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Oculus Rift - 3D Head-Tracking Headset

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by wccrawford, Aug 1, 2012.

  1. wccrawford

    wccrawford

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    As noted, the Rift needs some post-processing applied to the screen to make it work. The indie version of Unity doesn't support this.

    In the end, the question is if Unity will specifically add support for the Rift in Indie or not, because it doesn't appear you can do it as a third-party.

    For Pro users, A DLL would make it easier, along with a shader for the image processing.
     
  2. Ostwind

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    Even as DLL it would probably be a native library a not a pure .NET which also means Unity Pro only.
     
  3. mariobyb

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    $1500 for unitypro to start working with the rift is no go for me. Better start looking around for other alternatives.
     
  4. ShadoX

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    same.. it would be a shame if the Oculus people would limit the amount of people who can actually make games for it by not supporting the Indie version. :/ I just hope that Oculus and the Unity guys can work out something.. :)

    [edit] actually it would be cool if the Unity people could give everyone who picked up a Rift a a discount for Unity Pro.. at last in case if they end up having to use Pro to actually support it.
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2012
  5. mariobyb

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    I'm no expert on the subject of software engineering a 3D engine. But I would assume that implementing stereoscopic render support at the core level of unity's render processing would benefit performance. Since stereoscopic 3D requires you to render your scene twice, this must affect performance/fps considerably. Maybe there are performance shortcuts to be gained by tight integration with the unity's core system. If so, a plugin wouldn't be necessary, and rift support in unity free is perhaps a possibility?
     
  6. _Petroz

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    I will be very disappointed if Unity are going to force Pro usage. If they were going to do that they should have come out and said so before the KickStarter campaign ended.
     
  7. angrypenguin

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    It'll all come down to whether or not it needs a plugin, and isn't that up to the Rift guys? Or by "support" are Unity implying that it'll be native?
     
  8. _Petroz

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    I was under the impression it was going to be native.
     
  9. mariobyb

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    My impression from what I've heard/read in interviews with the oculus rift designer, is that unity will support it out of the box when the sdk is released. If it will be pro or free I have no clue. If its for pro, many of us rift backers will be screwed. I would be forced to consider another development tool, and that would be a shame, because unity is awesome.

    Unity really need to rethink their sales policy.

    • Free license - free for all
    • Indie/hobbyist license - $250 tops! including all pro features.
    • Indie/professional license - $1500 for the developer/studio that wish to release a title
     
  10. angrypenguin

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    Everyone wants more for less. If Unity gave everything away there'd be no income and then there'd be no Unity.
     
  11. Jaimi

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    I guess it's human nature to want something for nothing. But if someone is willing to spend $300 for the promise of beta hardware sometime in the future, surely buying pro and getting the benefits now could be a reachable short term goal.
     
  12. _Petroz

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    The problem is I have indie licenses on a number of platforms and last time I checked Unity doesn't support mixing indie and pro so I would have to upgrade all platforms to Pro, so it goes from $300 to $4000. Even if I could get only Pro for PC for this Occulus stuff, it is a jump from $300 to $1800, that is not insignificant. The occulus is something I want to play around with, I probably wont release anything. Experimenting with hardware is popular indie scene so it seems contrary to require Pro which is targetted at professionals.

    What ever the case, I would have liked to have had some kind of announcement prior to the end of the KickStarter campaign. If they're going to hold us all to ransom until we upgrade to Pro without having stipulated that earlier, that would be pretty underhanded.
     
  13. Jaimi

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    Personally, I hope everyone can use it. I'm sure a lot of people are hoping it will work with the indie version, both Unity and Oculus included (I mean, the whole point of the kickstarted is to get the SDK to as many people as possible). But if for some technical reason that doesn't work out, I don't think that would really classify as being underhanded or as holding everyone for ransom. If you're just wanting it to play with, then you weren't really the person that the kickstarter was aimed at. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, probably most backers are the same.
     
