How to: DK2 Setup & Troubleshooting on Win 8.1, NVIDIA

[VisionPunk]

Hey, I recently set up DK2 on a new machine. Thought I'd post my findings here in the hopes that they might help someone, especially since my specs are probably quite common. This lore was gathered from various sources (reddit, google, these forums, etc.). Some of it may be incorrect or vague, but atleast it got me happily set up after some 10 hours of scavenging for tips and tricks =).


Incompatibilities encountered
- Windows 8.1 (Rift not detected -> rolled back to default driver installed by windows)
- Firewall (Rift was blocked -> switched firewall)
- NVIDIA driver 347.09 (caused double vision -> rolled back NVIDIA driver)
- Unity 4.5.x (blackscreen -> use Unity 4.6)
- Unity 5 Beta (blackscreen -> use Unity 4.6)
- USB 3 ports (potential connection trouble -> used USB 2 ports).


General notes
- At earliest possible point / as soon as your Rift gets detected, upgrade to the latest firmware through the configuration utility.
- Word has it the DK2 has issues with USB3 ports so I just made sure to only use the USB2 ports on my machine. I've seen many people recommending getting a USB 2.0 hub.
- The "runtime" referred to here was the "oculus_runtime_rev_1_sdk_0.4.4_win.exe"


Rift not detected on win 8.1
1) Plug in all hardware and let windows install default drivers.
2) Install oculus_runtime_rev_1_sdk_0.4.4_win.exe. This will install the necessary server software to allow for head tracking, but it will also install its own driver. The HMD driver is incompatible with Windows 8.1.
3) Go to Control panel -> Programs -> Uninstall a program -> Oculus Driver. NOTE: do NOT uninstall the camera / positional tracker driver
4) Reboot the computer. This will allow for the oculus drivers to be unloaded and the Windows 8.A compatible drivers to be loaded again.


Problems getting OVRService to run / "Oculus service is not running"
OVRServer_x86.exe / OVRServer_x64.exe uses network functionality to run. This network traffic may be blocked by your desktop firewall. Make sure to allow inbound and outbound network traffic for both these applications. Go into your firewall and make sure that anything related to oculus / ovr has full rights. This worked for me. Some users have reportedly had to uninstall their firewall completely to get things running (notably: ZoneAlarm) .


Double vision on NVIDIA cards
- The 347.09 NVIDIA driver creates a problem with double rendering. Basically, you see two scenes in every lens (4 scenes output to the HMD in total). This is very frustrating and there seems to be many people asking questions about this around the Internet. To fix it you can simply roll back the NVIDIA driver (in my case rolling back to v 344.75 worked like a charm).
In Windows:
1) Open Device Manager.
2) Double-click on Display Adapters.
3) Double-click on your NVIDIA GPU.
4) Select the Driver Tab.


Misc display problems
If the "Direct to Rift" display mode does not work you must use the "Extended Display" mode, that is: extend your desktop to a second screen (the Rift) and set that display to 1920x1080 resolution. Every time you run a full screen app, you must make sure it opens on the rift display, and every time you run a windowed app (such as the unity editor "Game" window or a fullscreen youtube movie) you must drag the window to the rift display, peek through the goggles, try and find the mouse cursor, and maximize the window on that display. Many times I've found myself having to remove the lens cups to see what's going on (far from ideal) but if you do then put them on quickly again or dust will gather on the screen.
- Configuration utility -> rift display mode -> "Extend Desktop to the HMD"
- Make sure games are opening in full screen, or in a borderless, maximized window
- Some games require running on the main display
- If game opens on the wrong screen (impossible to get it to open on the correct one) this can be enormously tricky and frustrating to get working. I recommend using either "Bilago's VR Game Manager" or "Virtual Desktop" to easily solve these problems. The latter is quite awesome actually and allows you to work with the Rift without taking your headset off all the time.


