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EugenioR
New Participant
April 25, 2013

Using only as viewer, no head tracking, with any device?

Hello,

I need an immersive viewer with no head tracking (not totally immersive... I know :roll:). Do I need the SDK anyway?

I apologize if this information is already in some thread. I browsed the forum but I could find only similar questions (like this one).

This would be the ideal scenario for me:

  • I plug the viewer to a pc (workstation, laptop, even tablet), with VGA or HDMI

  • The viewer is detected as an external monitor (e.g. with resolution 2048x768)

  • I play a video in fullscreen mode on this external monitor; the video is a side by side stereo (two frames each 1024x768 juxtaposed, which is actually a video with 2048x768 resolution)

  • In the viewer I see each side in the proper eye


This would have the great advantage to be o.s. and software independent (actually, Linux for me). Of course it is not exploiting the most interesting feature of Oculus, which is the head tracking.

I was evaluating a product from Vuzix for this (the Wrap 1200) but I was surprised of the size of the screen and view field of Oculus.

If I buy the developer kit, would it be so easy as I listed before? Or, such usage would require implementing a specific software layer with the SDK?

The very best would be to try it before buying. One minute would be enough. But I live in Germany...

Thanks!

    4 replies

    lazydodo
    Up and Coming
    April 25, 2013
    "EugenioR" wrote:
    Hello,
    I need an immersive viewer with no head tracking (not totally immersive... I know :roll:). Do I need the SDK anyway?

    Unless you want to depend on other people you generally end up using the SDK.


    This would be the ideal scenario for me:

    • I plug the viewer to a pc (workstation, laptop, even tablet), with VGA or HDMI

      The current model has HDMI and DVI connectors, so this one we can check off the list!


    • The viewer is detected as an external monitor (e.g. with resolution 2048x768)

      • The current devkit gets detected as an external monitor with a max resolution of 1920x1080, however the panel inside the unit is only 1280x800, if you feed it a higher resolution signal, the controller box will scale it down for you. But i think we can check this one off the list as well.


    • I play a video in fullscreen mode on this external monitor; the video is a side by side stereo (two frames each 1024x768 juxtaposed, which is actually a video with 2048x768 resolution)

    • In the viewer I see each side in the proper eye


      • This would have the great advantage to be o.s. and software independent (actually, Linux for me). Of course it is not exploiting the most interesting feature of Oculus, which is the head tracking.


      Aaaaand here we hit a minor snag, the optics in the rift require some significant warping, so you can just feed it any side by side video stream, it'll look incredibly weird in the headset without this warping filter, now there is software that does this distortion for you like stereoscopic player but i don't think it's available for linux. Also you're limited to a 640x800 resolution per eye in the rift, so that might be a point of concern as well for you.
    cybereality
    Inspiring
    April 25, 2013
    Yeah, you should be able to use it as a display without the head-tracking. It would be detected as a 1280x800
    display, but it will accept other resolutions (for example 1920x1200). You still need to provide the proper side-by-side stereo image in your application. This means you would need to properly offset the images, and also handle the optical distortion. Right now the SDK reads these values from the headset, but you could try hard-coding the values for the Rift.

    Anyway, if you just want to play video, then the Stereoscopic Player is your best bet.
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    julianadenauer
    New Participant
    April 26, 2013
    I have same problem over here. We'd like to use a PandaBoard with the Rift for our Eyesect-Project. Basically we want to show the image of a camera on each eye. No stereo, no head-tracking. So I only need information about how to distort the image for the Rift.
    Has anyone tried that on Linux?
    EugenioRAuthor
    New Participant
    April 26, 2013
    Thanks for the answers, it is clear now.

    I used OpenCV for video effects, I guess that the distortion algorithm shouldn't be much difficult to implement. Could you suggest me where I can find more details about the required transformation? (I guess is it the same used by panorama viewers, like the distortion applied in google streetview)

    In this sense, how does Oculus relate to other products (esp. the ones allowing for "universal" compatibility, i.e. not requiring video transformations)? Others don't need the distortion because their view frustum is narrower? Or, they implement it in hardware?

    Is it planned to implement the distortion in hardware? That would be a great feature for developers and a big step towards a wide commercial compatibility :roll:
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