  14. mariobyb

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    I'll have to disagree. I got the strong impression that both Carmack Luckey goal with the kickstarter is to make the Rift available to as many established and indie developers as possible. Sure they want the big boys developers to adopt their games for it. But they also need the tinkerer and the hacker to play around with it, to figure out the best way to do VR, with hardware, software, ergonomics, design, functionality and so on and so forth...

    I think they should support the Oculus Rift as a Build Target both in indie and pro. Do the right thing Unity!
     
  15. Morgan

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    I’d say it’s more the responsibility of Oculus to not overpromise when collecting Kickstarter money (and I don’t think they did). Our money for Unity/Oculus support went to Oculus, not to Unity. I don’t think Unity has a responsibility to do any particular thing unless, of course, they made a promise. If it’s technically difficult to support the Rift in Indie (I have no idea) but easy in Pro, then that would make sense. Unity’s time/money into the project is a risk just like all of our Kickstarter contributions, and they have to manage that vs. the other things their time/money could go into.

    Of course, if support in indie IS easy, or if it’s hard and Unity wants go for it anyway, that would be great!

    Also, the dev kits are indeed aimed at small developers, not just big ones. But probably not so much at developers who are just “playing” without plans to release. Not, in other words, at non-publishing hobbyists. Now, a lot of people got it just to “play” anyway, and some great things may come from those folks after all! But this version of the Rift seemed aimed at developers who will add support to their actual titles.

    Disclaimer: I haven’t decided whether to get the dev kit or not! I know they plan to keep offering them, but I’d also love to just go for the consumer version next year. Decisions...
     
  16. _Petroz

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    Agreed, this VR stuff was born out of the tinkerers. Palmer was active in online community based around VR where people were playing around various hardware.

    The Unity logo was on the KickStarter and there were public announcements about supporting the Rift. If it seemed likely or even a possibility that it would require Pro, UT should have been up front about that.
     
  17. dogzerx2

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    Hope this thing doesn't give you headaches! The screens are real close to the eyes.
     
  18. Morgan

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    They have lenses inside, a little bit like a Viewmaster or stereoscope, so you’re focussing on a spot far in the distance. Much farther and more restful than focussing on a computer display a few feet away in fact.
     
  19. SNS_Case

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    Hopefully not too far in the distance... I wear glasses and when I heard that the current dev version isn't great for people wearing glasses, I was a little nervous until I realized that it didn't matter since I'm near-sighted. If the lenses actually require your eyes to be capable of focusing in the distance, I might be in trouble. Either way, I'll make it work considering I signed up for one of the dev kits during the Kickstarter. I can't wait to see the breed of games that comes from this, and already have some plans myself! With over 5600 dev kits pledged for at the $300 level alone, I don't think this will be vapor..tech.
     
  20. dogzerx2

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    Wow... nice to hear that!

    Hope this device kicks off!
     
  21. _Petroz

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    Can you provide a source for that information? My understanding was the purpose of the lenses was direct each eye to a separate part of the single screen to provide the stereoscopic image and a wide FOV.
     
  22. wccrawford

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    They said the lenses were to distort the screen and provide more pixels directly in front of your eye, where they're more sensitive, and fewer pixels for your peripheral vision.

    This is the first I've heard about them being used to simulate distance vision, and I'm not sure that would even be possible.
     
  23. TylerPerry

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    It is possible, i have a HMD and it looks like it is a meter or something away.
     
  24. kingcharizard

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    I want them to create something like the animus or whatever is used n the Assassins Creed games.. To put the player in the Virtual Reality world like its our world
     
  25. wccrawford

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    But is that from having the screens be at the right spots to make your eyes spread, or because it uses some lens tricks? remember that even on a flat screen, fake 3D makes things look like they are in front of and behind the actual screen. It's all part of the illusion.
     
