2 screens, different content

Probably a number of different (and better) ways to do this, but I could only think of a shoddy makeshift approach to this using Unity:

1. Two Rift cameras render to one half of your viewport (The 1st & 2nd quarter or 3rd & 4th quarter, etc)
2. Normal camera renders to the right (and the normal camera is sitting as a child of CameraRight if you want the nonsteroscopic view to be the same as what the Rifter is seeing)
3. Run windowed while desktop is extended across both your Rift and monitor
4. Stretch the resolution out at startup (via script or something) to be double-wide, and some window trickery to get the whole thing lined up

Would be really curious to hear other ideas on this, as I have seen several questions about this after seeing how great that Crystal Cove Valkyrie demo looked with the 2nd screen.

If I were going to design a solution for this kind of setup it would be:

Have a "VR rig" that is just a standard Rift setup. It isn't worth it to do any extra rendering steps that would degrade the performance for the user. However, it can send the tracking data from the Rift to a "display rig" over a simple UDP connection. The "display rig" can take the tracking data and render whatever view you want to display for onlookers.

Its not easy to do in Unity, but probably the best way to do this in general is grab a copy of the back buffer before distortion is processed, in a smallish rectangle from one of the eyes. This way you get a non-stereo non-distorted view of what the player is seeing without any extra rendering.

Of course this will be relatively low resolution, but its easy to do and very very cheap. Naturally you don't want to waste any processing time on stuff not contributing to the VR display.

However, Unity still doesn't have native multi-monitor support on anything but iOS. Getting around this might be possible with a native plugin though.

Best way to do this would be to have 2 computers networked, and have the non-Rift PC be in "spectator" mode.

"cybereality" wrote:
Best way to do this would be to have 2 computers networked, and have the non-Rift PC be in "spectator" mode.

That sounds doable. Thanks!

I didn't manage to create a script to do this (using network to have a spectator view). I am a beginner for using Unity3D for now. If you can share your method or even better your scripts. It would be very helpful for me.

Thanks

I haven't done it yet. I probably won't until March. When I do try it I'll probably use the default smooth follow script or try simply parenting the spectator camera to the oculus camera. I'm a newbie so there may be a better way.