Today I introduce Vireio Perception, a Virtual Reality 3D driver designed specially for the Oculus Rift. Some of you may have been following the work I've been doing in the DIY section, for others this may be the first you hear of this. Anyway, Perception is basically a new stereo 3D driver with 3DOF head-tracking. Although only a handful of titles are supported at the moment, the experience you get with the driver is something that is not possible with current 3rd party options. In particular, it will pre-warp the image to match the Oculus Rift optics, handle custom aspect-ratios (needed for the Rift's strange 8:10 screen), and utilize full 3DOF head-tracking. The plan is to launch in conjunction with the Rift dev-kits, so probably in December 2012.

The website is now live (just a holding page for now, will update soon):
http://www.vireio.com

Games currently with full or partial support:
- Left 4 Dead
- Half-Life 2
- Portal 2
- Skyrim
- Mirror's Edge
- AaaaAAAAA!!!!!!!!
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Dear Esther
- DiRT 2

Stereo modes supported:
- Oculus Rift
- Side-by-Side
- Over Under
- Horizontal Interleave
- Vertical Interleave
- Checkerboard
- Anaglyph (red/cyan + yellow/blue + green/magenta w/ black & white option for all)

Trackers supported:
- Hillcrest Labs

Here is an image from the Side-by-Side (cross-eye) mode so you can get an idea of the quality:

For the initial December release I would like to get all those games listed fully supported (some still have minor issues) and I would also like to get another 5 games on that list. I also plan to support Vuzix Wrap HMDs; they already work with the SBS mode just need to add tracking support. Down the road I'd like to get more stereo modes supported like Nvidia 3D Vision and AMD HD3D, dual projectors, planar mirror, etc. And, of course, I'd like to grow the supported games but that will come with time.

Just to be clear: this is a commercial product. I am still investigating pricing options, but for sure it will be under $50.

Please share your thoughts and requests for the software. Thanks.

Great to see you get this off the ground. Way to go!

(PS. How do you pronounce the name? Rhymes wth stereo ? Why the odd spelling? )

I've been saying it "Veer-e-o". It stands for VIrtual REality Input Output, if you're wondering.

Nice! I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this...

My requests would be Battlefield 3 and Borderlands 2

Skyrim has been sitting unplayed on my HDD in anticipation. Glad to see it's nearing market-readiness!

As for features, I would like to see a 2D mode, with one screen doubled to both eyes. Strictly for performance reasons when working with a backtop.

great work cyber! I know what i'm going to be getting Will be following!

Holy smokes, looking at that mirrors edge screenshot with crossed eyes gave me that slight vertigo feeling... I cant wait to try it "for real"
I'd definitely consider the product, if only to play Portal 2 and Mirrors.

Ha. I figured it was a combination of "vr" and "stereo"




I second that request !! High speed 2D warp mode please.

Awesome cybereality! Any chance you can post additional sbs snapshots up - would love to test them with my DIY Rift! I immediately tried the Mirrors Edge pic, however quickly realized that it was in cross-eyed mode (as things just did not look right on the Rfit LOL)!

Think I could get a preview copy of the driver to check out?

Nice work CyberReality, its great to see how far you have come with this in a short time...

Awesome cyber. Will this allow separate head and gun movement ?

Cool. I got Dear Esther during the last Steam sale and haven't got around to playing it yet. Might just wait now till December to give it a go. Mirror's Edge looks interesting. I tried looking at that pic with crossed eyes. Will be interesting to try that with your driver. Do you get a great sense of vertigo while playing that game?

Awesome!



If you can make Battlefield 3 work, I'm sold. You set the price and I will pay anything

Oh, and ArmA games have view fully decoupled from aiming, those games already support TrackIR for head tracking. I think they would be perfect to showcase the rift on a first person shooter environment.

By the way, if you got DiRT 2 working, I guess you can also support other Codemasters racing games like DiRT 3 and F1 2012

I would love to see this support emulation of joystick axis for 3DOF head rotation, which is supported in some sims like Live for Speed.

Hi cybereality!

this is my first post in this forum. I have been lurking around here for quite a while since the Rift appeared on kickstarter (i'm also a backer). I'm feeling like this kind of crack addicted 10$ Wh... waiting for ANY Rift related news. Sadly i am not a developer, but a technophiliac (don't know the correct spelling) so i can not help much here...
A mess i did not find this site earlier
However. I have been reading every Page and monitoring your driver work log, my thougts were something like this:

A price under 50 bucks is fine for this hard work - keep going your amazing work

Forgive me my cheesy engl

Nice work cybereality, awesome!

