6DoF Device Pose — `tdlidar_devicepose`

Mount the phone on a tripod (or hold it), walk it through the room, and have a TouchDesigner camera fly exactly the same path — the heart of projection-mapping and AR-aligned visuals.

Category: Camera & Vision · Tier: Free · Needs: ARKit world tracking (LiDAR device recommended for solid tracking)

What it does

This op streams the phone’s full position and orientation in real space — where it is (in metres) and which way it’s pointing. ARKit builds a world coordinate frame the moment tracking starts, then reports the camera’s pose against it every frame. Wire that pose onto a Camera COMP and your virtual camera matches the real device, frame-for-frame. It is the camera-driver of the whole TDLiDAR family.

OSC in

Outputs

out1 (CHOP) carries the pose channels, named after the addresses without the leading slash: tdlidar/arpose/tx, …/ty, …/tz (translation), tdlidar/arpose/quat1…quat4 (quaternion), tdlidar/arpose/euler/pitch, …/roll, …/yaw, and tdlidar/arpose/tracking.

Parameters

| par | default | what it does | |—|—|—| | OSC Port | 9000 | UDP port to listen on (match the app) |

Quick start (beginner)

In the TDLiDAR app, enable 6DoF Device Pose and start streaming.
Drop the 6DoF Device Pose op into your network. Confirm OSC Port matches the app (9000).
Watch out1 — tx/ty/tz should change as you move the phone, the euler channels as you tilt it.
Drop a Camera COMP. Export tdlidar/arpose/tx → tx, ty → ty, tz → tz onto its Translate, and euler/pitch → rx, euler/roll → ry, euler/yaw → rz onto its Rotate. Add a Geo/Render and your scene now moves with the phone.

Advanced patterns

Use the quaternion, not euler, for clean rotation. Euler channels gimbal-flip near ±90°. Feed quat1…quat4 into the Camera COMP via a small CHOP-to-matrix setup (or a Python tdu.Matrix from the quat) to avoid the snap.
Align a TD scene to the real room. Capture the pose at a known physical spot (e.g. phone resting on a marked floor cross), store those values, and offset all incoming pose by that snapshot so TD world-origin sits where you want it in the room.
Smooth the hand-shake. Run out1 through a Lag CHOP (lag ~0.05–0.12) or Filter CHOP before exporting to the camera — kills micro-jitter without adding visible latency.
Gate on tracking quality. Use a Logic CHOP on tdlidar/arpose/tracking >= 2 and only update / hold the camera when tracking is normal, so a “limited” relocalisation glitch doesn’t throw your camera across the room.

Gotchas

tracking is an int state, not a quality bar — 0/1 mean ARKit doesn’t trust the pose; only 2 is solid. Always gate on it for a show.
Pose is relative to wherever tracking started, not a fixed room origin. Re-launching tracking resets the world frame; build a re-zero step into your patch.
Euler is radians, not degrees — multiply by 57.2958 (or use a Math CHOP) before feeding any op that expects degrees.
This is the one sensor you almost never want raw on a camera; without a Lag/Filter the projection visibly trembles.

6DoF Device Pose — tdlidar_devicepose