ChrisAlex Sands

Hmm... i dont think bashing on Cracker might lead to any useful reaction ;-) To make things a bit more clear: bringing full stereo for head mounted displays to SL is far from a trivial task: you have to set up proper frusta to render each eye, for side by side you also have to change horizontal resolution and render into only half the visible screen. Of course this affects all kind of pieces, not just the 3d window, but also all HUD's, menus, buttons... And what have you gained by doing all that? You can display the world in 3d... yeah, sure: but so far we dont have any head tracking, this means you arent "in the world", just looking at it. And third, but that will be the biggest part: all the UI is made for hires screens and being used with keyboard and mouse. Small problem here: you only have half the resolution, in case of the Rift devkit even a rather small one (like 600x750 usable) plus: you cant see your keyboard ^^ So those are rather steep mountains to climb and honestly, i am not sure how much of these issues can be solved by any lonesome code warrior. Hence my initial call to all interested coders to unite their skills and tackle this task together. Reaction so far: zero, none, nada... Strachan has finished the part he was intending to create, i.e. 3d output to shutter glass compatible systems and i am trying to understand the internal structure of the viewer at least to that point where i can decide if it makes sense to try implementing side-by-side stereo output by myself. Think about this all considering the fact that those guys whose day time job it is fiddling with the second life code base are already working on it for quite a while and still havent decided to put out even a a little beta... Well, to sum it all up: better dont expect a working Rift compatible viewer before LL finishes theirs

Hi Cracker! i know you dont want to throw any half made stuff out at the community. I am working on implementing side-by-side stereo into Firestorm myself, usinge Strachan Ofarrel's CtrlAltStudio viewer as a starting point. He already has a working stereo viewer, but "only" for shutter glasses and 3d TV's. So far i have come to a point where i can choose what kind of stereo output i want to use. Now i am implementing the viewports and later i want to look into the head tracking too. I know this all doesnt really make much sense, considering Linden Lab has already a working version in their own viewer and we for sure should use that code base for further development. Nevertheless i feel that throwing out at least a version where people owning an HMD might have a look inside SL as soon as possible might be a good idea. Is there any chance that you might have me take a look at your sources so i could use some of the work you have put into it already and try to put together at least some basic working version for really early adoptors to have a look at? best regards, Chris

CrackerHax wrote: "I am not going to bother with the UI at all. We can wait for SL Viewer 4.0 for that. Linden Labs says they are redesigning the UI to work with Oculus Rift." I can only partially agree with you in this matter. For sure one or two independant developers wont be able to redesign the SL UI experience the way it has to be done. This will take some serious amount of time and money. But: if we can make a start and show how things might be done, e.g. by implementing one feature at a time. I think modifying the chat window so it can be used inside the rift shouldnt be that hard. From what i have found so far there are many people interested but only very few are actually working on implementing things. I think we should try to gather all available ressources and start working on this together. Some things i am aware of is the prior work of Dale Glass and Kirsten Lee who both had some anaglyphic viewer implementations running. Recently i also discovered someone working to implement Razer Hydra controls into SL. And then there is someone writing a webGL based viewer that also already has dual rendering support. And of course there are those wonderful groups of people developing the third party viewers. Did you already try to contact e.g. the firestorm developers? Currently i am trying to gather some overview of available ressources (web sites, forum discussions, blogs, developers..) that are interested in bringing the immersive metaverse to life ;-) I think for a project like this we need some kind of central point to collect info about and coordinate collaboration across all the different groups that have to work together to make it become true. Does anybody know of an existing site that we could / should use as a "focus point"? If we wont be able to use some established site for this i will try to set up some wiki to be used. Lets get the metaverse started! Chris

Hi Cracker, great to see you are working to open SL for the Rift! Since i will have to wait quite a while to receive my Rift (#5xxxx...) i want to prepare my environment as good as i can before it finally arrives. I am currently using some setup similar to the FOV2GO thingy & some tracking (freetrack & Hydra). It would be great trying to get those to work in SL / opensim too! I used to be a programmer "back in the days" too but i dont have a working environment to compile the SL viewer set up atm. Hmm... maybe i should give it another try? Meanwhile i would be glad to help you test things on my current setup if i could receive a copy of your viewer or become involved in further developing the code. best regards, Chris

Hi Griff! i own a Hydra and have ordered my Rift. I am using some DIY (or is that WIP?) setup at the moment: iPod 4 as display, freepie headtracking and a Hydra. Getting those to play along nicely for SL & opensim will be great! I am thinking about using the left hand Hydra for head tracking and the right hand one to have a hand inside SL. This way i'd have full 6DOF headtracking without the angular restrictions imposed by the usual 3 or 4 point IR head tracking devices. Atm the Rift only supports 3DOF, so some way to add the absolute head position will be required anyways. I'll give your motioncreator script a try and would like to test your dll integration too, but i dont have a working SL viewer compile environment set up. best regards, Chris