Relativ – A VR headset that you can build yourself for $100
github.com
github.com
Oh, one note, in your read me, the part about Jonas convincing Chinese factories to sell you parts at premium prices should be changed. You probably meant he got really good prices, but premium pricing means basically the opposite.
Webcam based hobbyist 6dof headtracking for use with desktop screens has been around for many years (freetrack, ftnoir/opentrack and so on), but the quality is rather dreadful. Still, people who don't mind glacial latency from very heavy smoothing have been very happy with those solutions.
But VR requires so much headmounted technology that tradeoffs between cost/weight and quality shift a lot. For desktop tracking, adding head mounted sensors to the existing single camera 6dof tracking solutions would at least double the amount of hardware involved. But when your baseline is a full VR headset, those sensors are an almost negligible extension. Gyro sensors and/or an "inside out" camera could easily add a lot of precision/speed (effectively the same metric, with filtering) to the rotary axes of single cam 6dof. Last time I looked at opentrack it already supported some sort of fusion between stationary camera and Android gyros. This would be a good starting point for a hobbyist VR rig (not room scale).
Focusing this type of educational attention on children at an early age is critical for future personal and professional development.
This is what allows consumers to have a build yourself VR headset for $100.
I have covered a few early STEAM programs in the Los Angeles area.
https://latechnews.org/raymond-ealy-founder-steamcoders/ https://latechnews.org/stem3-academy-open-house-november-4/
it’s not a big study nor does it comes to any concrete results, so I was wondering if you knew of more data on the subject, or knew of any real word feedback on the matter.
This looks like a real fun project.
If you belong to it, then great work!
Carmack has long lectures about that issue.
Yes and no. And the "no" seems underappreciated.
I normally run my Vive and Lenovo WMR at 30 fps on an old laptop with Intel integrated graphics. So why hasn't it made people sick? Camera passthrough AR helps. Likely the "comfort mode"-like tunnel-vision effect of not doing barrel or chromatic aberration correction. Perhaps not doing predictive tracking, so lag but no judder. Maybe "visible out the corner of your eye" framing. Maybe something else.
Most VR reporting starts from an assumption of games. Games, games, always games. So "you are there" immersion, with no avoidable visible artifacts, no AR, etc. So 90 fps, constant latency, high GPU and HMD bandwidth demands. But if you don't care about games, if you just want a desktop replacement/alternative... the design constraint space looks very different.
But yes, their focus seems Unity and games.
It sounds like you might know something about the desktop experience. Do you have any thoughts, or useful links?
Tl;dr: wait for Xmas.
A current design point: gaming laptop; Windows; SteamVR; a virtual desktop like http://bigscreenvr.com/ ; HDMI dummies as mentioned by @sgtmas2006, so Windows thinks it has more monitors; RDP/VNC/etc to a linux VM. All off the shelf.
But gaming laptops are likely "annoyingly unportable laptops". If you can segregate when you want portable vs monitors, something like a Lenovo X1 Carbon is portable, and has Thunderbolt 3, so you can plug in a rather less portable external gpu enclosure.
Current HMD resolution is still quite low. If you use big desktop monitors for their resolution (eg, lots of text), rather than merely their size (eg, vision impairment), that's a problem. If the big monitors are full of little terminal windows (eg, ops), I saw a report of someone being happy.
https://varjo.com/ , despite its website, appears on track[1] to release a much higher resolution HMD this year. For only "under $10k". With that, you could just render your big monitors. Current software support is unclear.
So a takeaway could be "wait for Xmas 2018".
> what to expect if I were to buy a headset and plug it into my laptop running linux
The HMD shows up as a normal monitor. (In future, that may require telling `xrandr` "yes, I know it's an HMD, just treat it as a normal monitor please".) From there, it's like google cardboard. There's a border region you can't see, and each eye gets half the screen. If you close one eye, you can just drag/open windows and use them normally. I open a full-screen browser window, and render stereo for 3D. The pixels are magnified, and can easily be seen individually.
As for tracking and controllers... attention to linux largely evaporated when VR transitioned from niche to chasing the Windows gaming market. I know of nothing usable with Windows MR HMDs. (There was/is? a project to unpack their odd camera format, and then one might run say ORB-SLAM2 for tracking, but that's all diy). And doesn't gget you Windows MR controllers. For Vive, there's SteamVR and WebVR, but I believe both still require major setup effort, with buggy results. http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ exists. As do low-level Vive device drivers.
