Oculus VR guru John Carmack leads crucial position-tracking development for mobile VR

Oculus VR has one of its biggest brains working on a feature that could make mobile virtual reality even more impressive than its Rift headset or HTC’s Vive.

John Carmack, the chief technology officer at Oculus, revealed in a tweet today that he is spending the majority of his time working on the problem of positional tracking for Samsung’s Gear VR device. This would enable the Gear VR, a visor that goes over your eyes and holds a Samsung Galaxy phone, to tell where you are in the world and when you are moving around. Developers could use this tech to put you in simulations that you can walk around inside of freely and without wires hanging off your body and connected to a PC. This is important because today’s Gear VR can only tell when your head turns or a single axis. When the head-mounted display doesn’t move with your body, it can lead to motion sickness and other problems. This could also open developers up to both the VR and AR markets on a single device.