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Actually Steam/Vive brought that tech first to market with the HTC Vive + Lighthouse, and after trying both the Lighthouse tech has noticeably less latency (through less complex tracking mechanisms). Plus side is Valve is giving away the tech for free.

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What do you mean it is giving away the tech for free?

You can use Vive's lighthouse tracking commercially for free, with no royalties or patent licensing. For whatever reason, Facebook still decided to re-invent an inferior implementation using cameras and computer vision.

"Inferior" is debatable. It is pretty darn accurate. And it could potentially track my coffee mug, which has value :)

I don't think it's debatable. The Oculus tracking system at best does the same as the Lighthouse tracking, except lighthouse has less latency, less processing requirement (you can track a room full of hundreds or thousands of discrete balls since there's no CV loop). Plus in theory multiple users can use the same set of lighthouse emitters (they work kind of like Wii's IR based tracking system).

I don't think lighthouse was originally royalty-free and without any licensing fees back in 2016 when these systems released, pretty sure that was announced later.

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