Alan Yates

Alan Yates is an engineer who developed virtual reality hardware at Valve, where he invented Lighthouse, the laser-sweep positional tracking system used by the HTC Vive and also known as SteamVR Tracking. Road to VR described him in 2015 as "a key player in the system's design and implementation", and the same article noted his tongue-in-cheek job title, "Chief Pharologist", a nod to the then-secret Lighthouse project. He is a named inventor on Valve's original Lighthouse patent, filed with Jeremy Selan, and on later Valve patent families covering head-mounted display position tracking and eye tracking.

Outside Valve, Yates is known in the electronics hobbyist community for his personal website, "Alan Yates' Laboratory" (vk2zay.net), his circuit-a-day "Advent Calendar of Circuits" video series, and talks at the Hackaday Superconference.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Re-opened every cited source (Hackaday, Road to VR, UploadVR, Game Developer, Make:, Engadget, PC Perspective, Embedded.fm, vk2zay.net and six Google Patents records) and checked each quote, date, number, co-inventor and attribution against them. About review dates.

Electronics hobby work

Yates's personal website, vk2zay.net, collects his electronics projects under categories such as antennas, ham radio, high voltage, test equipment, microcontrollers and homebrew. In December 2011 he published an "Advent Calendar of Circuits", releasing a video about a different electronic circuit each day in the run-up to Christmas. Hackaday noted that the entries included a current-limiting voltage regulator, a metal detector, an AM transmitter and receiver pair (day 7) and a tester for burnt-out Christmas lights (day 12). He repeated the format in December 2014, and his site also lists an exhibit at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013 in San Mateo.

Career at Valve

Joining the VR research team

In a June 2016 Reddit post reported by Game Developer, Yates wrote that he "was super fortunate to start at Valve right around the time Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team". He added that the group "has since grown to encompass about a third of the company, but the key individuals that solved most of the really hard technological problems and facilitated this generation of consumer headsets are still here working on the next generation". He made the comments as an aside while discussing how to track an OSVR development headset with Lighthouse.

In June 2016 Make: magazine published a photo gallery from a visit to Valve's hardware lab, naming Yates among the Valve staff who spoke with its reporters. Items the gallery attributed to him included a display he had built early in Lighthouse development to show what the sensors were seeing, a signal tester, a motor tester, and his first attempt at sweeping a laser, a prototype made from an Xbox controller motor and a laser that the magazine said "would go on to become lighthouse!"

Lighthouse

Speaking at the 2016 Hackaday Superconference, Yates said, "I actually invented the Lighthouse tracking technology quite early," but added that he had been "very worried it would be almost impossible to implement, so I sat on it for months and months." The patent he and Jeremy Selan filed for Valve, with a provisional priority date of 10 November 2014, describes transmitters containing two orthogonal rotors that each sweep a fan-shaped laser beam at constant speed, with small optical receivers on the headset; position is found by timing when each beam crosses each receiver. It was granted as US patent 10,338,186 on 2 July 2019.

Valve revealed Lighthouse alongside its SteamVR announcements in March 2015. In Valve's statement, Yates said, "In order to have a high quality VR experience, you need high resolution, high speed tracking," and that Lighthouse "gives us the ability to do this for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough BOM cost that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices." After the reveal he posted a short FAQ to answer repeated questions. Road to VR summarized its points: like all optical systems, Lighthouse is limited by occlusion; it can work with single sensors and no IMU, but the IMU reduces latency; tracking volumes can be chained "like cell towers"; one base station can track a rigid object that has an IMU; the base station emissions are Class 1 and eye-safe, with the internal Class 3 sources enclosed and interlocked; and, unlike a camera system, the sensors know their own IDs and the hardware reports angles directly, so pose calculation can be decentralized.

In May 2015 Yates staffed a booth at Maker Faire that showed a working base station spinning lasers from two cylindrical chambers, photodiode sensors, a wireless controller framed in 3D-printed plastic, and a handheld proof-of-concept that UploadVR captioned "the original Lighthouse prototype device". He told UploadVR that the tracking could also be used for robotics and indoor micro-flight drones. In January 2016 he posted a photo of the latest iteration of the Lighthouse sensor, the small photodiodes that cover the HTC Vive headset and controllers.

