Oculus Rift - CV1 support

[Myrylyn]

Yes, the latest build is very frustrating... given how great Linden Lab's original Oculus-capable viewer was back in 2014. I've been limping along using that one ever since. It produced such great results that I never updated my Oculus drivers beyond .6.01 (to remain compatible with that one-off project.) Now, I'll have to figure out how to revert everything back... and that's not going to be easy.

Anyway, here's something I made with the "old" Oculus-ready Second Life Viewer:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, there's a huge difference in the quality of the "old" viewer and the "new" one that Nvzn has posted.

[Myrylyn]

A quick follow-up. With the release of the latest "Oculus-ready" beta viewer, you cannot revert back to the one from 2014. Even with "update manually" checked in the settings before you try to log in with the old one, as soon as you try to connect to the main grid you're told "You must update to the latest build."

That's... not good. That wrecks a lot of a the fun projects I've been working on.

 

At least I made one last video before the switch-over. As a major advocate for Second Life, I feel like there is going to be egg on my face after this. I just want to cry.

[Myrylyn]

If you're seeing my video in "Red/Blue" anaglyph, try changing the video's settings (click the gear) to 2D and make sure anaglyph is off. Happy viewing!

[Pyewacket Kazyanenko]

for my DK2 - ive gone back twice and got the old rift 0.6 runtime from occulus..  and then use cntrl -alt viewer.

(i want to try other stuff so upgrade..then downgrade back for SL.. pain in the butt!)

Corrupt? hmm maybe try another runtime?

 

im pretty sure i used this link https://developer.oculus.com/downloads/pc/0.6.0.1-beta/Oculus_Runtime_for_Windows/

[Mimara]

This is a joke, right? The UI is unusable (broken up in the middle of the view), it's jittery, the graphics look like their set to low and it ghosts all over. On CV1. =/

[Rai Fargis]

This does not work for me. I can't see the mouse cursor. The menu bar and chat windows are locked with my view. There are problems with stereoscopy and textures. This is awful, please fix it, Linden Lab - we waited so long. 

I updated my Nvidia drivers, but that didn't help either. The user interface still does not work, the mouse cursor is still gone, and there are still texture and stereoscopy problems.

The old Oculus Viewer had a fine user interface and worked great (with DK2).
Did anyone here get this new viewer to work with the CV?

 

[Grebo Fright]

 I'd recommend CV1 owners hold off and see if we will get any fixes. SL can be fantastic in VR but not in this version of the viewer. It seems to me that very little has been done with this in the last 20 months.

 

Though at least it lets us know what is up. Does not give much confidence for Sansar, that's for sure. Actually, curse Sansar, the Sansar thing was when the Rift viewer got abandonded.

What do you want from us LL, how can we get this going? What would it take to get resources on to this? Maybe you could reach out to Oculus/HTC/Razer etc for some assistance, either technical or financial?

 

I don't like to complain (as I do love Linden Lab very much) and I believe there's only one person left working on this viewer in their spare time and I am thankful for even that. But I have to go back to 0.8, DK2 and CtrlAltStudio viewer for now. Shame because it is a major nuisance to switch between normal Oculus runtimes to run everything else. I may just set up a dedicated machine for that as I am losing all hope that we will get proper VR support in SL and that set up is probably the best there ever will be for it.

[TinaFayet]

I am extremely dissapointed in Linden Labs with this release, 

It's so broken its not even usable, AT ALL.

Would have been better if they said "We are not releasing anything" than releasing this garbage onto us.

 

 

[Key Bandler]

This does not work at all for me... I have not found 1 person online yet using this viewer that has got it to work... for me I see 1 1/4 of my screen is total black... it renders only about 25 percent of the enviroment....  so no walls or textures in most places... head tracking does not work at all... seeing 4 different images at once that don't match... I have an "oculus ready" PC so my computer should be the ideal for this viewer to work....  please fix!!!!

[Rai Fargis]

Hello, Linden Lab. Are you listening? Can someone who is responsible for this disaster answer here? I've been using SL for ten years now and rarely have I been more irritated. The way Linden Lab is treating VR is a shame. 