Unity specific issues (basics)
- Black screen issue: When pressing play, screen remains black for several minutes. The game may eventually start but likely in a bad state. Solution: DK2 only seems to work on Unity 4.6.x, not 4.5 or the Unity 5 Beta (?).
- The unity "Game" window should be non-docked, placed on the rift display, set to "Maximize on play". You then Maximize it on the desktop by clicking the tiny square in the top right corner.
- Judder: For me the Tuscany demo had horrible judder. It appears the game must run in true fullscreen, which is not supported by the Unity Editor. Build to standalone exe and run in fullscreen and judder should go away beautifully. While you're at it, go to the Unity editor settings and activate / beef up the antialiasing and the Tuscany demo will look quite a bit slicker.


Camera does not work / "waiting for camera"
(note that camera led only comes on when an app is using it)
Same steps as "Rift not detected on Win 8.1" above, in short:
1) Reinstall the runtime
2) Before restarting, uninstall the DK2 HMD driver but not the camera / positional tracker driver
3) Reboot, and the DK2 HMD driver should fall back to the default Windows one.


Once I got this all working the DK2 was a blast and I'm sure this will eventually be easy-peasy to set up and use.
I especially recommend Vox Machinae and Virtual Desktop. Both had my jaw hit the floor =).

Cheers

/Cal

[Vidjay]

Well, I have to post here again.

After having used the rift for a few hours, it came back stuck into that orange light :cry:
And since I could not "wake up" the rift again...

I just gave up, it has been stuck for one month now and I won't try again till next SDK is out.

To resume I tried so far :
Reboot
Install/uninstall : Firmware/SDK (with new and old version)/Drivers/windows (tried win7 and win8)
USB : tried different USB 2.0 hubs (but tried also USB 3.0)
switched direct HMD mode/extend mode
different HDMI/VGA/cables
switched Asus instant on Off
unplugged every other USB devices
switched every single non necessary program and anti virus off
checked on other computers if it worked....

....and yes it worked...sometimes, and got back to that orange light and no HMD detected stuff.

To be honest I think when I got it to work it must have been some kind of random luck.

[Anonymous]

If you have a computer with two vid cards like NVidia and intel. set the NVidia control panel from automatic to NVidia. This fixed this problem for me.

[Vidjay]

Thank you for your help, unfortunatly I am not on a dual card system so this is not the solution.
I bought the dk2 via second-hand market so I don't expect any official help from occulus.
I think I'll just leave the rift for a few months away from my PC till next SDK or....I may place it in the trash can.

[enzo]

Still having 8.1 rift detection problems, why is there no firm solution yet. The runtime has not been updated in months and this is becoming vary aggravating. I play the USB dance, turn on and off the rift, restart the software and reboot the computer, install/uninstall drivers etc and then after 30 minutes to an hour of randomly doing these thing I finally get the rift detected, other times i just give up. This has been a problem identified for over a year why no permanent fix yet? Oculus I want a real reply, please do something and at least respond with that you know this is a problem that you aware of and actively can/cant fix with an estimated time of arrival.... By the way this was an issue on my old computer and my brand new computer and I bet this problem is quite prevalent.

😞

[enzo]

Good news, it was not a software problem but a cable problem, I have plugged in different cables and did not use the Oculus Sync/USB connector box and it worked. It worked every single time, I power cycled the pc with rift on/off, tried it in direct mode/extended mode and in all configurations it worked. I have always tried fixing this thru software, well it was not a software problem 🙂
I am sending Oculus support a request to get new cables since the cables i used to trouble shoot are the wrong length and are not conducive to vr use.

[GroundControlGa]

Just a little addon to this thread, on the sequence of my other issues (0.5 unity integration not working, check my threads), I've tried 0.4.4 (skipped it earlier) and it totalled my Alienware 17 w/ Win 8.1. It must've been the driver issue that the OP mentioned that really went south on my laptop. I had to do all sorts of system recovery shannanigans to get windows going again.

Definitely rolling back to 0.4.3 (it worked) and sticking with it for now 😕

For the sake of specifications:

Alineware M17 (2014 model)
32GB RAM
i7 4700M
ATI R9 290x