Oculus Rift?

[average]

Is anyone planning on getting the Oculus Rift? I'm normally very hesitant to back kickstarter projects, but after watching the QuakeCon interview with John Carmack, Michael Abrash, and Palmer Luckey (the guy behind the Rift) I am extremely excited about the potential of this device! I haven't found much information about how exactly to develop for it yet, but I certainly plan on using Ogre!

Here's the QuakeCon interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyf ... 1&t=45m34s

[Mind Calamity]

So, basically almost every major developer is supporting these guys, I don't think this device is going to fail, also the developer kit doesn't seem to be that expensive either.

This is probably going to be the next step the gaming industry will take. Unfortunately, since the Oculus Rift is a stereoscopic device, it doesn't take into consideration the stereo-blind (like myself), so I'm going to skip on this one.

[saejox]

i wish this to succeed.
but i cant stop being skeptical.
lcd screen this close to eye, it hurts my eyes and permanently damage my vision. also it creates massive headaches after an hour or so.
i hope they keep human health as a priority.

[average]

@Mind Calamity, You are right the Rift supports stereoscopy, but you won't need it, in fact Carmack and Abrash seem to completely agree that it's just not that important compared to parallax and depth cues. Here's a link to the interview where they talk about it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyf ... ge#t=3001s

[Kojack]

They plan on having Unreal 3 and Unity support.
If they give me a free one, I'll get it working with ogre.

110 degree diagonal fov is pretty cool for VR, although I'd prefer 180 degree.

[average]

I'm trying to figure out what it would even take to get it working with Ogre. I guess it's basically just a rotational/positional input for the eye point, right? And, I guess you'll have to draw two separate viewports on the screen, one for each eye. So, it should be rather easy to get working, though I haven't worked with Ogre in over 5 years, so I may stumble around for a bit!

[cybereality]

This thing is going to be awesome, such a big step forward for consumer VR. For $300 the Rift is a steal, high FOV headsets like this usually cost $10K+.

[duststorm]

I'm really excited about this project too. So much that I'm even considering buying one and make it support Ogre.

[Kojack]

This thing is going to be awesome, such a big step forward for consumer VR. For $300 the Rift is a steal, high FOV headsets like this usually cost $10K+.

That's why I'm a little sceptical. Companies that have been making consumer vr (like Vuzix and even Sony recently) are half the fov for double the price. I'd love to see cheap high fov vr, but this seems like a big jump over current tech.

So much that I'm even considering buying one and make it support Ogre.

Aww, but they won't give me a free one if you are willing to buy one.


Support in ogre should be basically a few lines of code, depending on their 3d method. My Wrap1200 vr headset works with side by side video (so does my samsung plasma 3d tv), it expects the screen to be split in half. I just made 2 viewports on the screen, made 2 cameras, attached them to the same node (with a horizontal offset) and bound them to the viewports.
I didn't get around to trying the head tracking sdk.
One problem for the Wrap1200 was that you can't use the full res of the headset. Each eye has a 852x480 screen. But the highest res it can accept is 1280x720. That sounds fine, except the 1280x720 is before splitting the side by side image into left/right eyes. So you get 640x720 onto each 852x480 screen. That's not a nice scaling. You can't give it 1704x480.

[cybereality]

Well I had actually got to try one of the older Rift prototypes and it was pretty amazing. Granted the resolution does not compete with a good 1080P flat-panel. And the color/contrast is not as good as OLED like with the Sony HMZ-T1. But the high FOV really transforms it into another experience. I've tried a bunch of other HMDs (Vuzix, etc.) and it totally blows those away. Still not quite "The Matrix", but it does sort-of feel like you are more immersed in the game. From what I have heard the Rift they are shipping will be better than the prototype I tried. So I have high hopes for this project. Especially with big names like John Carmack throwing their weight behind it.

[madmarx]

Thanks for the advice.
I only saw the prototypes device in an older youtube video. I did not know it was made into a commercial product.
If i remember correctly, shader were required to compensate the distortion of the lenses: The projection matrix is a little funny here ^^.
Maybe a custom fpga does that directly in these new glasses?

[duststorm]

Aww, but they won't give me a free one if you are willing to buy one.

They don't need to know

I'm also a little afraid that mounting displays very close to your eyes might lead to headaches or worse, permanent eye damage (remember Nintendo's failed Virtualboy a few decennia ago? ).
Even though a lot of the technology has changed since then, I really wonder how much of it has changed that would make VR glasses less hazardous to your health.

