Forum Discussion
Oculus Certified
After Reading the VR Sickness Blog entry below:
http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/vr-sickness-the-rift-and-how-game-developers-can-help
it has become clear to me that there is ALOT Developers can do wrong to make the VR Experience visually stunning, yet very poor for the average user.
The current tools out there are great to get the ball rolling, but because there are many technical steps that need to be taken to make sure that the user experience is "technically correct", I feel that there should be a certify program by Oculus that Developers can pay for to have their game checked.
This would provide consistency and an easy way for end users to ensure that what they are about to buy has been "validated" by the people who know best.
Quality control is nothing new or bad. Both Microsoft and Sony do this very heavily for understandable reasons.
The PC Market is an open playing field and this will be entirely optional for Developers, but I think that this would be very important to deliver a consistent experience.
http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/vr-sickness-the-rift-and-how-game-developers-can-help
For others we need the help of developers to do the right thing, use the correct mathematical models, and resist the completely understandable temptation to just “get something on screen”. We’ll go into that in more detail in the SDK and blogs in the future.
it has become clear to me that there is ALOT Developers can do wrong to make the VR Experience visually stunning, yet very poor for the average user.
The current tools out there are great to get the ball rolling, but because there are many technical steps that need to be taken to make sure that the user experience is "technically correct", I feel that there should be a certify program by Oculus that Developers can pay for to have their game checked.
This would provide consistency and an easy way for end users to ensure that what they are about to buy has been "validated" by the people who know best.
Quality control is nothing new or bad. Both Microsoft and Sony do this very heavily for understandable reasons.
The PC Market is an open playing field and this will be entirely optional for Developers, but I think that this would be very important to deliver a consistent experience.
18 Replies
"xSpektre" wrote:
Also, Homeworld + Rift should be very interesting, seeing not only an RTS game, but a space RTS at that.
Well it's taking a back seat to my costume prep for PAX 13, so it may not see the light of day for a while."tomf" wrote:
We plan on expanding the SDK with a suite of tests to make sure you did get your math right. One idea we had was for reference scenes of known-sized blocks at known distances. You build this scene in your engine, take a screenshot, and compare it to a reference screenshot that you need to match with pixel-perfect accuracy. If you don't - there's a bug somewhere!
Are there any news about this?
I really want to be able to test my implementation. It looks correct right now, but it would be nice to be sure.- Just an opinion, but once you start a tier system, you lend yourself to corruption. Like, who's ass do I gotta kiss to get this thing Oculus Certified? Or Oculus will only certify stuff they deem "acceptable. Or something that is not in competition with ID Software.
I don't think Oculus would do any of these things, I'm just saying that you open up a pathway for bad things when you go this route.
Mike - I think this will improve by itself over time. Currently developers just aren't aware of the simple mistakes of rift development, but this early in the lifecycle that is to be expected. I think waiting it out is a safer bet than convincing users to rely on a system that might immediately become obsolete.
- Having a distortion test in the SDK would definitely be useful. Any idea when this might be available? I'd be happy to try and help with testing the test!
Jeff "jherico" wrote:
I'm currently working on getting Homeworld working with the Rift, and it's non-trivial for someone who isn't familiar with the codebase to chase down where the insertion point for making sure the scene gets rendered twice from different viewpoints should be. Just having stereoscopic 3D in your game isn't good enough, because you need to have a shader based post-processing step that does the distortion (or you have to be ready to emulate a per-pixel distortion in your game engine in some other fashion, but retrofitting GL or DirectX shader support is probably the easiest way to do that).
Did you ever get this to work?"tomf" wrote:
Any suggestions on simple debugging methods you like to see, fire away...
Getting the projection matrices right and composing them in the right order can be error prone. I wrote a blog post on the topic a year ago. The same content is also covered in our book, along with an entire chapter devoted to VR sickness."Peteo" wrote:
"jherico" wrote:
I'm currently working on getting Homeworld working with the Rift, and it's non-trivial for someone who isn't familiar with the codebase to chase down where the insertion point for making sure the scene gets rendered twice from different viewpoints should be. Just having stereoscopic 3D in your game isn't good enough, because you need to have a shader based post-processing step that does the distortion (or you have to be ready to emulate a per-pixel distortion in your game engine in some other fashion, but retrofitting GL or DirectX shader support is probably the easiest way to do that).
Did you ever get this to work?
Not really, no. Doing the stereoscopic rendering is not that hard, but there's all sorts of edge cases to deal with like the 'letterboxing' during cinematics and the way they overlay the UI. UI is pretty much the hardest thing about any retrofit, because lots of applications and games just render the UI as a 2D overlay after 3D rendering. You can do hacks like have it render into a transparent framebuffer and put that into the scene as a texture, but to do it properly you basically have to rip out all of the UI and redo it, which is something of a large project for a game like Homeworld.
Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but it's not high on my list right now or for the foreseeable future.
