SteamVR without a headset: https://github.com/shinn716/SteamVR-without-an-HMD.
Inside Max, I had direct access to position and orientation data (pictured below).
