Setting up the Oculus Rift in Unity Free

Here is an example of how to integrate with external data sources in Unity for anyone interested: http://mypersonalsoft.blogspot.com/2010/12/unity-3d-integration-with-any.html

"Caine" wrote:

"virror" wrote:
"Rift support isn't a Unity Pro feature, RenderTextures are."
This. Ony reason that Rift support is a Pro feature is that it requires RenderTexture.
If you are worried, mail them and ask.

The only reason? If this was accurate, don't you think Unity would have endorsed the workaround or offered it themselves? If someone can't afford or don't want to pay for Unity Pro there are free alternatives (like Torque).

Where do you draw the line? So it's ok to workaround to get rift support, why not get the Unity pro water effects for free as well?

I wouldn't care to do this if it was just you two but since so many seem to argue against the obvious and encourage others (the breach of the EULA), I will go straight to the source to clear this up and will report back.

Just for the record, i already have a legal version of Unity Pro : )
But still curious what Unity's take on this is.

"virror" wrote:

"Caine" wrote:

"virror" wrote:
"Rift support isn't a Unity Pro feature, RenderTextures are."
This. Ony reason that Rift support is a Pro feature is that it requires RenderTexture.
If you are worried, mail them and ask.

The only reason? If this was accurate, don't you think Unity would have endorsed the workaround or offered it themselves? If someone can't afford or don't want to pay for Unity Pro there are free alternatives (like Torque).

Where do you draw the line? So it's ok to workaround to get rift support, why not get the Unity pro water effects for free as well?

I wouldn't care to do this if it was just you two but since so many seem to argue against the obvious and encourage others (the breach of the EULA), I will go straight to the source to clear this up and will report back.

Just for the record, i already have a legal version of Unity Pro : )
But still curious what Unity's take on this is.

Gotta say I'm surprised you have the legal version given your arguments.

I don't have a definitive answer back yet from Unity, but in the meantime, here's something straight from the CEO on the matter - See twitter of @davidhelgason "Without doing much research yet, it sounds like it’s not okay… but I’d have to check. Thanks for asking".

See also http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/547984/unity-3d-license-questions-oculus-rift.html

I have been curious about the legality of it myself. I am not using it for any commercial purpose / only for non-profit (library) use, so as of now it seems okay.

Let me know what response you get from Oculus. =]

"brknhrt16" wrote:
I have been curious about the legality of it myself. I am not using it for any commercial purpose / only for non-profit (library) use, so as of now it seems okay.

Let me know what response you get from Oculus. =]

Your method's use of a .dll seems pretty clearly prohibited with Unity Free (see Unity Answers post I linked to above, plus the initial comment from Unity's CEO). Whether you use it for commercial purposes or not is irrelevant - exactly what provision of the EULA are you basing that comment/supposed loophole on? Even if that was a loophole, what steps did you take to ensure everyone else who uses your workaround doesn't then use it for commercial purposes?

"Caine" wrote:

"brknhrt16" wrote:
I have been curious about the legality of it myself. I am not using it for any commercial purpose / only for non-profit (library) use, so as of now it seems okay.

Let me know what response you get from Oculus. =]

Your method's use of a .dll seems pretty clearly prohibited with Unity Free (see Unity Answers post I linked to above, plus the initial comment from Unity's CEO). Whether you use it for commercial purposes or not is irrelevant - exactly what provision of the EULA are you basing that comment/supposed loophole on? Even if that was a loophole, what steps did you take to ensure everyone else who uses your workaround doesn't then use it for commercial purposes?

Hey! I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to check Unity's Agreement. You're absolutely right! I only kept checking up on Oculus without any hope of a clear answer. Thanks!

Didn't get to see the tutorial at all (it's been taken down at this point) but using the rift in unity free is not a pro specific feature... at least the head tracking. You can't use the rift made dll and unitypackage, since using dll's are indeed a pro feature.

That said, it's not hard to pipe in data from an external program. I've done it without any issues. In fact, on my pc I was getting 7000 inputs per second using a c# pipe. This is a native part of mono c# and regular c#. It's kind of like sending data over a socket in c#, but it's accessing the same memory so it's darn fast. You just make your own c# script to get the data from the rift and put it in the pipe.

I did this when messing with different ways to get serial data. For some reason whenever I tried to access the socket system inside of unity, it crashed. O-o. That's been all cleared up, was apparently something on my system messing with it. (I've been working with getting the arduino to send data into unity off and on for the past few years, I was actually making my own version of the rift a while ago. Had tilt up and down and rotating your head toward your shoulders, but didn't have a digital compass or gyro, nor the money for either. Now I'm working on a virtual glove/arm system)

Using the dll may break the EULA and such, but using a pipe doesn't, and is a fairly easy and useful alternative that most definitely doesn't break the EULA. Also, if people want, using viero (or however it's spelled) after you've distributed it without viero, I don't think there's anything the unity team can do from a legal standpoint as you aren't distributing the workaround method.

I'm not a lawyer though, so I can't say anything with any assurance on the viero part, but using a second program to pipe in data is not illegal as it's covered under Monodevelop, not unity it self. Unity can't use monodevelop as their base unless they accept their EULA.

DLL import is actually a basic feature of mono as well. It would actually take work by unity to disable this built in feature for the free version. I love unity but I just don't understand this decision.

I really hope in the future we can freely use the free version of Unity with Rift. I enjoy developing in my free time, but I wouldn't want to pay for Pro just to get the disortion..

Hi there, this is my first post on this forum so bear with me

I'm reasonably experienced with Unity so I do have some reservations about the solution im going to pose for all this but a fellow whose assets i've purchased before, and are solid, has released a $20 asset for the asset store giving Unity Free rendertotexture ability and i'm assuming he's been fooling about with it a great deal as he claims he's getting usable performance despite using the notoriously slow Texture2D.Readpixels function, with the caveats of using half resolutions and whatnot (Full resolutions in the next release). You can read about it here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/204481-FXLab-Unity-Effects-%28Does-NOT-require-Unity-Pro%29

So, i've been nagging him a little to write the barrel distortion shader needed for the Oculus, and intend to buy his asset as my computer's quite capable and I might find it useful, and can check its performance for myself, but is there a need amongst current Oculus owners for this, given the caveats, or not, given he's offered to supply the shader to myself or put it in the package but I dont know if theres any point nagging him further about it to avoid him wasting his time, more or less, or buying the asset, have him supply me the shader then come here and say 'i got what you need you just gotta give some guy $20'