[Linden Lab]

Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn't meet our standards for quality, and so we've now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.

By definition, Project Viewers aren't ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we're working on, so that you can see what we're up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we're not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.

We can't say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.

We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we're creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).

We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.

[Ai Austin]

Oh that is very sad. This really was working well with the DK2 and the earlier Oculus SDK and certainly enough for some very impressive and immersive training experiences, small group meetings, etc.  I even attended a virtual graduation for distance education students in VR on the Vue regions in Second Life very successfully. You have massive advantages in VR when it comes to the whole linked up social platform and content that is in Second Life.

It would be really helpful to know what went wrong with this latest release as the graphics were really low quality even on a really top end rig.  Basics like the mouse cursor not showing and all the UI not wired up to the settings panel was just odd. This all worked fine before and surely that's not changed by altering things to move to the later SDK. The 1st July 2016 version seemed to reverse all the inputs given and the progress made by internal and external testing that was taken on board by VoidPointer Linden for the previous release.

I hope your team can figure out if this was just a glitch for this release and a quick fix gets you back to the previous state. Don't even think of trying to go for 90fps with distant scenes and all that.  We all understand that's not what the aim can or should be.

[Grebo Fright]

The last 2014 version of the project viewer was 90% there, it was coming together really nicely. Great UI, reasonable resolution. Really the main issue with it was some framerate issues and objects sometimes failing to render.

Since the last project viewer in 2014, the Oculus runtime itself has improved tremendously, making it significantly easier to squeeze performance out of older software (especially with Asynchronous Time Warp). AMD and NVidia have also put a lot of effort into updating their drivers for VR performance using newer Oculus runtime features, as well as for Vive, etc. Seems at the minimum the last 2014 project viewer simply needed to be updated to use the newer runtimes.

[Qie Niangao]

Totally naive question here, from one with barely even an academic interest in Oculus: Is there some reason the LL developers shouldn't (can't?) just open-source the code they were working on? (or did they already?)

(I'd be more interested in a Daydream née Cardboard viewer, but even then I'd probably never use it more than ten minutes at a stretch, so don't mind me.)

[bigmoe Whitfield]

so noticing this was taken down, okay, but the second life page was changes,  no more rift at all guys?    what gives?  we know it needs certain things like 60+fps. but some of us know how to get that constantly.  and I built this RIG just for SL and the dk2/cv1.  so now my investment is wasted?  

 

CPU: Intel® Core i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (4125 MHz)
Memory: 32668 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 10586)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2

 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

Its not clear where this is going...

VR is an opportunity to bring more people into SL. I can't imagine the Lab completely giving up on the SL side while developing the tech on the Sansar side. So, what might be going on? My thoughts are here: Second Life VR Door Closed?

[Rai Fargis]

Thanks for the reply, but I think this is an extremely poor decision by Linden Lab. A decision that throws a bad light on your company. Linden Lab advertised Second Life as VR compatible for years, published a category for VR on the destination guide and released a Project Viewer (3.7) that worked very well with the Rift Dev Kit 2.
The broken update for CV1 was disapointing, especially for people who had invested into VR equipment to use it with the new viewer and waited for its release since 2014. 
VR headsets can work well with Second Life, we saw that with the Project Oculus Viewer 3.7 and the DK2. Using a computer with modern specs, SL could be able to deliver a decent VR experience on the consumer version Rift. If Linden Lab is now giving up on VR for SL, you are breaking your promise to make this work, and everything Linden Lab did to talk this up since 2013 turns out as false advertising. Please at least publish the code for the VR viewer so the community can take over. 

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

Rai Fargis wrote:

 Please at least publish the code for the VR viewer so the community can take over.  

---

I feel a little responsible for this, having asked earlier. Turns out the source has been available all along. (I kinda wondered if that other viewer was a completely original product of Control Alt Studio, or whatever they were called.)

