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Inspiring
October 3, 2014

Linux 'putting your money where your mouth is' thread...

So, the Linux 'nagging thread' has kind of dragged on for a while. Oculus has pledged Linux support, but given no ETA on when we'll see positional tracking supported for DK2. It could be this week. It could be months.

However, I think that sitting around and waiting for Oculus to solve the issue kind of goes against the spirit of Linux anyway. If you want something done, you should be willing to do it yourself. To that end, I'm working on porting the current 0.4.2 SDK to Linux. I've managed to reverse engineer some of the code required to interact with the LEDs so that they can be turned on. The camera is natively supported. Right now the primary missing component to getting this done is the software for calculating a head pose based on an image from the camera.

Unfortunately this kind of math is outside my field of expertise. So I'm putting a call out to the community to see if interested parties might be able to assist with this.

If you want a Linux SDK and don't want to wait for Oculus to get around to it, and you've got the skills, here's a video of them captured from the webcam on Linux:




You can download original file from here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/Oculus/oculus_rift_leds.webm

If you can write C or C++ code that will take that video, or an image from that video, and turn it into a head pose, let me know and I'll work with it to produce a viable Linux SDK with positional tracking.

    44 replies

    Participant
    October 16, 2014
    "blackguest" wrote:
    "vrcoder3d" wrote:

    One of greatest community shortcuts I've rediscovered is how a Blender developer offers a VirtualBox .vha image...


    I really like this idea


    I'm a little late and off topic... But if you like this idea, then you're going to love Vagrant.

    http://www.vagrantup.com/
    https://vagrantcloud.com/

    Vagrant does exactly what you've described; build VM dev environments on the fly.
    Participant
    October 16, 2014
    "DePingus" wrote:
    "blackguest" wrote:
    "vrcoder3d" wrote:

    One of greatest community shortcuts I've rediscovered is how a Blender developer offers a VirtualBox .vha image...


    I really like this idea


    I'm a little late and off topic... But if you like this idea, then you're going to love Vagrant.

    http://www.vagrantup.com/
    https://vagrantcloud.com/

    Vagrant does exactly what you've described; build VM dev environments on the fly.


    Haha, yeah, I've been using and loving vagrant for a while now... but doesn't even compare to docker.
    Participant
    October 17, 2014
    Doc_ok just released his optical tracking code here: https://github.com/Doc-Ok/OpticalTracking
    New Participant
    October 18, 2014
    "brantlew" wrote:
    Anyway, the official Linux build is still coming soon - delayed along with the SDK mostly by non-technical scheduling, prioritization, and logistical issues of which I can't get into. But as opposed to previous releases we now have dedicated staff that concentrate on Linux and we have relationships with major distros to negotiate kernel fixes/compatibilities so I expect the upcoming release will be quite comprehensive.

    Really nice to hear. Thx for that. My DK2 box has arrived this week and except experiencing my first VR motion sickness with Half-Lif2, I can only use it as a paperweight (like someone else mentionned).
    I do primarily develop stuff on Linux and then eventually port to other platforms, NOT the other way around.

    Cheers

    -Swift