Showing posts with label Oculus Rift. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oculus Rift. Show all posts

Monday, April 11, 2016

Consumer Oculus Rift Blues ...

It started so great .. I was so excited! .. my free consumer rift (I was a DK1 backer) arrived on the 6th of April!

Unfortunately I didn't have time to actually try it until the next day.

But then .. I plugged in my Oculus Rift and .. nothing.

I downloaded their compatibility tool and it said that my Intel i7-3930k processor isn't good enough, even though it's a lot faster than their minimum Intel i5-4590 processor according to all kinds of benchmarks.

So I got a little frustrated



Then I started wonder if it was a software issue .. after all, it didn't automatically install anything when I plugged it in.


I do vaguely remember seeing this piece of paper in the Oculus Rift box that had a web address on it, but somehow it got lost.

I tried to find something on the oculus home page, looked for "downloads" or "drivers", but it didn't turn up anything. All I could find was the SDK stuff.

Finally I turned to twitter .. thankfully @Clavus helped me out


Searching for "Oculus Home" finally made me find https://www.oculus.com/en-us/setup/.

Why was this virtually impossible to find from the main site?
Who knows .. I just know it cost me a lot of time.


Finally some progress though!


After lots of uninstalling/reinstalling stuff & browsing I found the location of the error log.


Now I managed to continue the installation


And then ..


Literally the first blue screen I've seen in years ..

I try again ...


So I guess the Oculus Rift really doesn't want to work with my onboard USB 3.0 ..
... even though I never had any issues with it before ...


Fortunately @Clavus came through once again


So I bit the bullet and ordered an USB controller card. Since it worked for @Clavus I figured that it would be a safe bet.

4 long days later my PCI USB controller finally arrived..

I wasted time making the mistake to think that the incorrect connector was supposed to be attached to the card. Oops!


So now everything should go smooth now, right?


So I try to try to use the repair option of the Oculus Setup.exe, which starts to re-download hundreds of megabytes of data ... again


So I try to reboot, un- and re-plugging cables in and out, but to no avail.


Finally I give up. My Oculus Rift simply doesn't want to turn on.



PS. I'm going to assume that these installer problems will go away eventually, once Oculus starts realizing the problems with it.

And hopefully they'll make their USB code work with older USB plugs as well.

Now, I know I got the Rift for free, and I am grateful. But I have to be honest; had I bought the Rift, after buying a Geforce Titan for it and it still didn't work, I'd ask for my money back and buy a Vive instead. (and I'm saying that as an Oculus fanboy)

I know that you're supposed to have an expensive system to run a Rift on anyway, but it's unreasonable to force people to upgrade stuff that doesn't need upgrading.

My system worked fine with the DK1 and DK2, I see no technical reason why it shouldn't have been made to work with the consumer Rift as well...

I really hope this will be fixed somehow .... :(


Only bright side is that it's not a distraction anymore, I need to work on my real-time CSG Unity plugin anyway!



Update:
Tried to re-install oculus software since apparently new version was released.

The result:



Update 2:
Tried it at work:

Monday, June 16, 2014

Oculus rift + mouse control experiment II

Added Mecanim animations to model to animate legs (not exactly great animations right now, but good enough to show that it's possible). Also scaled head to near 0 to make sure that you don't see pieces from the inside of the head when you rotate the view using the Oculus rift. (thanks for the suggestion Merlijn Van Holder!)


Update: I noticed that the oculus rift neck model has a serious flaw: it rotates the eyes around the neck, as if your eyes where in the back of your head, instead of the font. So when you, for instance, rotate your head to look at your right shoulder, your eyes are way back on your left shoulder. I'm assuming this will not be an issue anymore when the DK2 arrives ...

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Oculus rift + mouse control experiment

Just a simple experiment on how to control a gun inside 
a game like setting using a mouse together with the oculus rift. 


I obviously used Unity here together with some plugins from the unity asset store.
The camera is placed inside the models head, I just used a model from some unity mecanim example.

The head is moved using IK. Ideally the head would not be rendered at all, but mecanim is a complete black box and only exposes a limited amount of it's internals.
So as far as I can see it's impossible to not render the head without actually creating a model without a head.

I should be able to animate the legs using mecanim, but I haven't tried that yet.
You would then be able to see yourself walk :)

The hand is also moved using IK, unfortunately mecanim doesn't allow me to modify the position of the elbow and it moves inside the character, which is unfortunate.

It's surprisingly easy to aim this way ... as long as you have that 'laser pointer' that is :)

Monday, January 27, 2014

VR head movement momentum

So about 2 weeks ago I went to Steam DEV Days and had a blast! Valve's presentations where certainly eye opening on some issues. Can't wait until they put the videos only so I can see the presentations I wasn't able to attend, I'm sure they'll be great too.

