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Oculus Rift S

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Re: Oculus Rift S

#261

Post by haagch »

segmondy wrote: post #25
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #13

They promised Linux support and took money from people on that premise. Then, when they no longer needed us, they discarded us with empty promises of adding Linux support "in the future". Now they're shipping new products and - surprise - no Linux support. Oculus can shove it.

This! I bought the dev kit 2 due to Linux support. I don't do windows and now the stupid kit is just sitting, need to trash it. I'm never supporting Oculus again.

To be fair, they did release the hardware specs under a good license https://github.com/facebookarchive/RiftDK2.

The source code for the optical tracking software was never released though. So instead of "trashing" it, I suggest donating it to OpenHMD, so someone else can use it for developing optical tracking.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#262

Post by haagch »

polishTar wrote: post #24
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #13

They promised Linux support and took money from people on that premise. Then, when they no longer needed us, they discarded us with empty promises of adding Linux support "in the future". Now they're shipping new products and - surprise - no Linux support. Oculus can shove it.

Did they actually claim they were going to add Linux support? Do you have a source?

To add to the other comments, from the very beginning they had a tux on the kickstarter page.

The Oculus 0.2 and 0.3 SDKs didn't really support Linux at first but as the source code was released, jherico fixed it up and linux support got integrated.

The website for the DK2 https://web.archive.org/web/20140919195305/https://www.oculu... clearly said

> The Oculus Rift and the Oculus SDK currently support Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Most of their 0.4 SDK source was still available but they had already started with putting their optical tracking into a closed source binary, which took them quite a while to release for linux, but eventually they did.

Then a few months before the CV1 release there was this blog post https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

> Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#263

Post by haagch »

tdhz77 wrote: post #19
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #13

They promised Linux support and took money from people on that premise. Then, when they no longer needed us, they discarded us with empty promises of adding Linux support "in the future". Now they're shipping new products and - surprise - no Linux support. Oculus can shove it.

I’m a follower of Professer Lessig concepts of open / free software. As such, Windows is a no-go. I wish an open source game manager / VR system existed.

I would not recommend OSVR hardware at this time, but the effort for free software XR is still alive. With the recent provisional release of the OpenXR standard we at Collabora started making the code for our OpenXR runtime "Monado" public.

It's not entirely complete right now and relies mostly on reverse engineered drivers that mostly miss positional tracking, but we are hoping to have something better to show for it soon.

https://monado.freedesktop.org/

A short demo of the current status on a fully open source software stack using linux with amdgpu/radv, the godot engine and the libsurvive Vive driver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB-vVL-MPos

Re: Oculus Rift S

#264

Post by dTal »

fjabre wrote: post #242
moron4hire wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vergence accommodation conflict is a contributor but not anywhere near a primary source.

The jury is still out on that. There simply is no research to prove or disprove what you or I are saying. My educated guess is that it actually is quite important and the key to making VR more comfortable for long term use. I think it is the primary issue. I am a software developer who works in the neuroscience field. I am not an MD but I have read enough research to know you cannot definitively say what the cause is…

The primary engineering challenge of VR is motion sickness caused by a mismatch of visual and inner ear information, which is extremely well established as causing people to throw up in a wide range of contexts outside of VR. The principles behind modern VR tech are decades old - the reason we're getting consumer VR now, in the late 2010s, is because commodity computing hardware is now fast enough to render scenes and track heads with a low enough latency to prevent motion sickness. However, low hardware latency is necessary but not sufficient to prevent motion sickness - the application developer also has a responsibility not to throw the user around in virtual space without corresponding real-world movement. A great many VR applications do not respect this principle - two such programs were mentioned by JabavuAdams at the top of the thread. Hence, the primary cause of nausea on VR is motion sickness caused by content.

Yes, even in a decent VR experience you will get headaches after an hour or two, possibly or even probably from vergence-accomodation conflict. But that's entirely secondary - you won't last more than a couple minutes on a virtual roller coaster.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#265

Post by wildermuthn »

leoc wrote: post #202
wildermuthn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The move to casual is risky if it alienates the current user-base of gamers. However, it is my understanding that the number of VR gamers isn’t high enough to drive self-sustaining profits for VR developers. There’s a case to be made that a platform like VR can’t be sustained by gaming. That VR needs a killer business application. If that is true, then the Quest isn’t equipped to handle business use-cases (battery-li…

VR is already selling quite strongly to firms who use it for various kinds of training. One good indication of this is the strong market of backpack PCs https://www.roadtovr.com/vr-backpack-pc-at-a-glance/ despite the face that the backpack PC seems to have almost no adoption among home VR users. It also underlines the fact that current workplace VR users aren't particularly price-sensitive. It futher seems unlikely…

Good example of non-gaming uses that seem to have traction! The key is figuring how to enable businesses to make more money by using VR.