  26. Jaimi

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    Definitely more than possible, a necessity - Most people can't focus on anything that is only an inch from their eyes. The lenses have to be doing this, or the glasses would be useless. All headsets have used lenses for this purpose. You can see by holding a paperback book an inch from your eyes, and see what you get without lenses. :)
     
  27. Morgan

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    The lenses certainly do that, but in addition, from the official Kickstarter FAQ:

    "The Rift is causes very little eye strain, particularly compared to other standard displays or headmounts.

    Normally, when you take a break from using a monitor or TV, the idea is to give your eyes a chance to focus and converge on a distance plane. This is a natural position of rest for your eyes.

    With the Rift, your eyes are actually focused and converged in the distance at all times. It's a pretty neat optical feature, for sure."


    And here’s a more detailed quote from Oculus creator Palmer Luckey:

    'Affordability is one consumer concern that Oculus are keenly keeping in mind, but so too is accessibility. With much of Rift's development team sporting contact lenses or glasses (Luckey himself is near-sighted which causes issues considering that "the Rift's focus is set out to infinity") can we expect the consumer model to be adjustable in terms of optic focus?

    "If you're far-sighted you'll be ok, if you have perfect vision you'll be ok," replied Luckey. "At the moment, you might have a little bit of trouble if you're near-sighted as the focus is set out to infinity, but it's not a hard engineering problem to solve to be able to put in a feature where the focus would be adjustable like binoculars. Or we could have lens inserts for correcting vision. Those features probably won't make it into the dev kits because we're trying to get them ready really fast and we've only got a short period of time. But for the consumer version it will definitely be adjustable. I'm near-sighted so if anything I have to do it for myself!"'


    If far-distance is our eyes’ natural relaxed focus state (which fits my own experience, and I find many mentions of it online) then that sounds good to me! (Although I recall reading years ago that one other—possible?—cause of HMD headaches is when your focus and parallax don’t match: so what if your focus is at infinity but your parallax—which varies as you look at near and far objects—tends to be closer than that? I’m thinking the effect may be negligible for most gaming, where you’re looking at things 5, 10, 20 meters away; it sounds like more of a problem for spending long periods looking an object right in front of your face, as many non-gaming VR and haptics applications might do.)

    That more-pixels-in-the-center thing seems to be a small but unavoidable optical side-effect, not the main function of the lenses. If you look at the image-pair output in some of their videos, you can see that the fisheye effect (when was and uncorrected on an external display) is not that strong, meaning it adds only a little detail to the center. But it adds a whole HOST of problems that must be dealt with (by burning hardware power) in software. I'm sure they'd rather avoid these issues if they could get an undistorted image: a) you have to use a shader (or other method) to re-render the output with the distortion removed; b) you have to corred for chromatic aberration or you'd get color-fringing; c) the result entails cropping off the corners of the image (may be optional but they do it, so those corners must look odd otherwise) and losing quite a few pixels to the rounded black “mask"; and d) the resulting image is not pixel-grid-perfect for the sake of sharp, clean text and UI. Now, that extra detail in the middle, however slight, is still a nice thing, but you’re going to look all over the FOV, not just hold your eyes still and turn your head—so you’ll actually lose detail at times too. So I don't think it's worth those other issues, and it can't be the purpose of the lenses.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2012
  28. wccrawford

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    So then it's still up in the air how well this will work for us near-sighted folk. In the past, I've had good luck with HMDs because they're close enough to my eyes (barely) to focus clearly on them. Time will tell if the lenses in these are different enough that my eyes can't focus right on them.

    Worst come to worst, I will seriously consider contacts again. ;)
     
  29. Morgan

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    Here’s one thing I’m trying to get my head around: how the horizontal/diagonal/vertical FOVs work out.

    The pixels are perceived as distorted in a fisheye-like sense, but they’re still square on average, in terms of width vs. height. The image you get is not being rendered squashed/stretched in terms of width and height (which sounds very hard to correct for in a lens anyway). You can see the raw 1280x800 output, with each eye essentially getting a slightly-taller-than-square 640x800 image (minus a black mask around the outside). Further, any such distortion would affect width, height, and diagonal in equal proportion: if you get fisheye on X and Y, you get it on the diagonal too.