[Rai Fargis]

The original Rift capable CtrlAltStudio viewer was not a clone of the SL Project Oculus Viewer - it was made months earlier.
It worked fine with DK2, but it was very different from Linden Lab's official Rift viewer. Because the new Oculus runtime for the consumer version Rift makes it necerssary to write entirely different code, the developer of CtrlAltStudio stopped working on his viewer and waited for Linden Lab to publish their new source code. He then wanted to update CtrlAltStudio Viewer one last time, not with his own code this time, but based on Linden Lab's. Maybe this will happen now based on the opensourced but broken Project Oculus Viewer 4.1. We'll see.

[Fortescue Birks]

Ok, the promise of VR was  the only reason I've continued to keep my Second Life account open. I guess it's time to cancel.

 

[Mizspellz]

This is very disapointing. SL was the main reason i bought the Oculus CV1

[Jo Yardley]

As mentioned on the SL VR facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/secondlifeVR ) you can use your CV1 in SL but not with the official viewer;

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2016/07/second-life-ends-rift-support-ctrlaltstudio-steps-up/

[Parhelion Palou]

---

Rai Fargis wrote:

Thanks for the reply, but I think this is an extremely poor decision by Linden Lab. A decision that throws a bad light on your company. Linden Lab advertised Second Life as VR compatible for years, published a category for VR on the destination guide and released a Project Viewer (3.7) that worked very well with the Rift Dev Kit 2.

The broken update for CV1 was disapointing, especially for people who had invested into VR equipment to use it with the new viewer and waited for its release since 2014. 

VR headsets can work well with Second Life, we saw that with the Project Oculus Viewer 3.7 and the DK2. Using a computer with modern specs, SL could be able to deliver a decent VR experience on the consumer version Rift. If Linden Lab is now giving up on VR for SL, you are breaking your promise to make this work, and everything Linden Lab did to talk this up since 2013 turns out as false advertising. Please at least publish the code for the VR viewer so the community can take over. 

 

---

Part of LL's comments about dropping the Project Oculus Viewer included: " due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience". The consumer release of the Rift wants 90 frames per second (mostly to avoid queasiness, I think). The simulators in SL do 45 frames per second max and potentially much less on a crowded or graphically busy region. The viewer can claim to be doing more, but at most they're interpolating between frames or just looking at the same simulator frames multiple times.

LL created Sansar because with a new graphics engine (and a required optimization step before edits can be published to an experience) they can get the framerate the VR gadgets want.

As for false advertising, in 2013 LL (and probably Oculus) very likely had no idea the framerate would need to be so high.

 

[Faerierain Lane]

Like has been said a couple of posts ago -  CTRL ALT Studio has stepped up! <3 <3 

They have released their beautiful viewer to the public now and it works perfectly for the CV1!!

http://ctrlaltstudio.com/blog/2016/07/18/oculus-cv1-support-added-to-ctrlaltstudio-viewer

 

With the right tweaking - I can maintain about 60 fps in a largely populated area and 90 or so without the clutter  

There is basically NO difference between what you can get in a normal viewer .. and the VR viewer too - it is BEAUTIFUL!!! 

This is exactly what I wanted for SL - thank you so much! 

 

I did  have a chance to use the SL viewer for the short time it was released and was too depressed to post here due to the quality - but now i've renewed my SL interest due to the CTRL ALT Studio viewer <3 

[Kitty Kiko]

My only concern right now is that cntrl alt studio is no longer in development and is no longer supported. I know they released a version that works with the CV1, and new runtimes, but are they going to continue updates? Because right now its pretty broken as it is and it has very lowsy performance. Hopefully a more competent developer picks up the code and introduces it to a popular viewer or at least does a better job at supporting it than Linden Labs.

 

What a big lowsy dissapointment on Linden Labs end, though I can't say anything they have ever done was good for the community other than mesh. The standard LL viewer itself is garbage as it is with all these random UI changes, and throwing in stuff that is seemingly unnoticed and doesn't help with performance. I'm afraid all we will get out of LL in the future from this point forward is just dissapointing garbage.