His 2016 Superconference talk, which Hackaday wrote up as "Why Valve's Lighthouse Can't Work", went through the engineering problems the team had to solve before shipping. According to Hackaday's write-up, the measurement comes down to timing a sweep from a rotor spinning at 60 Hz to within one cycle of a 48 MHz clock. The first prototypes used laser line elements bought on eBay; the rotors used fluid-dynamic bearing motors from hard drives; and after problems sourcing lenses, the team made its own. Each sensor is an ordinary BPW34 photodiode, a few millimeters wide, behind 120 dB of analog gain, and the optical sync flash uses a peak of 50 W per blink, which Hackaday called probably the limiting factor in expanding the system to larger rooms. He suggested that MEMS or other electro-optical scanners might one day replace the spinning rotors, and pointed hobbyists to an ASIC on a breakout board sold by Triad Semiconductor for building their own Lighthouse-tracked devices. Hackaday published a separate interview with him in 2017, describing him as "one of the developers of the HTC Vive and the ever-important 'Lighthouse' position sensors".

Later tracking and eye-tracking research

Yates continued to appear as an inventor on Valve patent filings after the first Vive generation. A family filed on 24 January 2020, with Joshua Hudman, Gordon Wayne Stoll and Evan Fletcher, covers tracking a headset or controller with angle-sensitive detectors that measure the angle of arrival of light from light sources, with the sensor data processed by machine learning or other techniques. The same four inventors filed an eye-tracking application on 27 January 2020 that uses LEDs, silicon photodiodes and polarizers that block specularly reflected light, so that only scattered light reaches the detectors. A later family, with a priority date of 28 September 2021, covers systems that detect corrupted position-tracking samples so they can be ignored; its US patent was granted in March 2024, and a continuation on LED droop compensation was granted on 23 June 2026.

Public comments

Yates has commented publicly on VR technology and on Valve's position in the industry. In September 2015 he wrote on Twitter that "Spherical photos and video are not VR!", calling them one form of content that can be viewed in a headset; he later clarified that he was interested in more advanced forms such as light field systems that allow some parallax.

In May 2016 he wrote in a Reddit comment that "every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program", and that the consumer Oculus Rift was, apart from Oculus's own computer-vision tracking and Fresnel lens design, "a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus" when Valve set up a copy of its "Valve Room" at Oculus's headquarters. Road to VR, which reported the comment, noted that "it's impossible to verify precisely how much cross pollination occurred" and later added that the Rift's industrial design, audio and custom Fresnel lenses differed from the Vive's.

After Valve let 13 full-time employees go in February 2019, Yates wrote on Reddit in March 2019, "I am still at Valve, still working on VR R&D with the original core team", that VR "wasn't the main group affected", and that "Hardware is of great strategic importance to our future, VR and otherwise".

Talks and interviews

Date	Venue	Subject
July 2016	Embedded.fm podcast, episode 162 ("I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast")	The science and technology of virtual reality
November 2016	Hackaday Superconference	Design and engineering of Lighthouse
August 2017	Embedded.fm podcast, episode 210 ("The Glass Hour")	His entries for the 2017 Flashing Light Prize
2017	Hackaday Superconference	"Introduction to Vacuum Technology"

Patents

Selected Valve patents naming Yates as an inventor (US grants; most families also have European, PCT and Asian counterparts).

US patent	Title	Filed	Granted	Co-inventors
US 10,338,186	Positional tracking systems and methods	10 November 2015 (priority 10 November 2014)	2 July 2019	Jeremy Selan
US 10,286,308	Controller visualization in virtual and augmented reality environments	27 February 2016	14 May 2019	David Sawyer, Tristan Reidford, Yasser Malaika, Jeremy Selan
US 11,073,906	Eye tracking system for head-mounted display devices	27 January 2020	27 July 2021	Joshua Hudman, Gordon Wayne Stoll, Evan Fletcher
US 11,209,657	Position tracking system for head-mounted display systems that includes angle sensitive detectors	24 January 2020	28 December 2021	Joshua Hudman, Gordon Wayne Stoll, Evan Fletcher
US 11,933,976	Position tracking systems and methods for head-mounted display systems	27 September 2022 (priority 28 September 2021)	19 March 2024	Evan Fletcher, Jeffrey Walter Mucha, Joshua Mark Hudman, Gordon Wayne Stoll, Jeffrey George Leinbaugh, Charles Lohr
US 12,663,642	Position tracking systems and methods for head-mounted display systems with LED droop compensation	18 February 2025 (continuation)	23 June 2026	Same as US 11,933,976

See also

• Lighthouse
• SteamVR Tracking
• Base Stations
• HTC Vive
• Valve