    But the Kickstarter page says:

    "Field of view: 110 degrees diagonal / 90 degrees horizontal”

    Here’s an online display calculator you can play with (just pretend inches are degrees—which works fine as long as you don’t MIX inches and degrees).

    Put in 640x800, 110 “inches” diagonal. What do you get on the horizontal? 69 degrees, not 90. (And 86 degrees vertical.)

    So I have to assume they are measuring 110 degrees diagonal in a case where you did NOT crop off the corners?

    It seems to me that what the lenses do to the square (half-)image is a pincushion effect. Therefore, a normal square game render needs to be "tucked in": software barrel distortion. Result: you see a perfect rectangle even if the pixels are not. (Plus it looks like Oculus’ raw output examples round off the rectangle's corners with additional black mask—maybe just as a design choice).

    So, if you measure that barrel image, and want to be fair and not count the black part, you would get a smaller diagonal.

    From that calculator, I get about a 144-degree diagonal for the FULL image, to achieve 90 degrees horizontal. That indirectly tells us the amount of pincushion: 144 degrees becomes 110 degrees.

    What I’m hoping is that the black mask is optional (except maybe for a bit of side-bars to stop image from leaking to the other eye). Then you could get the full 640x800 res and a wider diagonal FOV—even if your H and V FOV are unchanged. Instead of seeming like you were looking through a square “hole” in the helmet front, it would look like you were viewing through a “star-shaped” pincushion hole. Which is a little odd, but as long as you render extra FOV to compensate, the result would NOT be distorted. The scene would be intact, and you’d see extra at the corners. As a game designer I’d like that option. (Without having to write my own alternative Rift software :) )

    If I’m understanding all that correctly, I give credit to Oculus for not claiming a larger diagonal FOV—which they truthfully could, but instead they're stating the FOV for a “square hole” which is what most people expect to see.
     
  30. alptraum

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    just doing some quick googling, trying to find an answer to what i hope is a simple question.

    Does the Oculus Rift require a monitor to use, or is the headset the actual monitor?...i mean this isn't like the nvidia 3d gaming glasses where we needed a 120 herz monitor and u had to look at the screen well wearing the glasses to make it 3d right?.

    Hoping this is all a stand alone system...if anyone knows please feel free to post that info for me.

    Loving the fact they are in negotiations to work with the OUYA team...this will be one hell of a wicked combo..I can imagine people jacked into the OUYA sitting on the couch playing interactive games together.
     
  31. Morgan

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    It’s a full HMD (head-mounted device) meaning that a stereo display is contained right within the headset, along with motion-tracking so you can look around within the virtual world by turning your head. True VR, not just 3D within the pane of a monitor. (Audio is supplied by your own headphones.)
     
  32. alptraum

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    very nice, so then this device could also be used for privacy applications...IE: hooking it up to a users laptop and closing the lid, only allowing the wearer to see the users desktop then correct? I know thats not fancy VR..but it is something a couple of my clients have wanted the ability to do for a while now.
     
  33. Morgan

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    No, that wouldn’t work: one eye would see only the left half of the desktop/application, and the other eye would see only the right half! And both halves would be distorted by lens curvature and chromatic aberration. Same goes for games that aren’t Oculus-ready. Software support must be built specifically into each title.

    But there are already a number of lowish-cost VGA- and computer-ready glasses out there (mainly for movie watching; no stereo 3D or motion tracking) that would serve the privacy function you want. They’re pretty low-res (as is Oculis Rift) last I checked, so may not be ideal for conventional apps/computing. (And you’d probably leave the laptop open with the screen brightness down, or you’d have no keyboard/mouse! Some laptops won’t even run closed.)
     
  34. alptraum

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    Hmmmm pity I was hoping it would somehow support 2d, i've been waiting for a head mounted display for some time, without requiring a monitor..oh well still a very interesting concept, cant wait for my dev kit.
     