You're gonna need an iron stomach to play Mirror's Edge with the Rift. That game will cause motion sickness!

Unfortunately most games not built for the Rift won't work that well, because, for example, they are moving the camera around all the time, regardless of your head movement. Mirror's Edge is probably the worst example of this. I really love the game and I'm looking forward to trying it with the Rift, but I'm not expecting it to be a great experience.

That being said, keep up the good work!

Since people commonly just refer to Left For Dead 2 as Left For Dead is the driver for both or just one and which one

AFAIK It will also work for L4D2 because it is a Steam enginge game.

From cybereality's worklog:

This looks awesome. Definitely my most eagerly anticipated Rift product. Although I'm rather poor.

I so wish I had written this myself. I've hacked around with this kind of thing before, and I probably could have done it, but I never get around to finishing things or marketing things.

I'm very impressed by your work. How did you get to be such a genius?

Good job cyber! Looking forward to try your driver.

For my personal use, I'm mostly interested in this driver if it can be used to add Rift support to RAD development environments like Blitz3D, BlitzMax and other similar products. Even Unity is interesting if it will turn out to be a pro only support feature.

That would kinda suck, but I kind of doubt that would happen. They don't seem to like to limit the platforms the free kit can build for, just the 'shine'.

This is a bit of a n00b question, but what kind of PC set up would you guys recommend to run these smoothly for the rift?

Does the driver change the FOV of the supported games to fit the Oculus-FOV? Would be great, I guess.
Although I do not feel that the image is very "wrong" with my DIY-system, when using the Lens Distortion Injector that just does this post-rendering magic, without changing FOV.

Looks great. And some of the supported games are actually interesting, which is even better. Although isn't the original post slightly against the forum rules for commercial entities? Sorry, couldn't resist.

I don't know whether a wishlist makes much sense, but here are some more reasonably current games I'd like to see with proper Rift support, some most likely easier than others since their engine is already covered:

- Black Mesa Source (which is a fantatstic free Source engine version of Half Life 1)
- Dishonored (supposedly Unreal Engine 3)
- Racedriver GRID (same engine as DIRT)
- F1 2011 (same engine as DIRT)
- Deus Ex Human Revolution
- MS Flight Simulator X
- Fallout 3 + New Vegas
- Oblivion
- Bioshock (Unreal Engine 3 IIRC)

Very nice work cybereality! Keep it up!

He's not a commercial entity, he's our very own Cybereality!

Yeah, I don't think commercial rules apply to moderators.

Hey cyberreality. Thanks for creating this great driver.

Will you be letting reviewers on other websites test it out on different systems to see what the pc requirements will be? Given the desperate need to avoid latency, this seems like very significant information for anyone considering buying it.

That being said, 50 dollars is quite fair.

Will this include free updates or lower priced upgrades when new games will be supported later?

Would you consider a one time purchase for specific game support? Eg, I only care about 4 or 5 games, charge me ten dollars for each game then perhaps? Will future improvements to the driver performance be free?

Glad to see Skyrim there. I'd just like to walk around the world without being attacked.

How good is the Skyrim integration currently? Does head roll work?

Sweet! Can't wait to get my Rift and try this bad boy out!

Looks awesome so far! Since we're requesting games, I have a few.

Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed
Civilization 5
Amnesia: The Dark Decent
Minecraft (I know it's OpenGL, but this guy made a wrapper) - http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/186241-modwinrenderer-wrapper-depthanglyph-colsnv-3d-vsnfs/
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Fallout 3

Have you considered doing a preorder/beta?

The stuff I am most intrested in has already been covered, but I request that you prioritise games based on how well they are likely to work with Rift, rather than the amount of requests. For example, I would love to see Deus Ex Human Revolution in VR, but I don't think the Dev Rift has high enough resolution for it to be playable.

As for what you charge, it really depends on the terms. $100 as a one time payment I might be ok with. $20 for each new version would make me angry.

Thanks for the kind words guys, really appreciate it.

@ElectroPulse: BF3 is DirectX11 and I am only supporting Dx9 right now. Borderlands 2 is a possibility, but I will have to take a look at whats involved. Not sure it will make it for December, but I will try to get it working.

@FingerFlinger: Skyrim seems mostly working. The only major issue is the shadows, but as existing drivers seem to have problems with this I'm not sure I will be able to fix it.

@brantlew: I do have a 2D mode already that works for a much wider number for games but I just need to find a good way to expose this to users. Currently you can enable the mode by editing a profile XML file, but I'd like to allow people to choose this in the GUI. I could also make it so if a profile did not exist it would fallback onto 2D mode automatically, which might be convienent for people.

