Okulus Rift

[cbuchner1]

Hi,

a friend of mine will receive an Okulus (or Oculus?) dev kit soon.

I was wondering how hard it would be to port one of the GLSL or CUDA based 3D fractal raytracers to work on these VR 3D goggles. Unfortunately I cannot tell yet, as the SDK is going to be shipped with the goggles.

Wouldn't it be cool to fly through a mandelbox being totally immersed and having 3D headtracking?

Christian

[marius]

Hi,

a friend of mine will receive an Okulus (or Oculus?) dev kit soon.

I was wondering how hard it would be to port one of the GLSL or CUDA based 3D fractal raytracers to work on these VR 3D goggles. Unfortunately I cannot tell yet, as the SDK is going to be shipped with the goggles.

Wouldn't it be cool to fly through a mandelbox being totally immersed and having 3D headtracking?

Christian

Mine is in the mail too (almost), so boxplorer2 support will be next.

The rendering should be easy, just pre-distorted side-by-side and picking the fov right.
Rendering speed is going to be quite important to make the head tracking plausible enough for your brain to not puke ;-)

-marius

[cbuchner1]

Excellent, then I can focus on getting my CUDA (nVidia Optix) based Mandelbulb renderer modernized a bit, and you can tackle the boxplorer2 challenge

I am also considering making a 3D movie player that puts you in front of a virtual cinema screen.

Christian

[Syntopia]

Yes, the oculus looks exciting.

Combined with a Leap Motion for mapping your fingers to fractal parameters, you could create an interesting interactive environment.

[cbuchner1]

Combined with a Leap Motion for mapping your fingers to fractal parameters, you could create an interesting interactive environment.

Well, I already have access to a Leap Motion dev kit.

I am a bit disappointed that all you get is finger and palm coordinates. No access to raw data so far,
which would be needed for more specialized uses, like object tracking/digitizing.

Christian

[eiffie]

Combine it with a giant 3d printed fractal for the tactile sensation and... wait, I guess that would make wearing goggles a little silly. Well until then this looks like great fun!

[marius]

Mine is in the mail too (almost), so boxplorer2 support will be next.

The rendering should be easy, just pre-distorted side-by-side and picking the fov right.
Rendering speed is going to be quite important to make the head tracking plausible enough for your brain to not puke ;-)

I put in initial shader changes for Oculus support:
https://code.google.com/p/boxplorer2/source/detail?r=173

Note, haven't tried it yet (later tonight.. have device at home) but the distortion is done by casting distorted rays, rather than a post-process shader.
There's a good chunk of pixels drawn that are invisible with an actual device so some performance is still on the table.
And some further performance from adjusting the on-screen-error ('m_zoom') to track the distortion.

I switched the vertex shader to be dumb rather than have it interpolate ray directions and instead compute the distorted ray directions based on screen coordinates. Seemed easiest.. open for suggestions.

Nothing on headtracking yet.

-marius

[cKleinhuis]

lol, keep us informed, especially about the puking
just because our brain would by far not be used to that infinity surrounding
i was thinking the okulus would use a high density display, but then it would be far too expensive i think,
so yea, please provide little reports!

[flexiverse]

Well ... It's actually quite easy to make one your self...

It's all 'off the shelf parts'.

http://bitcortex.com/oculus-libre-open-source-hmd-inspired-by-oculus-rift/

I was thinking about this the other day.

I think you can make one just using, say,  two smartphones one for each eye.
There are already stereo apps for smart phones right now.

Heck, you could use a gaming laptop with 3d display and glasses right now.

Interesting though,  how long have we been waiting for this ?

Really don't know why it's taken this long, we were promised vr when I was a kid...

I expected to be living on the moon in 1999.

 

Lol check out vr in the 80s...

http://www.vrtifacts.com/hmds/platypus-headsets/

[marius]

Interesting though,  how long have we been waiting for this ?

Really don't know why it's taken this long, we were promised vr when I was a kid...

There are serious limitations with VR and it might never be for the unwashed masses short of brain implant delivery.

Seen http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/slides-from-my-game-developers-conference-talk/?
That slide deck gives you an idea of the real challenges beyond showing different images per eye.

The virtue of the Rift is its simplicity (and using a single screen is a huge part of that), wide angle of view, low latency and head tracking, all for $300.
Getting a half decent screen for that price in that form factor was wet dreams until the recent smart phone boom made them a commodity.

Fwiw, I have many a 3d delivery device (sony hmz, large 3d tv, couple of passive computer monitors) but nothing comes close the sense of immersion that the Rift delivers. To the point of being disturbed when sticking out arm and not seeing it. And vertigo when up high.

As figured, floating around in an abstract fractal world is hard to relate to for the brain, hence less disturbing. Pretty interesting actually.

[flexiverse]

Thanks Marius for that link very interesting!

Didn't realise abrash was at valve, he is a  Serious cgi veteran !

Well I'm pleased looks like it's getting there with the rift vr finally !

We've got smart phone evolution to thank for this.

When the Japanese start cloning the rift ...  Boy that's when things will start flying ..
Imagine when Sony, nintendo..et al...get in on this ..
Exciting times !