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

[drash]

Looks interesting! I wasn't able to get very far, though.

After installing on Win8 64-bit, I switched to Extended mode, Rift is on and showing the non-icons part of my desktop, and then run Virtual Desktop. I see the eye icon in my system tray but when I mouse over it, it disappears. If I run it again, same thing. Looks like it's crashing?

[AoS.Wasted]

I have the same problem 🙂

[guygodin]

Thanks for trying it out, I think this may be related to a UAC issue as I try to copy the correct (Win32/x64) DLL at launch. I've now forced the app to x64 temporarily and added better error handling so hopefully now you'll get an actual error message 🙂

The MSI has been updated. You should just need to install and it will take care of updating. Let me know if that solves your problem.

Guy

[drash]

Progress! Now it just says "Index was outside the bounds of the array". 🙂

Also note that I had to first uninstall what was already there to get this error message to show up -- installing again over the old one wasn't sufficient.

[guygodin]

Hmm, is your desktop setup as your primary display and the rift as a secondary output in extended mode? And both are on the same video card?

[cybereality]

Looks awesome, but I'm on Windows 7. Thanks, though.

[guygodin]

Ah 😞 Are all the folks at oculus running windows 7 ? I know this will prevent lots of people from using it and I don't blame them. I was very hesitant to upgrade as well. In fact, the only reason I switched to Windows 8 was to try those new D3D11.1 APIs and they are quite amazing for VR I gotta say.

drash and AntonieB, I've updated the app to correctly detect the desktop / rift outputs and warn you if it detects an incompatible configuration. Just uninstall the old one and install the new one and you should be able to get it to work 😄

[cybereality]

What's so great about DirectX 11.1 and VR?

I'm still on Win7, but I would consider upgrading if there were significant gains.

[guygodin]

"cybereality" wrote:
What's so great about DirectX 11.1 and VR?

I'm still on Win7, but I would consider upgrading if there were significant gains.

It supports stereoscopic 3D natively (kinda like what tridef does). But the feature I'm using is called "output duplication" which essentially allows me to get access to the desktop image in GPU memory. This means I can copy the desktop texture, apply distortion and send it to the rift with practically zero CPU usage. The other solutions out there (like Deskope) have to copy the surface to system memory with Blt which is very cpu intensive so the framerates and size of the desktop are limited.

I personally hate the whole app store and metro UI though. I turned it off completely. I'm using this Start8 program that brings back the start menu and disables the annoying hot corners.