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

[RoyMi6]

Now that Windows 10 has been announced you need to add support for it's multiple desktops 🙂

Oh, one other suggestion (if we do get 3D audio) it would be amazing if the notification sounds were position and came from the monitor that the application was displayed on.

[heywirez]

First off mad props to the programmer Guygodin for this app!! It has improved at an incredible rate and can't wait til this is out of beta and running on a retail version of the Oculus! Keep up the great work!

I had 1 feature suggestion that would take this app to the next level. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Leap motion but would it be possible to add Leap motion support to the app and allow a virtual keyboard to be brought up in front of the virtual deskop to type on ?? Also have it be movable within the 3d space so it's out of the way when not needed or have a hand gesture make the keyboard appear ?? that would be f%ckn awesome.

[Infinimitsu]

You're doing a fantastic job guygodin. It's been a while since I've been able to tinker with my DK1 and I just recently tried the latest release of Virtual Desktop. Everything runs so smooth now, with pretty much no issues. The curved screen is still a little too uncomfortable to use, but I can't really think of what I could suggest to make it better. It seems that the curve applied to the screen is a sphere distortion or something, rather than more of a cylindrical distortion. I can't really tell what's going on but it feels very uncomfortable to use. Contrasted with Steam VR's curved screen, which is very comfortable and immersive, the current curved screen feels unnatural, like my eyes have to work hard to make it work. I usually don't spend more than five or ten seconds with the curved screen setting on. On the plus side, I just played Minecraft, fullscreen, on a ten foot virtual screen about ten feet away, for about an hour and a half. I love Minecrift, but I can't use the Rift mod while crafting with my brother in Realms, so I decided to give Minecraft a whirl using Virtual Desktop. It was very immersive and make my stomach lurch a couple times when I went to the edge of tall structures. Great feeling to get from a virtual screen.

For anyone wondering what my setup for Virtual Desktop is, I use a laptop with Virtual Desktop running from my integrated graphics and whatever 3d game or app I'm playing running from my discrete graphics. Extended mode, with my main monitor set to 720p and my DK1 set to 1280x800. Everything is clear enough for me to message on Facebook messenger and work the command line from cmd.exe.

Again, great work guygodin! Thank you for keeping this so up to date! Can't wait to get my DK2, (my wife DID buy one for my bday, right?...) and try this out!

[guygodin]

Alright, got another test build for those interested. In this one, I've decoupled the capture from the rendering; this means that you'll always get 75 FPS even if the capture can't keep up. This should improve the experience considerably on Windows 7 and especially in multi-monitor scenarios. I've also multi-threaded the capture so that it will scale a lot better. You can download it here. You'll need to uninstall first before trying to install this build.

Let me know what you think!

[Lagahan]

"guygodin" wrote:
Alright, got another test build for those interested. In this one, I've decoupled the capture from the rendering; this means that you'll always get 75 FPS even if the capture can't keep up. This should improve the experience considerably on Windows 7 and especially in multi-monitor scenarios. I've also multi-threaded the capture so that it will scale a lot better. You can download it here. You'll need to uninstall first before trying to install this build.

Let me know what you think!

Oh that sounds good, gonna try this out now! Was having a bit of trouble keeping capture up to pace while running PCSX2.
Out of interest how are you capturing/encoding this? x264? Could it use NVENC or VCE instead of CPU compression?

Edit: Getting pretty mad stuttering and the encoding keeps hanging. Only capturing single monitor (1080p).

[Sharkku]

Seems like a very good idea to decouple the capture and the framerate! Unfortunately, now I only get 60 fps in the Rift. I have a solid 75 fps with the official build (0.9.4). My main is a projector at 60 Hz.

I also get a crash when I press win-D. Details below:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Virtual Desktop.exe
Application Version: 0.9.6.0
Application Timestamp: 542d0e28
Fault Module Name: dxgi.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.2.9200.16492
Fault Module Timestamp: 50f30fbd
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0000000000022f56
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1053
Additional Information 1: ea1f
Additional Information 2: ea1ff88354124f4064498e97b16eb1cd
Additional Information 3: 0676
Additional Information 4: 067649688993a362ba4d2cf5f49dbedc


Win7 x64
i7 2600K
8 GB
GTX 970 <--upgraded yesterday! 🙂

Would you consider including Direct-to-Rift mode again soon? It worked very well for me.

[guygodin]

I'm able to repro the crash with Win+D, will look into it, thanks! As for the stuttering im puzzled as it runs smoothly here on an i7 920.

Direct-to-rift only works on Win7 and I'm not able to detect when other VR apps are launched so I'll wait for a SDK update that fixes those 2 before enabling it.

I'm not encoding during capture, just copying the desktop texture (in win7 it does from GPU to ram then GPU while on 8 it's a straight GPU to GPU copy). If you can take a screenshot of the performance section (frame rate, capture rate, CPU, etc.) that would be helpful, thanks!

Sharkku: is this in Fullscreen mode or are you running your main display at 75hz?

[kendoka15]

"guygodin" wrote:
Alright, got another test build for those interested. In this one, I've decoupled the capture from the rendering; this means that you'll always get 75 FPS even if the capture can't keep up. This should improve the experience considerably on Windows 7 and especially in multi-monitor scenarios. I've also multi-threaded the capture so that it will scale a lot better. You can download it here. You'll need to uninstall first before trying to install this build.

Let me know what you think!

I tried this and had 60 fps and it often dropped down to 30-35 (Tried every option) though the official build works fine except for some judder while watching a youtube video in multi-mon.
i7 2600k 4.6Ghz
GTX 780 Ti
Windows 7 64bit

[guygodin]

I've updated the test build, let me know if things improve for you.

[nkeeney]

guygodin - Thanks for all the hard work on Virtual Desktop - you've made an excellent utility for extending Oculus use beyond gaming!

Speaking of gaming, I have a request. While playing Elite:Dangerous (of course, this applies to any game), I often find myself wishing that I could alt-tab into Virtual Desktop in order to enter data into spreadsheets, look up info in a Wiki, etc., but whenever I attempt to do this, it seems that Virtual Desktop shuts itself down as soon as Elite becomes fullscreen.

I also attempted (after a suggestion on reddit) to use the Steam overlays via SteamVR, but to no avail - the Steam overlay for a non-SteamVR game is 2D and unusable in the Rift.

Is there any way to keep Virtual Desktop running "in the background" so that alt-tabbing from a game will allow Virtual Desktop to provide the UI?