[Hampshire] VirtualBox and Ifrared devices

Hi guys,

It's been some time since I last posted - good to see there's new
members joining HantsLUG! :-)

I'm wondering if anybody has tried using an Infrared device with
VirtualBox? I currently use CentOS 5.2 on my laptop and have recently
purchased a heart rate monitor/training computer to assist in my
training (unsurprisingly!). The software used to download the training
session information from the device is Windows only however, so I have
installed official VirtualBox 2.0.4 RPM and created a VM into which I
have installed WindowsXP and the relevant software. It is all working
very nicely, and I'm very impressed with VirtualBox too!

However the watch unit uses IR to communicate to the computer. I don't
believe my laptop has a built in IR device, however I know that there
are USB devices available at reasonable prices. I assume that I will
need to check what is supported by the host OS first, but I'm wondering
if it will actually be possible to pass an IR device through to the
Windows XP guest? I know you can map USB devices, but I'm not sure how
it will see an IR device.

Any help much appreciated.

Cheers,
Steve