Jump to content

Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset Second Life Viewer Development


Cracker Hax
 Share

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3606 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

I will be coding the open source vanilla viewer to work with Oculus rift. First I will just do a simple version that only move the camera around with your head  motions.

If there is enough interest I may post a kickstarter funding project to develop a full Second Life Virtual Reality viewer that addresses problems such as moving your view around separately from the interface, or perhaps even a dissolving/fading interface so as not to interfere with your VR view.

I may also include support for motion detection such as Leap Motion to replace the whole keyboard/mouse thing (such as a popup keyboard you can use your hand motions to type on).

I am expecting my Oculus Developer kit in late March or early April 2013, so stay tuned to this thread for updates.

If anybody is interested please reply to this thread with any thoughts concerns or questions.

 

Thanks!

 

- Cracker Hax

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 95
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I have no suggestions regarding what features you're thinking of at all. But I do have a suggestion for anyone who finds this interesting: read a novel called 'Idoru', by William Gibson. Actually I recommend that for people not interested in this too.

It has a major plot section dealing with virtual worlds; worlds which to me are very much like what I would expect an advanced version of ours would look like. It was published in 1997 (the story takes place in approximately our present—one which does not match the imagined one of the novel) so I'm not at all sure how that could be, but read it for yourself and decide. The thing that reminded me of it was the mention of 'hand motions'; in the novel, the girl who is the virtual world protagonist goes 'inworld' with her computer on but wearing goggles, and she moves her hands in space to control everything.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You should make a twitter page to keep us updated! I'm ridiculously excited, but pretty absent-minded. This way, you can keep us up to date with any kickstarting/beta version/etc. that's on the horizon!

PS, I love the idea of the leap motion with a pop-up keyboard. I thought the same thing and am glad to see someone with the same vision actually taking action.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am very much interested in this. In fact, I have been thinking of the educational applications of Second Life and may be able to apply for grants for what you are suggesting from a federal source, if it is applied to the classroom. Let me know if you would be interested in making this project focused on making the headset for purposes of classroom immersion (which would be no different than for any other purpose) and collaborating with a high school teacher. We could speak about this project further. I could pen a grant and provide a high school class to test the hardware. A kickstarted would be fine but I think I could get us access to a few large High Tech Ed grants at Federal and State levels, as well as some private company grants that focus on instructional technology. The combination with an interface that makes the keyboard unncessesary would be great.

 

Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Hey Cracker Hax,


I'm awaiting my Dev kit scheduled for sometime in April.  Did you receive yours and you are starting to code?  You must have been an early adopter.

Is there a way to PM you?  I'd like to get some insight from you as I start to play around with the APIs.  What do you recommend I start reading up on?


Cheers,

JB Sivith

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

id love to help test it out too, not sure if you will be that successful with a kickstarter campaign, maybe but not sure a ton of people will be getting the rift (only about 15,000 dev kits i think so far preordered ) but maybe just suggest donations. ;-) i hope you can get it to work soon that would be awesome id love to see sl in 3d and head tracking ;-) make itneracting with the sexy ladies more fun!


you should once you get your Rift and work on the project (the SDK will be able to be downloaded so you might be ble to work on it before you get your Kit once the Dev Center comes out the first of April you should post on there and also perhaps ask people to help test it out who do have the rift so they can provide feedback and what. I really hope you get it working :-) also if you could make sure to remove the (press ecape) to leave mouselook thing would be nice ;-).  Cant wait!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

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:

 
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.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I got side by side rendering working... now to add frustrum controls and Oculus Rift SDK shaders.

I am only doing a quick and dirty implementation of the Oculus Rift SDK because I think it's really Linden Labs responsibility to get all this working, not the community (virtual reality is a huge selling point for second life, and if they don't want to mess with it... well I guess they will just miss the boat).

A lot of things aren't going to work.... For instance... since the resolution is probably not going to be high enough with  Oculus Rift VRGs, a lot of  text is going to be illegible.  Also, the view has to be stretched around using shaders (which means what you see in this screenshot will be stretched to cover your entire view so you can't see the edges) so any UI that cannot be moved around will be totally unusable since most of what you will be able to clearly see will be right in the center of the screen. .

From the way it's looking now, you won't really be able to do a lot besides move around and voice chat. A complete redo of the UI will be needed. For virtual reality, ui will need to float around in 3d space so you can set it somewhere like off to your left, or above or behind you if you wish. Having it stuck right in your eye will be undesirable and annoying.

 

SL Snapshot_001.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 3606 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share


×
×
  • Create New...