Meant to be Seen

Okay, I will try to be very clear on this. I wish this to be a suggestion thread, about everything that can demonstrate the potential of oculus rift that are available today or will be come december.

I want to get people interested, and I want to visit various people bringing along some different types of demoes.

Most obvious is

A) Oculus Rift + Doom 3 BFG.

B) I also have a decent racing setup with seat and logitech g25 with shifter and all that.
How far away are we from getting one of the major racing sims to display pre-distorted side-by-side?
I know how to hack the field of view on Richard Burns Rally.
Even without the built in tracker, i can get by in a racing scenario with trackir 5.

C) Ive heard about Rage being used for some demoes, could we see something like be made available?

I would love something like dear esther, or other beautiful scenery to demonstrate.
Its okay if it requires some hassle, but it has to be something that can be done in practice.

So what do you know for a FACT that are or will be ready by december?

Here is a draft of list I hope to get up and running, to be as comprehensive as I can make it.
Any input on what I should include, and error corrections as well as better definitions would be appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv? ... full#gid=0

Namielus wrote:Okay, I will try to be very clear on this. I wish this to be a suggestion thread, about everything that can demonstrate the potential of oculus rift that are available today or will be come december.

I want to get people interested, and I want to visit various people bringing along some different types of demoes.

Most obvious is

A) Oculus Rift + Doom 3 BFG.

B) I also have a decent racing setup with seat and logitech g25 with shifter and all that.
How far away are we from getting one of the major racing sims to display pre-distorted side-by-side?
I know how to hack the field of view on Richard Burns Rally.
Even without the built in tracker, i can get by in a racing scenario with trackir 5.

C) Ive heard about Rage being used for some demoes, could we see something like be made available?

I would love something like dear esther, or other beautiful scenery to demonstrate.
Its okay if it requires some hassle, but it has to be something that can be done in practice.

So what do you know for a FACT that are or will be ready by december?

I am an academic in the VR field first and gamer second, so I would like to see (and can provide in Unity) reconstructions of some "classic" VR demonstrations such as the virtual pit illusion, looming responses and fear of public speaking demonstrations. The first two are very compelling effects, which do unfortunately need some motion parallax, but which demonstrate immersion very well; the latter is an excellent demonstration of the social impact of having the appearance of other people watching you.

cybereality and Emerson are both working on driver support for using the Rift with legacy games. They have at least half a dozen games supported now and probably more by December.

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=15086

http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p ... 150#p76766

I'm trying to implement direct support of the Rift into a free-walking motion controller, hopefully ready for beta by December.

Brant, are you creating a generic interface for your free-walking system? I know there are a half-dozen projects going on right in that area, it would be nice to standardize it.

Quick question, these drivers do they involve better control of head movement, rather than mouse emulation in addition to fov/pre-distortion?

In any case I think its fantastic work, and looking forward to try it out.

I'd also be very interested in the Racing aspect, unfortunately Dirt 2/3 don't play particularly well with the current middleware (shadows being somewhat broken in 3d) so i don't know what we can expect there without some support from Codemasters themselves. They have bothered to implement AMD-HD3D in Dirt3 at least but I don't know how interested they would be in a VR system. Dirt3 at least seems to play nice with custom FOVs and resolutions, so it might be possible to get something reasonable with custom fov/resolution settings in Dirt3 and SBS mode in TridefDDD.

Logitech g27 owner chipping in. The Rift would be a completely different experience to my 22" Zalman, I currently play on my 27" Dell in preference, even though it's not 3D.

The only racing game i wanna play is iRacing!! Its bullt for surround and high fov's( you can set the fov up to 179 degrees in the settings). And there is trackir support.

Dirt is too much arcade.

Bartdesign, its sort of apples and oranges. iRacing, rFactor and Richard Burns Rally mod, all compete to be ultra realistic.
I like them too. Trackir works well on iRacing, question is side-by-side 3D and distortion.

Im making a list of games that will be or are compatible with oculus rift as we speak.

So any tips are helpful.

profvr wrote:
I am an academic in the VR field first and gamer second, so I would like to see (and can provide in Unity) reconstructions of some "classic" VR demonstrations such as the virtual pit illusion, looming responses and fear of public speaking demonstrations. The first two are very compelling effects, which do unfortunately need some motion parallax, but which demonstrate immersion very well; the latter is an excellent demonstration of the social impact of having the appearance of other people watching you.

Profvr do you have any pointers to these classic VR demonstrations?

