Virtual Desktop 1.0 - Now available on Steam

[guygodin]

Virtual Desktop is a little utility that improves your VR experience on the desktop. By efficiently replicating your desktop into the Rift, the application allows you to see your desktop on a giant virtual screen. You can browse the web, watch movies or even play non-VR games. It also allows you to launch VR games and resume from them without having to take your headset off.




After you launch Virtual Desktop, a tray icon will appear in your taskbar. From there you can manage your list of games, change your settings.




You can also drag & drop executables or shortcuts to add more games to your list.

Requirements
- Windows 8 or 10
- Oculus 1.3 Runtime

Latest Changes
- Added ability to browse 360 photos
- Added mirror to monitor feature

Follow the link below to access the store page
Official website

[Jewlz]

"guygodin" wrote:
....so I highly encourage you to upgrade to Windows 8 as there is no performance penalty with additional screens.

I honestly don't think people are going to upgrade to Windows 8 just to try this out dude.
I am using this on Windows 7 and it works great!

[InfiniteMort]

Starting this on Win7 x64 shows the exception: The parameter is incorrect.

SP1 and Platform update are already installed.

[Ossielocal]

Using windows 7 and 3 monitors now and running vr desktop was running smooth on one monitor but with 3 killed it , getting 9fps now love the idea of this Vr desktop . Will you be doing a fix for 3 monitor setups on window 7 !

[guygodin]

"Ossielocal" wrote:
Using windows 7 and 3 monitors now and running vr desktop was running smooth on one monitor but with 3 killed it , getting 9fps now love the idea of this Vr desktop . Will you be doing a fix for 3 monitor setups on window 7 !

As I mentioned, multi-monitor is gonna be very demanding on Win7. There's unfortunately no good APIs to capture the desktop. It was already a stretch to be able to capture one monitor at full resolution.. there's really nothing else I can do besides hoping that Nvidia will license me hardware specific APIs.

So some people are able to get it working on 7 and some not? If anyone can give me more detailed information about the crash (from the Event Viewer), I'll be able to track it down, thanks!

[Zhamul]

Huge thanks for you efforts. I have been using this for a little over a week now. Almost daily. The multimonitor support is great, finally it feels like that I could not only browse net, chat & watch videos in Youtube, but actually develop inside the Rift.

I have had zero technical problems with the program. The newest version doesn't run 75fps on my Win8 setup (Phentom II X4 955 + GTX760 + 12gb ram) but is not that bad. I'd like to see some sort of feature roadmap on your site. For features I suggest more controls for positioning your monitors. At least floating recenter and independent zoom for each monitor for now. Custom monitor position presets would be great too.

[Sharkku]

Cool update! Drop-down menus are back! And I really like the transparent feature!
But still no Direct-to-Rift?
What would really make it useful would be if you could use The Rift as the only monitor, and that worked in Direct-to-Rift mode. I still have that build you sent, but the camera translation/stereo rendering is messed up in that version. Is it coming, or are you waiting for an SDK update?

[bluej]

I love this app and have been using it since the beginning. The new multi-screen version 9.4 beta looks great.

I am running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit on an i7 4770k and a very old AMD 5770 video card. I have two monitors and the DK2 Rift attached to the AMD, and a third monitor attached to the motherboard (using Intel HD 4600 graphics). The Rift is connected using an Active DisplayPort to HDMI adapter.

When everything is configured correctly, I get a consistent 77 fps frame rate, ~12.6% CPU utilization, and 22ms - 24ms latency.

First, the working configuration:

With the Rift turned ON:
The motherboard attached monitor MUST be disabled in the Windows Display control panel.
With the 3 remaining displays (including the Rift in extended mode), the Rift can be on either the left or right side.
The first non-Rift display on the far left MUST be set as the main display.

In Virtual Desktop: VSync ON, HQ Distortion OFF, Time Warp ON, Full Screen ON

Problems and/or concerns:

1: The HQ Distortion setting makes stuff look better and drops latency down to 13ms - 18ms (fluctuating a lot as you move your head). But, it can cause the screen to jump a bit every half second or so. (It doesn't always do that. If I take the Rift off and set it down for a few seconds and then put it back on, the jumping stops or becomes less frequent.)

2: If the motherboard attached display is left enabled while the Rift is ON, all of the displays in Virtual Desktop just show as black boxes on a pretty background. (I see a lot of people complain about the black screen, maybe this is the cause of their problems as well?)

3: If the working config is used, but a non-Rift display other than the far left one is set as the main display in the Windows Display control panel, then the two screens are reversed and the other screen is just a black box in Virtual Desktop (the main one showing on the left side instead of the right side). The mouse is NOT reversed, so it points to the wrong screen in Virtual Desktop. (Maybe this is also a cause of the black screen in previous versions?)

Feature request:

One of my favorite uses of Virtual Desktop is watching videos. In the older versions, you start a YouTube or Netflix video and set it to full screen and enjoy the space theatre like experience. With the new multi-screen support in the latest version, the other non-video screen is distracting. It would be nice to be able to hide the other screens via a toggle while watching videos.

Thanks for the awesome work you are doing!

[Hammey]

Having two monitors does not work for me but having one does. I am using 8.1 64bit all displays plugged into my gpu

[garrwolfdog]

Whenever I run Virtual Desktop with the Rift in extended desktop mode it crashes with a "Virtual Desktop has stopped working" message.
If I load it up without the rift on, or in direct mode, it worked fine until the rift is detected in extended mode.

Any ideas? i've got the the latest runtime and a fully updated version of Windows 7.

[OculusRiftRocks]

Would it be possible to play games in a triple wide monitor view inside virtual desktop, so in other words the desktop space will be the same height it is now but 3x longer, some of the desktop image may be rendered outwith my view in which case I would have to turn my head, and if it was curved it would be better than a real triple monitor setup.


A workaround would be you could play a game -in a window- in a custom resolution that has less height than 16:9 (say 1920x800 to mimic a 21:9 screen), make rest of the desktop black background (the remaining 280 vertical pixels), then zoom the image in with virtual desktop,voila you now have a 21:9 curved screen!