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Boff
Up and Coming
February 7, 2014

Use Rift + Monitor?

I've been thinking about how to use the Rift and monitor independently with Unity.

E.g. A short introduction level on the monitor, before being instructed to "Put on the Rift" and seeing a whole new world (a separate scene) in glorious technicolor! Wizard of Oz style.

After a quick search it seems there's a ''-popupwindow" switch that will do a borderless window. If I'm running RIft + monitor in extended mode this should fill both screens. So if I set up a 2 viewports on each side, one with OVRcameras and one with a normal camera (showing separate scenes), would this work?

And if so, would it only work for my particular setup? (Resolution, and whether the Rift is display 1 or 2)?
I'm at work right now so can't test it, and my Unity skills aren't the best so it would probably take me all night to set something up!

Anyone already tried it? Is it even worth bothering? Or would it be better just to go for full VR immersion from the start?
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    3 replies

    drash
    Inspiring
    February 7, 2014
    First of all, I didn't know about the -popupwindow option. I'm going to have to play with that. Thanks. :)

    I have tried the double-wide viewport thing while running the desktop in extended mode and the Unity program in Windowed mode. However, I don't think Unity makes it simple to ensure that this extra wide window is positioned correctly (I always had to manually move it around for it to be usable), but maybe the -popupwindow option changes things. And yes, this approach probably requires that both Rift and desktop are running at the same resolution, and I'm not aware of a way to detect at runtime which display is the Rift, but you could certainly give the user the option to swap viewports or something. :?:

    Assuming the aforementioned conditions are satisfied, to also be performance-minded, you could clear the whole viewport black at startup, then just update only the monitor half of the viewport in your intro level, then switch to updating only the Rift half when it's time to use the Rift.

    The whole approach sounds like it could be problematic since it requires running the desktop in extended mode, which has been fairly difficult to work with as an end-user.
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    cybereality
    Inspiring
    February 8, 2014
    This is something we are looking into supporting for the future. Right now it's not really a feature in the implementation. That said, there are probably ways to make it work but may not be consistent across different machines. For example, what if the Rift is the left screen rather than the right? How to handle different resolutions or aspect ratios, etc.
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    BoffAuthor
    Up and Coming
    February 10, 2014
    OK thanks for the info both - I'll probably just try it for my own use then. Was trying to think of different experiences than "run demo, quickly put on rift".
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