Well, I am working on a driver currently with about a half dozen games currently somewhat working. Its a work in progress, though, so I don't want to oversell myself here. But so far I have a handful of Source engine games fully working (Left4Dead, Portal2, HL2, Dear Esther) and those are pretty solid. I also recently got Mirror's Edge mostly working (still need to implement tracking). I hope to have around 10 games supported for the Rift launch. I can look into getting a racing game working, I think that would be cool. Personally like the Dirt series a lot, but I know it has had problems with 3D drivers in the past. I did like playing rFactor with the VR920, so I may try that also.

Cybereality, i updated my original post to include a spreadsheet.
I hope you can take a look at it and see if its allright by you.
Simply trying to make it alittle easier for people to keep track of development.

cyber - any idea if the rift tracking will run the same time as the hydra? If I remember correctly my mouse does not work in Portal if the Hydra is currently running.

zdam wrote:
Profvr do you have any pointers to these classic VR demonstrations?

Disclaimer: the group I work in developed some of the first, or early, versions of these demonstrations.

The "Virtual Pit" is a demo that most VR labs have in some form or another. Its a simple demo: just a ledge over a deep pit that you invite users to walk over. There is something about motion parallax below your feet that causes very extreme reactions. I have shown similar demos to several hundred people over the years, its a good way of explaining why immersive VR is different. The first experiment I worked on using a virtual pit illusion was about 1993, but most people refer to a 1999 siggraph paper from UNC/UCL about this, http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/Research/eve/pap ... H-Usoh.pdf.

The "looming response" is a very simple demo, in fact I don't have a good reference to it to hand, but it is very easy to get someone to duck in a HMD by throwing something at their head, or just getting them to walk through a low doorway. Then show them doing the same thing on a stereo desktop display and invite comparison. I would expect a few minutes on google scholar would find some references to this; we did use it in a very early experiment but I don't think we ever wrote it up.

The "fear of public speaking" is one of my favourite demonstations which again several labs now have implementations of. The idea is that someone gives a talk in front of an audience, but that audience behaves politely or rudely (their behaviour need not depend on what the person actually says). This is interesting because if someone sees a polite audience they will usually rate themselves as having given a good talk; if they see a rude audience they will rate themselves as having given a bad talk. See: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Slater/ ... jvr.lo.pdf and subsequent demonstrations by Slater and colleagues.


There must be some other VR labs represented amongst the members of this forum, but those are some of my favourite simple demonstrations of why VR is not your traditional media.

Damn, the Virtual Pit pdf is amazing, I seriously hope someone make something like that for the Rift

DiNo29 wrote:Damn, the Virtual Pit pdf is amazing, I seriously hope someone make something like that for the Rift

One of the architectural features in the Rage demo level at Quakecon was a large open pit. I can confirm that using the Rift gave me vertigo looking over the edge of that pit.

Brantlew, what are the odds of getting our hands on such a demo? As sort of a self proclaimed oculus rift-ambassador.
hahahah

Well I really don't have any inside info, but I would guess that there is a zero percent chance we will be seeing that demo since it was just Carmack's little test app. Don't worry though, you'll have plenty of opportunities to get nauseated in Doom.

I guess you are right. But the more content I can show the better, in my opinion.
Now that Cybereality confirmed support for dear esther, and lots of other good news, its far along.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv? ... full#gid=0

the more info I can cram into this list, the better. Im looking for confirmation that someone is enabling support in any of the driving games.

DiNo29 wrote:Damn, the Virtual Pit pdf is amazing, I seriously hope someone make something like that for the Rift

The virtual pit is a good demo to show a sceptic: invite them to walk out over the drop and when they refuse (most people refuse - but gamers just tend to go for it) , ask them if they are still sceptical. Various labs (UNC were the first I think), added a real 1'' ledge that you could put your toes over for added drama.

I have these demos running in Unity, so if the Unity support for RIft is forthcoming, then it will be easy. Otherwise, it wouldn't be hard to put something together in Unity anyway, there is enough knowledge on this forum to put together the optical distortion and tracker input.

I would say Iracing would be a huge hit! Best racing simulator out there...

I wish I knew how to embed the spreadsheet into a post so that its as easy as possible to track development on game mods.

I think the bb-code for google spreadsheets should be [gs] or [gsheet], but cant get it to work.