[cybereality]

I don't think the Rift (or any HMD for that matter) is dangerous to your eyes. At least not in the sense that they cause permanent damage. But, yes, they can be more taxing on the eyes than regular 2D (or 3D) displays. So usually you will want to keep sessions to around an hour at a time, and take a short break. You can certainly go longer, I know I have, but then it does strain the eyes a little. Also, when you have a head-tracker on the HMD then you can also get sickness (vertigo, etc.) in some situations. But, overall, I would not be worried.

[syedhs]

If I am not mistaken, creator of Oculus Rift is someone who is very familiar with the device, what is to expected, what is not to do etc - for an example, the fov is much wider than many similar HMD. And it gets a lot of support from well known techies (and not politicians lol). So in essence, the device should be safe.

[rkeene]

Sandswept satudios is making The Dead Linger, and has an Occulus on order when it comes out. We also have Matias Goldberg (Mr. Instancing Ogre3D, dark_sylinc) on staff and he will be integrating it into Ogre3D and The Dead Linger.

[Mind Calamity]

Sandswept satudios is making The Dead Linger, and has an Occulus on order when it comes out. We also have Matias Goldberg (Mr. Instancing Ogre3D, dark_sylinc) on staff and he will be integrating it into Ogre3D and The Dead Linger.

Can't wait to see how that turns out.

[Klaim]

Did you see the announcement that the Occulus Rift will work with Hawken?

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/28/hawke ... t-support/

[Mind Calamity]

Did you see the announcement that the Occulus Rift will work with Hawken?

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/28/hawke ... t-support/

Holy crap! :O

That, combined with the controller (if you can use it with the Oculus Rift) would be the ultimate mech experience (now all that someone has to do is add a force-feedback chair.

[duststorm]

Nice!
I'm already regretting not getting one before the 1 september deadline, but I really didn't like the no-paypal option of kickstarter.
(which is probably not too surprising because they're a US site and are affiliated with Amazon, the competitor of Ebay/Paypal)

[hedphelym]

I backed it on kickstarter,
and we have done stereoscopic with ogre for 3d tv's at work.
it 's basically just a splitscreen with viewpoint from 2 cameras side by side, then when you turn on the 3d on the tv it overlaps the images and the glasses does the rest.
it works VERY well like this.

I'm unsure how to go about doing it with the oculus rift, but I guess it'll be fairly easy.

[duststorm]

For those who can't wait for it to come out:
Someone attempted to build an opensource/DIY version of the Oculus rift.
If you're interested, have a look at http://bitcortex.com/oculus-libre-open- ... ulus-rift/ and http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=15247

[Kojack]

A video review of the dev kit version of the Oculus Rift that is going to be shipped out:
http://www.viddler.com/v/9b6d9f2a?secret=83941706

The consumer version will be better (lighter, higher res).

The view on the monitor while the guy is using the rift is interesting. It shows how you need to render for the rift to work.

I was a little worried when they started talking about the supplied different eye cups for near sighted people. I'm near sighted in only one eye (my other eye is normal). Hopefully having two different eye cups won't ruin the effect (such as if they scale things slightly differently then I wouldn't be able to get the true 3d effect). Other headsets like the vuzix ones have per eye smooth adjustment, not just swapping entire lenses.

[mkultra333]

I'd love to have one of these, but I'll probably skip the dev model and wait for the consumer. Partly because I want to make sure the project doesn't simply vanish along with my money, and partly because I've heard that resolution can be a problem when the screen takes up that much of your vision. (Doubly so because, if I understand correctly, you have to render the image twice at half X resolution then put the two images side by side on a single screen.) Stereo head tracking sounds great, but not if it looks like a pixelly blur. The consumer model is supposed to be higher res, so I'll go for that.

[Kojack]

The rendered view required:

The dev kit is 640 x 800 per eye.
With 110 degree view, that's 5.8 pixels per degree.

My 1200VR headset has 852 x 480 per eye, with 1280x720 input res and side by side only mode, so each eye is rendered at 640x720 then scaled to 852x480.
With 35 degree view, that's 24.3 pixels per degree (native res) or 18.2 pixels per degree (pre-upscaled res). So narrower fov, but smaller pixels.

(Note, the fov is usually diagonal (at least on the 1200vr) and I'm just using the eye width, so the numbers are very rough)

The consumer Oculus is aimed at 1920x1080 res, which would give 8.7 pixels per degree.
Another thing to note is that the Oculus lenses do a pincusion effect (which is why the renderer needs pixel shaders to post process), so pixels in the centre are smaller than those on the edge.

[Kojack]

Only 6 days until the Oculus starts shipping (with an estimated 6-8 weeks to ship all the preorders).


It's been revealed that the Unity integration will only be for Unity Pro. There will be a 4 month trial license for oculus devs.
So if you want to play with the Oculus in Unity for longer than 4 months, you need to pay $1500.

Or just use Ogre.