  35. angrypenguin

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    Yeah, I'd have thought that some minimal 2D support would be important (I've seen HMDs where 2D works by just showing the same thing on both screens) for usability reasons. You don't want to be swapping the headset on and off as you pop back to 2D menus and whatnot. Of course you could just draw a line in the sand and say that nothing in a game which supports the headset can ever be 2D, but that's a bit of an issue in itself.
     
  36. _Petroz

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    You could possibly capture a 2D image and render it to a surface inside Unity.
     
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2012
  37. patman

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    I think we're going to see a rejuvenation of flying games. A joystick to fly the plane or spacecraft and the headset to look around seem a wonderful match for the capabilities of this hardware. If you had some way to detect the position of one hand you could activate switches and dials in the cockpit, too. Voice commands might work, but I have a feeling many people will feel awkward putting on goggles that make you blind to the room around you, then talking to yourself. It would be cute to have a camera attached to your computer, giving a view of your actual room on a screen in the game -- a ground control screen.
     
  38. mgear

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  39. Arowx

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    No it would work but you would be limited to the resolution of the headset, so would need to visualize the desktop view.
     
  40. Arowx

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    Link this to a Kinect like movement tracking system and any first person game could be amazing.

    Just remember to tidy up before you start jumping and diving.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2012
  41. Morgan

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    It’s not as simple as that, because there are lenses between you and the headset’s single screen: each eye only sees half. Two displays, in essence, that the computer’s output “sees” as just one—plus the lens distortion. Both “problems” can be solved in software, but that doesn’t help alptraum’s situation.


    Too bad! But it seems legitimate, lukcily: not vapor, just temporary bad luck (the display they wanted to use was discontinued).

    I hope to pick up a used dev kit cheap in the summer, after people with too little time to develop for them start to get bored with them :)
     
  42. rifter

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    I wouldn't count too much on that, as there will mass of content to play with (prototypes, beta-tests, old games made compatible...) ;)
    And i don't know how much time yet the devkit will be sold on their website... (normally it won't be a mass-product)
     
  43. patman

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    Good luck! Personally I'm planning on being the coolest kid on my block (for the first time in 62 years) for even having one, even if my development plans don't work out.
     
  44. Marvn

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    I'm looking forward to my Oculus Rift kit finally being shipped out like I never have for something else. This could be a serious game changer. I can't see anybody selling their dev kit any time soon. Not until there's the final/next version out. After all, it wasn't that expansive.

    Unity will be my primary engine for creating various VR experiences and then hopefully something serious will come of it.
    Is anybody here working on something in particular already?
     
  45. Finjitzu

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    Really looking forward to this. Probably going to order a dev kit when they are 'final'. I've seen some Unity demo's online. Has anyone got one yet?
     
  46. Arowx

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    The developer versions are just in production due out in March.

    Will it come with a Unity ready code base, e.g. Occulus SDK for Unity?
     
  47. Marvn

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    That's what's been announced but no details as to what exactly that means. I hope they managed to come up with a solution that doesn't require Unity Pro.

    Today they sent out a status update, explaining how the manufacturing process is being set up and how they tried to solve the problem with glasses and near-sightedness. All seems to be working out fine and they will update the community about SDK at some other time. Incredible how great the dev kits will look, I certainly expected more of a work-in-progress look.
     
  48. Padges

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  49. yuriythebest

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    the dev kits are alerady "final" in that you'll get a 1280x800 split between 2 eyes - personally I'm waiting for the consumer version which will hopefully have a higher res screen. that being said - people who tried it don't seem to be bothered by even the current resolution - more to do with the refresh rate/blurriness during motion that you see sometimes
     
  50. wccrawford

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    Most of them don't mention the resolution, but when asked, they say that it's noticeable. I'm taking this to mean that it's ignorable, but always there on the edge of your mind.

    And I'm fine with that. For now. ;)