@space123321: The tracking code I am doing is using mouse emulation for pitch/yaw and direct control for the roll. I don't see any reason this wouldn't also work with the Hydra, or other mouse emulation software (GlovePIE, FreePIE, etc.).

@Namielus: The forum here does not have the plug-in to support Google docs. Though the game list is so short now it wouldn't be to hard to just list the text.

True, I can do it in plain text, and I should. Adding to my to-do-list. However as the list inevitably grows longer and longer, its sad that you cant have it embedded with full sorting functionality etc.

Not a very big deal tho, as people could just click the link. I just liked the idea of having it right in forum.

As i am a huge fan of open world/survival/zombie games i would like to see Palmer get in contact with the guys from Techland (theyre at gamescom as well).
They are going to show off the sequel to Dead Island, Dead Island: Riptide. It's a first person melee based survival game, rift support would be a perfect fit!

Cyber, you might want to check out the chrome engine ("recently" released games based on V.5 would be Call of Juarez/Dead Island) and see what you can do with it?

profvr wrote:
I am an academic in the VR field first and gamer second, so I would like to see (and can provide in Unity) reconstructions of some "classic" VR demonstrations such as the virtual pit illusion, looming responses and fear of public speaking demonstrations. The first two are very compelling effects, which do unfortunately need some motion parallax, but which demonstrate immersion very well; the latter is an excellent demonstration of the social impact of having the appearance of other people watching you.

Very interesting! I'm particularly curious about the public speaking module. Where and when will you make these available for Rift?

Flim wrote:I would say Iracing would be a huge hit! Best racing simulator out there...

And if I'm right, it supports multiple views for setups with multiple monitors that are tilted towards viewer. Now, this is something you need if you're simulating FOV higher than 180 degrees.

I'm working on a commercial indie game at this time. It's still early days, and thus I'm keeping the theme a secret until it hits alpha or beta stage.
But I can tell its about flying..with a twist. It's a completely new game concept, that to my knowledge have not been done before.
It's built from the ground up and tailored for VR gaming.

I am really hoping for a Rage patch to be released for the Rift. Unfortunatly TriDef3D doesn't work with it because it's OpenGL.

I just booted it up again and it's such a beutiful game, I would play it right through again with the Rift.

It would be an excellent showcase demo.

Rift + rage = epic

I really really want to see iRacing support the Rift. It already benefits hugely from stereoscopy as you get a much clearer sense of relative speed between other cars and yourself, which is extremely important because every contact incident counts against your rank regardless of fault.

The added benefit of 1:1 spatial awareness would make it much easier to drive safely.

I can tell you two competitors of iRacing: pCars and Asseto Corsa have ordered dev kits so it is likely iRacing has as well

Namielus wrote:Rift + rage = epic

Agree! Although a bit of a faux pas with the word 'epic'

Is it possible to do a similar injector/driver with OpenGL as with DirectX? I have had a bit of a google search but can only find libs to work with during development.

bobjwatts wrote: Is it possible to do a similar injector/driver with OpenGL as with DirectX?

Possible? Sure. I think Fredz was doing something like this but for Linux: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p ... 16&p=80289

cybereality wrote:

bobjwatts wrote: Is it possible to do a similar injector/driver with OpenGL as with DirectX?

Possible? Sure. I think Fredz was doing something like this but for Linux: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p ... 16&p=80289

Awesome thanks Cyber! missed that post.

Sure, I've implemented one for Linux, I think it should also be doable in Windows in the same way it's done with Direct3D. Modifying the camera projection matrices should probably even be simpler since games very often use the standard functions for camera projection.

bought rage recently just in case carmack gives it support for the rift

really getting excited for december now

I am working on a unity based game too. I will be a little late to the party because as a website order my rift wont arrive before January.

But I can put together some nature demos in unity, I got a realy nice cloud and weather system so flying should be fun too.

It´s funny I havent been this excited for hardware since the first vodoo, and I orderd it for glquake...

Bjørn Christian if you are in norway I can probably hook you up. I mean you can test it and stuff, you cant have it.

bjoernchristian wrote:It´s funny I havent been this excited for hardware since the first vodoo, and I orderd it for glquake...

I see we come from the same old times, I feel exactly this way too. One year before that I've been equally hooked by my first 3D shutter glasses, too bad it took more than 15 years for the next 3D revolution to come...

I am currently in Germany near Frankfurt, I will travel in January though so maybe there is a chance than.

But I am currently working on the content so I have enough to do. If I have a prototype running I can make an alpha version available to gather some feedback.