Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

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nathanimator
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Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

Post by nathanimator »

I don't know if anyone can answer this question yet, but if anyone at occulus reads these please chime in. I'm an animator. When it comes to making worlds to explore with the rift, that's the easy part. I am not at all, however, a programmer. So I guess my question is, how hard would it be for me to set something up in Unity with the rift that would allow me to simply walk around environments that would create? I'm familiar with bringing things into unity, but again, not the programming side. I'm certainly not opposed to messing with the coding if it's simply a matter of following instructions or copying the right code to the right place, but I realize i certainly couldn't suddenly become proficient at it. So in short, as someone who is really just an artist, is it feasible for me to mess with a dev kit in that way or am I kidding myself?

-Nathan
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tmek
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Re: Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

Post by tmek »

nathanimator wrote: ... how hard would it be for me to set something up in Unity with the rift that would allow me to simply walk around environments that would create?
Well it depends on what you mean by "walk around" if you are talking about making an avatar walk around a map that you look through his eyes (like any first person shooter) the Rift Developer Kit is made to do that off the shelf. If you are talking about being able to move your real life head to gain different perspectives on what you are creating that will take more than just the current Rift. The Rift currently only includes tracking for head orientation (which direction you are looking) not position (moving your head side to side, forward and back or up and down like peering around a corner). There are all kinds of ways people achieve positional tracking but currently for someone not already a VR enthusiast they are fairly complicated to get working.

However Palmer has said many times it is their goal to include positional tracking in the consumer version of the Rift if at all possible. That kind of tracking combined with a two handed spatial and orientation controllers like the hydra would allow all kinds of possibilities for virtual sculpting and tweaking 3D models almost as if you were working with a lump clay floating in space in front of you, and be able to lean your head from side to side, above or below it to see it from all sides in a very intuitive and natural way.
nathanimator
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Re: Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

Post by nathanimator »

Yeah, all I'm really looking for is to be able to walk around a level I make, although using it for creation does sound awesome. I'm just wondering how much programing is needed to do even that much, or if it really is pretty straight forward.
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nateight
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Re: Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

Post by nateight »

Welcome to the forum. I think the short answer is simply: We don't know yet. Only a handful of VIP developers (Notch, etc.) have their Rifts yet, and they are all under some form of NDA and only talking about the Rift in general terms. The rest of us don't yet have access to the Rift's Software Development Kit (SDK - this is the thing programmers will need to utilize to send information to a Rift, sync with the (limited) headtracker, etc.). The community seems fairly confident that the SDK will either ship on a disc with the hardware and/or be available on the website starting sometime around the Game Developer's Conference on March 25-29. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but until we actually start using the SDK in conjunction with Unity we won't know how complicated the process is, what level of coding knowledge will be required to enable basic functionality inside a game engine, whether large chunks of code can be used between projects and different developers or if every project will need to be different, etc. In short, wait until the SDK opens up, give people a week or so to get some preliminary experiences integrating all this stuff, and come back and poke this thread - someone will be happy to provide more details once we have them.

You may want to consider throwing yourself into programming, though - some of us programmers are hard at work with the Kinect SDK, and we can imagine a day when anybody with a $50 PC peripheral can get decent motion capture data for free. In five years, "animator" might be an endangered profession! :shock: :D
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spire8989
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Re: Making use of the Oculus Rift as an arist

Post by spire8989 »

I don't think you'll have much problem getting first-person to work with the Rift in Unity, especially if you've used Unity a bit in the past. Programmers like myself will probably be available around here to help with some basic stuff too ^_^
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