> ... with intel graphics
Ah, that is very not mainstream. I know of only my own stack[2] easily available. And that's for Vive tracking. Tracking Windows MR HMDs then requires taping on a Vive controller, or diy software dev.
So unless your usage patterns happen to mesh nicely with rather severe current tech constraints... using VR to replace big monitors isn't quite ripe yet. Maybe by Xmas. But once that threshold is passed, I expect a rapid and large impact.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12102/varjo-announces-shippin... [2] https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack
Why not submit an issue or get involved with the project? It seems like you have expertise in the area that they would appreciate.
I'm sure everyone agrees this is a big achievement for these students, move along.
Not everyone has the time to volunteer and not every comment has to say it is a cool project.
Allez, développez votre création et votre histoire à long terme, c'est ça qui compte!
Well, GearVR and Daydream suck but at least don't make you sick if you stay sit and avoid apps with artificial movement.
If only he followed his own advice.
Even if he can't its pretty hypocritical for him to ask these people to open source their work, allowing Occulus to benefit from it rather than worry about them as competition.
It seems like a chief architect would have a lot of pull in technical decisions, but a lot less in business or legal decisions. Open-sourcing the code would have to be considered from all three perspectives.
That having been said, these kids are really cool and I wish them the best of luck!
*edit: punct.
Cool kids :-)
Quick question for any experts reading this - do Oculus or VIVE use any sort of dead reckoning/movement prediction in their tracking? Also does anyone have any documentation on the APIs for this, or information on how the devices keep track of their latency and calibration information?
There are fundamental limits on latency, especially with spread-spectrum transmission when all of this goes wireless. As accurate as the tracking and pointing are for controllers, I feel like some additional extrapolation is happening. It would be great to have an open source library for this so we can give hand-built rigs the best tracking that's mathematically possible.
Absolutely. Vive uses a combination of IMU based dead reckoning combined with Lighthouse sensors to provide tracking. The dead reckoning is super important for maintaining tracking during sensor occlusion. The API it interfaces with is SteamVR, which is mostly open source, so you can even see how they’re doing it. The new generation Vive Pro will combine this along with stereo camera CV based inside out tracking for even better precision.
Look again. The Odyssey's cameras sit below eye level and point down & sideways, which makes sense for tracking:
https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/hmd/windows-mixed-reali...
The Vive Pro cameras sit at eye level, at average interpupillary distance, and point straight ahead:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/digitaltrends-uploads-prod/2018/01/h...
That makes most sense for pass-through AR.
The headset is not wireless and the controllers have 1-2 ms of latency. They compress the controller data a lot in a very smart way. More info: https://hackaday.com/2016/12/12/cnlohr-reverses-vive-valve-e...
Can't wait for the day when we truly have modular VR.
It's going to take a few years and I know Oculus has the right idea with their eco system but it sort of bums me out that the Vive didn't end up being the hackers headset.
Today it feels like the Vive was built out of spite and HTC got lucky Valve went them first.
But damn, so I 1000% agree with being bummed about it not being the hackers headset. I preordered the Vive because of a VR video of a guy programming the environment he was in at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag
I would love to use a VR IDE some day.
The LCD Windows MR HMDs seem pretty close to being a sufficient display. The useful visual area is something like 900^2 px. Big, visible pixels, that are ok with a 7 pt font. And one can do subpixel rendering, so ~3x the horizontal resolution. If you are ok with working on a small laptop screen, you might be ok with this.
Otherwise, there's Varjo[1] later this year. Similar resolution to looking at your laptop. ~55 px/deg. For "under $10k".
For gloves, that you can still type in... we'll see. I had hope for https://senso.me/ , but they've gone quiet. If you don't mind spending $10k, there are existing trackers.
For software... sigh. Maybe if market size explodes this Xmas, things will improve. There's been a lot of "do something, then abandon it, because the area isn't ripe yet" over the last half decade. And software dev in VR hasn't been where people's attention is focused.
Oh, if one's interest is in-VR creation of VR, instead of in-VR general software dev, then there are a bunch of "authoring environments" being worked on.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12102/varjo-announces-shippin...
Senso.me? https://senso.me/order has said "Estimated shipment date: December 2017" for long time, and blog hasn't been updated since Sept.
Varjo? Last I saw, Alpha version available to partners. Though Beta was expected Q1?