In a previous thread about VR, someone was quite negative about the utility of VR, but ended with “talk to me once there’s an Excel of VR.”

There are billion-dollar opportunities here, but only if VR is accessible as a platform in the same way a PC is.

To your point about backpack VR, however, the Quest will undoubtably accelerate these kind of use cases!

Re: Oculus Rift S

#266

Post by moron4hire »

fjabre wrote: post #251
moron4hire wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working in VR and AR for nearly a decade. I've even built my own headsets. The experiences that make people sick are always low framerate. I've put people through experiences pegged at 90FPS for hours at a time with no nausea.

Perfectly valid point. I still think vergence/accommodation needs to be solved as an important key step in VR dev for more comfortable experiences. Its harder to do than just upping frame rates. You need foveated rendering to start with but im sure you know the rest. If you want VR, well you need actual VR. Its not enough to trick your vision superficially. You have trick the whole system. I digress.

Foveated rendering doesn't solve vergence accommodation. Your eye will still be focused at infinity regardless of where you are looking, you'll just have the illusion that the foreground or background are out of focus. Eye tracking plus dynamic lenses (perhaps liquid lenses) or real light fields are necessary.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#267

Post by philwelch »

phs2501 wrote: post #197
philwelch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one; I just find the tracking pretty fragile. I often need to set it up again on a weekly basis.

This really makes me happy I went for a Vive. I stuck the lighthouses up near the ceiling, calibrated once, and it still works perfectly eight months later. And no USB cables. Hopefully they perfect inside-out tracking eventually but in the meantime the lighthouse system just works for me.

Yeah, I should have gone with a Vive.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#268

Post by leoc »

karmakaze wrote: post #232
leoc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR is already selling quite strongly to firms who use it for various kinds of training. One good indication of this is the strong market of backpack PCs https://www.roadtovr.com/vr-backpack-pc-at-a-glance/ despite the face that the backpack PC seems to have almost no adoption among home VR users. It also underlines the fact that current workplace VR users aren't particularly price-sensitive. It futher seems unlikely…

TIL Backpack PCs are a thing. I wonder how people would react if I sat in a coffee shop with a backpack PC/keyboard and doing dev in VR. Can I code on a Quest?

Well, if you were sitting down you'd be better off with a gaming laptop. (Unless you want the backpack for the gargoyle chic of course ... ;) ) As Quest is an Android-ish mobile device, I assume it's not a great development platform even if you choose to sideload things. You'd probably want to use the Rift S or one of the high-end WinMR HMDs plugged into a Windows laptop. (Only Valve's SteamVR is supported on Linux, but there's no SteamVR HMD with markerless inside-out tracking out there yet. You could use a Rift and clamp a SteamVR Tracking base station to your table, if it's stable enough, using a battery pack to power it. That would be so Linux-on-the-desktop, in more ways than one.)

But then you'd run into the big (and hard-to-fix) limitation of first-gen VR, the very low pixel density compared to conventional displays, which is a particular problem when you're working with text. It's a problem with is partly compensated for by the unlimited virtual screen size that VR gives you, especially in comparison to the small and awkwardly-placed screens you're often stuck with in a mobile context. So you could certainly give it a go, especially if you get one of the highest-res WinMR headsets, but on balance the laptop screen would probably still be more practical for coding today.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#269

Post by dwighttk »

gpm wrote: post #244
dwighttk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true... what does VR offer in those categories over desktops?

Better IO? There's almost certainly educational value in being able to view (and sometimes interact) with a 3d model of a cell/organ/body/physics simulation/3d chemical model/...

it's different... not sure it's better.

Re: Oculus Rift S

#270

Post by andybak »

idlewan wrote: post #188
andybak wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just a huge pain in the ass to set up The trick is to leave it set up ;-) But is it really that hard? I use a Rift in a hot-desking office and setting it up takes all of 30 seconds each time I move. The room setup doesn't need to be redone. I don't bother with the guardian boundary for front-facing cameras. I just plug in the USB+HDMI and I'm done.

Moving furniture around because you don't have a 3m x 3m space free all the time is tiring and a major pain point for me (I own a vive, I don't re-setup everytime though I do change the boundaries & optimal furniture placement sometimes)

You don't actually need 3m x 3m for many experiences/games. I work in much less space and only bother clearing space when I need it.
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