HMD Middleware Utility?

[BHawthorne]

I know there is a lot of buzz lately with the Rift and most people simply don't realize that the Rift dev kit is really a dev kit and is not meant to work out of the box on everything. My question is there anyone out there that is currently working on a middleware utility as a generic interface? My experience is with multi-projector S3D gaming and I helped convince Immersaview to get into the consumer market in 2008 with NTHUSIM. I'm trying to convince them at the moment that it would be also a good idea to make a HMD software utility for the Rift to act as a middleware to do the footwork using a profile based system to handle movement interface and camera correction. Am I off the mark trying to get Immersaview involved in development of a HMD software? Immersaview is concerned that the Rift would just have all of that software already designed leaving them with nothing to put into a consumer software product. I'm trying to explain to Alex and Andy of Immersaview that the Rift is primarily a hardware development and they're leaving the software interface up to whatever can be imagined by third parties. Should I pursue this with Immersaview? I helped NTHUSIM for projectors happen and I think I might be able to convince them to develop a HMD utility.

Personally, I see a generic interface utility the missing piece of the puzzle. While all talk has been focused on individual integration into to each game I just don't think dev houses will buy into that in a grand scale. I see it having the same level of developer imvolvement as triple-head LCD gaming. I think that there could still be a middleware utility that could make things just work on a lot of titles. In many ways I see HMD as the next gaming enthusiast niche market -- about the same level of of adoption as mutli-display gaming (AMD Eyefinity/Matrox TH2G/NVIDIA Surround) has evolved into the last half-dozen years. I see a lot of parallels in development between multi-projector S3D pre-warping and HMD. Immersaview has codebase that does pre-warp correction of desktop and DirectX/OpenGL apps. That could handle the camera rendering correction across most situations, including 2D desktop navigation.

[Zaptruder]

From what I understand, Occulus' intention is to have drivers that allow for automatic distortion correction.

What developers have to do is implement things like decoupling weapons from view points, and additional degrees of freedom for the camera.

If they're feeling adventurous, they may use the rift as inspiration to develop general VR concepts that may intergrate other devices (certainly the more enthusiastic posters on this board are planning to do just that).

[cybereality]

I am working on a 3d driver for the Rift that does pre-warping of the image amung other things. I have about 5 games supported now but hope to have more for the launch. But certainly if other people want to get involved that would be great.

[BHawthorne]

Alex got back with me. Both him and I have pledged for a dev kit each. Tentatively, he's interested in coming up with a utility. I let him know the forums is here. I realize there are forum rules for commercial entities. Is it ok for him to post as long as he's not marketing anything and is asking about integration questions?

Here are the games I can test the headset against:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/bhawthorne ... &sort=name

[cbwan]

You could try to use VRJuggler: http://vrjuggler.org/

Or for handling only devices you can use VRPN: http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/vrpn/

Or if you look on the web there is one commercial generic VR middleware but I can't talk about it here
cb

[jis]

I would really go for a middleware offering a set of services instead of having one monolithic driver that does everything.
We can then build on top of those services/utilities higher level APIs.

[BHawthorne]

I would really go for a middleware offering a set of services instead of having one monolithic driver that does everything.
We can then build on top of those services/utilities higher level APIs.

I just see people coming at this backwards though. Most games already out simply aren't going to invest development budget on a niche market without significant incentives. I see the need for a generic utility to cover the rest of the games that don't accommodate which will be more games than not until adoption pool gets large as LCD triplehead use.