Griff Golding

I have had mine for a couple of days now too! I have been giving demos to all my friends, gotten it to work with Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Have not carefully calibrated it for me or tried using it for more than a few minutes at a time yet. I'm looking forward to merging in your patches to Firestorm and getting up to speed on development!

I recently finished getting the Razer Hydra 3D controller working with SL. I think new input devices like this will become much more important when we start wearing head-mounted displays and find ourselves unable to see our keyboards and we want to move around too much to always have our mouse hand in the same place. The example of SL on a TV screen is another reason to want something other than keyboard and mouse. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Razer-Hydra-experience-or-interest-3D-6-degree-of-freedom/td-p/1962871

I love seeing that there is both actual progress being shown here by Cracker Hax and word of official support some time in the future. There is no way I want to wait until official support, which might not come until the next version of the Rift, so I am looking forward to Cracker (or anyone else) getting us started with something we can play with and that Linden can start using as they work on official support. I recently finished getting the Razer Hydra working with SL. I think new input devices like this will become much more important when we find ourselves unable to see our keyboards and we want to move around too much to always have our mouse hand in the same place. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Razer-Hydra-experience-or-interest-3D-6-degree-of-freedom/td-p/1962871

This method of using the Razer Hydra with Second Life does not require any programming or compiling. Sixense Motion Creator 2 is a free download from http://sixense.com/products/motioncreator Using Motion Creator, I made a configuration that works for both the stock Linden and Firestorm viewers. I posted the configuration in the forum that is used for sharing user-created Hydra configurations: http://sixense.com/forum/vbulletin/showthread.php?4393-Second-Life That forum can be difficult to access, so if you send me an email address I will send you the config file. It is just plain text XML, no danger of viruses. This configuration uses both controllers. One controller replaces the mouse. (This works but while sitting at a desk the mouse is still easier.) The other controller handles flying, walking, Alt and Ctrl and I think I may decide I like it better than the keyboard for everything but typing. There are plenty of buttons not yet assigned for you to add voice and other actions. I am using rotation on both controllers but not position. I look forward to hearing from anyone else who is interested in using Hydra in SL. Can anyone think of a way to have one of these control your avatar's hand without changing the server? Maybe we will see some of the physical puppeteering ideas return.

Razer Hydra is now running the Flycam for me. I did it by modifying the 3p-libndofdev project. This is not part of the SL or Firestorm source code, but is linked in from the library libndofdev.lib at the last step of compiling the viewer. Source is available from https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/3p-libndofdev/ I changed ndofdev_win.c to get values from sixense.dll instead of from DirectInput. There are several possible next steps: 1. Get SL to use more of the available features of the Hydra. (Currently it is just using one of the two controllers, only two of its buttons, and not its thumb joystick. Some configuration is possible - changing the sensitivity and which axis controls what and choosing whether it is active in different modes - but you can't choose what any of the buttons do and there are several more things that one might want to control beyond the ones currently available.) 2. Figure out how best to give this to other people so they can use it. (If you are already compiling a SL viewer, I could send you my Win32 release or debug libndofdev.lib if you don't want to compile it yourself or my modified source code if you do. If you are not compiling SL, I could possibly send my compiled viewer .exe, but I do not really want to get into the business of distributing a mutant viewer. 3. Integrate my new code with the existing version so it could work with either Hydra or DirectInput N-degree-of-freedom devices and see about getting LL and/or Firestorm or any other viewer to incorporate the changes.

There is a start to the effort to get Oculus Rift working with SL: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Oculus-Rift-Virtual-Reality-Headset-Second-Life-Viewer/td-p/1826591 The Leap Motion looks interesting, but I think it is better for when you are using a monitor than when wearing a head-mounted display because your hands have to be near it. I have ordered the Razer Hydra instead which seems more promising for VR: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Razer-Hydra-experience-or-interest-3D-6-degree-of-freedom/m-p/1962913

I am happy to see that there is already some promising progress. Even just the side-by-side style rendering you have already shown would let people get a taste of SL in 3D using either a mirror and some patience (if one of the images were reversed left/right then this would work: http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/help/index.htm) or some kinds of mirror or prism glasses. As far as I can tell the first sample image above does not seem to be stereoscopic, so don't anyone knock themselves out trying to see the stereo effect in that one. I agree that there are a lot of things to do on the path toward SL becoming a truly great experience with a HMD like the Rift, but the side-by-side view, making it stereoscopic, and warping it for the optics sound like fine things to start with even if the whole journey looks long from here. As more SL citizens and developers get their hands on a Rift, we will get more interest in pushing further on making it better in various ways. I have now managed to get both the Linden and Firestorm clients compiling and running in VC++ Express. I have not tried making any modifications yet. I have also gotten the Oculus SDK and would appreciate any assistance you can give in following in your footsteps.

There is a feature request "Native support for the Razer Hydra" https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-26492 It mentions several interesting ways the Hydra could be used. I may be interested in doing some programming to make Hydra do more things for us.

Someone is getting started working on getting Oculus Rift to work with SL: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Oculus-Rift-Virtual-Reality-Headset-Second-Life-Viewer/td-p/1826591

Razer Hydra is a pair of controllers (one for each hand) that can tell their position and orientation and have several buttons like a console controller: http://www.razerzone.com/minisite/hydra/what There are many games supported, but I do not see any mention of using it with Second Life. Is anyone here using a Hydra? Any tips on getting it to work? I see that SpaceNavigator, a similar 6DOF controller, is supported: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SpaceNavigator I am hoping that there is a way to get Hydra to work with Flycam without changing any code, but I can recompile the viewer if needed. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Flycam

It is great to see that someone is ready to get into this! I am also a programmer waiting for my Rift to arrive and hoping to see it work in SL. I have not tried setting up the SDK yet and I have not compiled a SL client before, but I am interested in getting into it. You have probably already seen the stereoscopic patch for Second Life. It seems to have been updated as recently as last June. Hopefully it is helpful to this effort: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2972 If you have any interest in blazing this trail as you go down it, I for one am interested in following. I might even manage to be helpful.