Anyway, in one of the presentations (I think it was "wild west of VR") the guys behind AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA talked about their Oculus Rift version of the game and how they discovered this interesting trick where they would slowly tilt the world which caused the player to automatically compensate by moving their heads in the opposite direction. This made the players feel like they where falling downwards. Also interesting that they only had to do a 45 degree rotation to give the impression of a 90 degree turn so that the players wouldn't get neck pain while playing the game. Players would swear that they where looking straight down even though they weren't.

In other VR presentations they would talk about sideways and backwards movements making players feel sick etc. (which is sort of common knowledge already I guess)

After these presentations I was suddenly wondering... maybe we've got this all wrong .. what if it's not the movements themselves which make people feel sick? (or at least not completely)
What if the problem is that we're not simulating momentum for the head when doing these movements?
I mean if you move sideways in real life no way that your head will remain perfectly still, it'll bob slightly to the left or right (depending in which direction you're moving). Maybe our brain is expecting this and when these natural movements are missing people get sick?

Unfortunately this is very hard for me to test as I seem to be completely immune to motion sickness :-/

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Oculus Rift & virtual texture space lighting

I was reading a thread on the oculus rift forums where some people where experimenting with super-sampling when rendering the oculus Tuscany scene in unity, which really improved the graphics quality. So some people where experimenting with rendering the scene 3-4x 1080p ... ouch

So this made me think of that old idea of mine where you would render the lighting of a scene in the page buffer texture of a virtual texture setup ..
For the oculus rift, VR and 3D in general, this would have following benefits:

  • Lighting is (partially) decoupled from the camera (don't need to do all the lighting twice)
  • Lighting can be (partially) cached, Diffuse as long as nothing moves in between it and the light
  • Lighting can be updated at different rate than the frame rate if / when necessary..
  • Diffuse and specular lighting could, perhaps, be updated at different rates? (would mess up physically based materials though, unless lighting normalization is done during the final pass)
  • Specular could have a different update frequency depending on distance
  • Specular could be calculated for both camera's at once, materials would only have to be read once, specularity could perhaps be compressed as 1 color + 2 intensities?
  • Lighting resolution can be decoupled from the actual resolution of the final rendering of the scene (which is fine because we generally want smooth shadows anyway)
  • Specular will obviously look better in texture space because of the regular normal map aliasing issues.
  • The final rendering pass, which is done twice, would be relatively simple and cheap.

Note that you don't need unique texturing for this to work, just unique texture addressing.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Oculus Rift


So Friday 2 weeks ago my Oculus Rift finally arrived! yay!
And the next day I left on a pre-planned vacation for two weeks .. (very bad timing)
So I did the unthinkable .. I took my old laptop + Oculus Rift with me and tried it out while on vacation (wife did not approve)

It's pretty cool.

I let several people try it and they all had a 'wow' moment when they first put it on. Most of them weren't even gamers ..

This makes me feel like this is going to be the next big thing ..


My impressions:
  • It's really responsive. 
  • Resolution is lower than I'd like and the screen door effect is a little distracting 
  • I seem to have a couple of dead pixels (fortunately not in the center but near the edges) 
  • I'm noticing some tiny distortions when I move my head in the Tuscany demo, which is probably because the software distortion part is an approximation.
  • For some reason the unrealistic-ness of the colors in the Tuscany demo is more apparent on my rift than on my monitor. Not sure if this has to do with the quality of the display in the rift vs my monitor.
  • It definitely feels really immersive, makes you feel like you're really there..
  • I tried some things that are supposed to be sure ways to get motion sickness, fortunately I seem to be immune to it.
  • I did notice that turning the view with my mouse/gamepad makes me a little bit dizzy, but only during the turning. I tweaked the turning speed in unity (made it slower) and that made the dizziness disappear .. The HL2 beta Oculus Rift seems to handle this well by easing your way into a turn instead of making your virtual body turn at full speed right away.
  • Mouse & keyboard doesn't seem to work very well with the rift ..
    You're constantly looking for your keyboard ... blind typing still requires you to know exactly where your keyboard is apparently ..
  • Bought a gamepad for the rift, now I understand why everyone was using it... much easier to use blindly ... still want to try the razor hydra with it .. I get the impression the hydra is perfect for VR
  • There seemed to be a strange blur when you move your head (in the Tuscany demo) .. but it's not there when you rotate using the mouse/gamepad ? I didn't notice it in HL2 / TF2 .. in fact either the blur was removed in the later version of the SDK (software after all?) or I simply stopped noticing.
  • It's a bit annoying that it's set up as another monitor (which is understandable) which either forces you to mirror a screen (which is not a bad thing) or stumble in the dark while you try to start a game on your rift 'monitor' (and you can only see a portion of the screen in your rift so you're constantly looking for your mouse cursor). Unfortunately you can only mirror your primary desktop monitor (I have 3 monitors). And since your monitor is bound to have a higher resolution than you Oculus this all makes things kind of awkward at times. (Some Oculus Rift demos don't start full screen so don't change the resolution, which you all have to do manually every time)
  • Also they did a surprisingly good job at hiding the need for positional tracking (although sometimes you can still tell)


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