Calibration of electromagnetic tracking devices

Electromagnetic tracking devices are often used to track location and orientation of a user in a virtual reality environment. Their precision, however, is not always high enough because of the dependence of the system on the local electromagnetic field which can be altered easily by many external factors. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the calibration techniques used to improve the precision of the electromagnetic tracking devices and to present a new method that compensates both the position and orientation errors. It is shown numerically that significant improvements in the precision of the detected position and orientation can be achieved with a small number of calibration measurements to be taken. Unresolved problems and research topics related to the proposed method are discussed.