OSX and Linux

"cybereality" wrote:
OSX support is coming very soon. Sorry for the wait.

Thank you! :)
Next stop (even more important for me): Linux?

Linux is on the road-map, we just don't have a solid ETA.

"jackwilliambell" wrote:
I don't think a Pi has the horsepower, either CPU or GPU, to support the Oculus.

How about Ouya? $99.

"cybereality" wrote:
OSX and Linux support is a goal for us, it just wasn't ready for the launch. We hope to have support soon, but we don't have a firm release date yet. But we're working on it.

Is there already some estimation for the Linux SDK? Just something raw would be enough, like: in one week, in one month, in several months ...

"cybereality" wrote:
Linux is on the road-map, we just don't have a solid ETA.

Hopefully not too far away - I've ordered a Rift for August!

I'm sure you're well aware of the high proportion of early-adopter, developer and compsci academic types using Linux (as opposed to Mac OSX or Windows) and will prioritize accordingly. ;)

On a serious note, have you considered throwing up some of the code in an official git repository with a mailing list? I'm sure you'll find volunteers to help, if you need to focus the majority of the development talent elsewhere. That'd be an ideal scenario as the community could help with features and fixes that could be ported to other platforms, too.

"Vaerraent" wrote:

"cybereality" wrote:
Linux is on the road-map, we just don't have a solid ETA.

Hopefully not too far away - I've ordered a Rift for August!

I'm sure you're well aware of the high proportion of early-adopter, developer and compsci academic types using Linux (as opposed to Mac OSX or Windows) and will prioritize accordingly. ;)

On a serious note, have you considered throwing up some of the code in an official git repository with a mailing list? I'm sure you'll find volunteers to help, if you need to focus the majority of the development talent elsewhere. That'd be an ideal scenario as the community could help with features and fixes that could be ported to other platforms, too.

I'm really looking forward to this, too. Valve has said they'll port over Oculus Rift support (for TF2, at least) as soon as the Linux SDK is available.

I'm not opposed to installing Windows 7 to play with my devkit when it arrives, but it would be _awesome_ if a few basic titles/demos were available for Linux in the next month or two. Especially Half Life 2.

I feel like Oculus is shooting themselves in the foot with the complexity of the SDK code. It's very pretty engineering-wise, but full of tons of indirection. It also creates unnecessary coupling between the tracking hardware interaction, which needs a dedicated hardware SDK, and the utilities for interacting with rendering, which don't.

If you're willing to dig through the code you can actually extract the head tracking communication functionality without too much effort. Once you've done that it's pretty easy to port the sensor fusion logic to any language, and the rest of the code can be dumped for easier target platform replacements.

The only real impediment to developing without the SDK is HID support on the target platform but it's not hard to find HID libraries for OSX or Linux.

"jherico" wrote:
... The only real impediment to developing without the SDK is HID support on the target platform but it's not hard to find HID libraries for OSX or Linux.

My lastest codebase uses the signal11 hidapi library:
https://github.com/signal11/hidapi
It comes with a choice of license including BSD and GPL. And it has build solutions for Windows, Linux and OSX.

EDIT: I have tested the signal11 hidapi library on Windows (MSVC 10 on Win 8 x64) and on my Raspberry Pi (gcc on Raspbian linux distro). It shows correct Oculus Tracker DK sensor values in both environments. I have implemented gyro drift compensation (low-pass filter subtraction), but I still have sensor fusion and magnetic gyro compensation on my "ToDo" list. The signal11 library does come with OSX support built-in, but I have not tested that.

"nsb" has a nice translation of the OVR SDK to pure C over in this other thread. That version (0.0.2) uses hidraw, but he's also changed it to use cross-platform HIDAPI (not posted yet).

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=667&start=20

I've added a demo to that thread, leveraging this library for sensors, and adding a layer for OpenGL support with distortion shaders and the stereo configuration. There is no impediment to developing without the SDK. ;)

I posted it to another thread, but I had the 0.0.2 version working on my RasPi some time ago. It also worked on x86 linux as well (but not Linux Mint).

The signal11 library supports both HIDAPI and libusb, each of which have their strengths and weaknesses. But what I like best is the BSD license that I can use with signal11. But the lastest OculusVR SDK (mostly) changed to the apache license, so that is good too.