Alan Yates of Valve talked at Hackaday Supercon about the research and development of the hardware in the HTC Vive virtual reality system:

Hackaday: Why Valve’s Lighthouse Can’t Work

[Alan Yates] is a hacker’s engineer. His job at Valve has been to help them figure out the hardware that makes virtual reality (VR) a real reality. And he invented a device that’s clever enough that it really should work, but difficult enough that it wasn’t straightforward how to make it work