@space123321: Yes, I can post some Rift-ready pictures soon, maybe a video if I get a chance.

@Dycus: Totally. I'd love to have the Oculus team test this out, its been hard to get a hold of Palmer. Need to fix a few things first, but I can have a preview version ready soon. Also plan on having a closed beta in November but this will only be for a few lucky people (aka the more active MTBS members).

@WiredEarp: Thanks man!

@mayaman: I initially figured independent head and gun movement would be possible, but it seems harder than what I thought. Something I could probably do is have the mouse move both the gun and the view simultaneously (as normal) but have the head-tracker alter the view in addition to this. This is sort of what I am doing with the roll support. However it runs into problems with whole areas of the screen getting clipped (or culled) so objects will disappear, you will see through walls and things like that. Maybe there is a way around this, I don't know. But its not an easy thing.

@NZstory: Yes. Mirror's Edge can get pretty intense in 3D. Especially the parts when you have to walk slowly on beams while looking down. I can only imagine how it would look on the Rift. Dear Esther would probably be perfect on the Rift, since you can just walk around at your own pace and not worry too much.

@LordJuanlo: As I mentioned BF3 is Dx11 so I can't support it with my current build. Maybe down the road. I also tried with ArmA2 and didn't have too much luck. Seems like a good game to support, so I will continue to investigate this. And, yeah, its possible that other Codemasters racing games will work, but I haven't tested any yet.

@Owen: Sounds interesting. Could probably do joystick emulation, but I'm not sure it will make it for the initial launch. I can look into it though.

@Endothermic: I have been testing mostly with Left4Dead 1, but chances are that Left4Dead 2 will also work. So far all the Source games I've tried seem to be working nice.

@2EyeGuy: Thanks, man. It means a lot. Really I feel like I have been doing the research for this project for years (unintentionally) and things just finally came together at the last minute. Though I have been experimenting with 3D engines for a while now, it was only within the last year I started learning about DirectX itself. What really motivated me was when I saw the work that John Carmack had done on Doom3:BFG and how that invigorated the whole community. So I knew then I had to go all the way and finish what I wanted to do with this 3D driver. So I guess when you have a clear goal and a deadline you figure out how to make it work.

@marbas: I'm not sure if I can make the IDEs themselves into 3D, though I guess its technically possible. Might work for games created with those engines if they used Dx9.

@coadyj: I am running a somewhat older rig and I can play games OK (between 30-60FPS in 3D). I'm using a Nvidia GFX 470 w/ 8GB RAM and an Intel E8400 (3GHz dual core). On my other machine I have an AMD 6870 w/ 8GB RAM and a AMD FX-4100. Seems about equal in performance.

@Parity: Yes, it is possible to change the FOV on games. Right now this is working on L4D and a couple others, will have to port this to the rest of the supported titles soon.

@MaterialDefender: I have already cleared this with Neil, and he's totally cool with this project. The rule is there mostly for companies that just show up into the forum with zero posts and start advertising their product (or even worse: posing as an user, writing fake reviews, etc.). Neil is cool with commercial entities that are contributing to the site and giving back to the community.

@greenknight: Yes, I will be providing free upgrades for people (at least through the 1.X versions) and, down the road, a discounted price for updating to the next big version (ie 2.0) but that will be way in the future probably and not worth discussing now. The price will be for the whole driver, and whatever games it supports. Charging for games a-la-carte seems like more work than it would be worth.

@rmcclelland: Still have to get roll into Skyrim, as I said some of the games are partially supported, but I have full confidance I can have it in there for launch.

@Yoder808: Cool. Deux Ex:HR and Fallout3 are high on my list.

@bobv5: I will be including free upgrades for a good amount of time (though versions 1.X).

Ok, I am sold. Thanks for the attention to detail cybereality.

In the meantime, I did a google search for the game aaaAAAAA and all I found was this:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!


It was worth it though!

Hopefully someone on the forum tries the link. I thought it was funny.

Ha! That's great!

Yeah, it was the images that got to me.

Cannot wait til' December. Not only do I get to experience VR, but I also graduate with a bachelor's in psychology.

A relatively useless degree, sure, but who said college was supposed to be for anything?

*cough* the engineers.

@ CyberReality: Would you be able to look into adding support for Comanche 4? I think it would be a great match for the Rift, big bright textures, designed to run in a lower resolution, etc. StreetRat seems to have figured out the memory locations for the view vectors, so it should be possible to interface the Rift in as well, once the Rift is released. If you don't have a copy already, let me know, I can send you one via steam or something like that (I think its a budget title nowadays).

Great work cyber. Please add NFS shift and Shift 2 as Crysis and birds of prey. Thanks