Meant to be Seen

Hey everyone - I was wondering how I could contribute to the Rift community and I found one thing that bothered me quite a bit; the necessity of taking off the Rift between each application launch. So I wanted to make a primitive shell for navigating between different Rift-based software.

Since I'm unsure of how much free time I have, I'm not going to promise any cool features or anything like that - I'm really just posting to hear your input on a basic issue: Do I risk creating resource conflicts or performance hits for the applications that I launch, by using either OpenGL or Direct3D for the rendering? Since the graphics involved would be relatively trivial (as a bonus, that means it's a nice starter's project for me) I could very well use whatever the standard UI toolkits for Windows are.

Thanks for your input!

This sounds like a great idea! I was thinking about this before; having to take off the Rift for each application you launch is inconvenient, so you'd want to keep the experience as easy-to-navigate as possible.

As for performance considerations, a simple DirectX/OpenGL application should be fine. All you have to do is stop rendering when the window loses focus, and you'll be fine.

What I'd really like to see is something like a XBMC for VR; an integrated experience should make it considerably easier to launch applications, as well as keeping the user experience consistent.

Looking forward to seeing where you go with this.

You might want to look to modifying some of the arcade emulation frontends. Most can launch real applications, usually very easy to control (since most arcades have a joystick and a few buttons). But one that is skinnable, you might be able to skin a pre warped double background and put multiple screen shots ect. www.arcadecontrols.com is a great resource.