I have to wonder if this team could have gotten more mileage out of working with OSVR, since a lot of the work to connect it with existing VR apps is already done. But there's certainly value in doing it all yourself!
Panelook seems down, but even if only 4K@30 5.5 panels are currently available/affordable... well, no gaming, but I use Vive and WMD at 30 fps as a desktop alternative.
Do you edit text, code, email and surf inside the helmet?
Do you have any issues with keyboard and mouse?
Do you sit in a desk chair?
It was very pleasant. I wish I had a Rift to try it with, the lenses on the Vive are rough, with my only experience before the Vive being the DK2. http://www.roadtovr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/wearality... This effect was highly noticeable for me.
Never had an issue with my mouse or KB. I went onto the app where you were in a living room, with other people in the online room around you, and you each had your desktop in your lap. It was pretty cool to play Overwatch and this guy comment when something sick happened.
I don't believe VR belongs in the gaming scene. Business / EDU all the way. I'd be curious if there's any plans to research trying to get kids to develop synesthesia using VR.
I do also sit at a desk chair. I ended up stopping using it a lot unless I'm trying to drown out everything around me because I am very paranoid if I can't see all exits/entrances to a room with my back to the wall. Still probably the most eye-opening experience for VR for me. Being able to come into my office, with only my desk in a part of the room, sit there with my KB&M and virtual displays, and then move around my room separately for things like Tilt Brush would be amazing.
"your desktop alternative" -> collection of crufty exploratory kludges. :)
I'm running custom stacks on linux and X. Browser as compositor, and three.js. React. Tracking from low-level Vive lighthouse driver[1], or laptop webcam optical, or none. Camera passthrough AR.
Most recently, I'd just plug a Lenovo WMR HMD with a duct-taped-on camera into an old laptop with integrated graphics; run a browser full screen on the HMD; run xpra to put emacs and xterm on laptop and HMD; with the camera AR in background; and sometimes track head motion using the laptop webcam and yellow duct-tape HMD marks. Boring and crufty. Though emacs looks kind of "hip" with text changing depth.
> Do you edit text, code, email and surf
Desktop is just xpra[2]. A remote desktop that pulls in individual X programs. No "plug in a null display device" Microsoft silliness. Text is ok. Video is low fps (though I've not tried to improve it). I'd not want to surf in a such small window - think a 900 px square.
Because of resolution (and budget) limits, the UI is more 2D on sphere than 3D. Just picture normal desktop windows. Vive resolution was unusably low and PenTile. LCD Windows MR resolution is tolerable with individual pixel control (thus the 2D). 3D might be ok with subpixel rendering, but I don't yet have a laptop with a dGPU, so I've been putting it off. Given 2D, I'm still just using xpra's kb/mouse handling. Bits of a React-and-three.js approach. For hand tracking, leapmotion is unusable, my finger tracking with fiducial markers is currently too slow, and gloves with IMU fingers are still like $4k+. So I'm basically just doing exploratory spikes, waiting on late-2018 hardware availability and prices.
> desk chair?
Desk chair, conference room, classroom, subway. All sitting with laptop keyboard. I've explored room-scale UI before, but for this, just emacs and xterm in space. Not even in space, just in your face. I'm tired of burning life fighting ephemeral display and input limits. I'd like to do software dev and collaborative compilation and category theoretic type systems in 3D. But I'm going to wait for the needed hardware, rather than struggling against the glacial pace of tech progress.
[1] https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack [2] https://xpra.org/
Too bad the IMU finger gloves are so expensive, doesn't make sense since the sensors are only $9 each qty 1. Using gloves like these [0] along with a HMD that had integrated wide field cameras could have great finger tracking support.
Just simple passthrough video for now - no vision. And mono, in a bid to reduce eye strain from long hours of use.
> do the passthrough cameras do edge detection with motion compensated infill (more pixels come through the closer/faster they move) so one doesn't feel cut off from the outside world?
Do you mean making "big vision-occluding windows" more transparent when the world behind them changes and/or head spins?
> expensive, doesn't make sense
Existing small high-end market; immature big low-end market; limited ability to do market segmentation; no HomebrewComputerClub-like market-bypass; lack of incentives to avoid collateral damage to rate of progress.
My hope is Xmas 2018 will see both finger and eye tracking get products priced for consumers.
> [color] glove
Yeah. Sigh. They did a startup... and were bought by Oculus. I don't know of an open source release. So here we are, literally a decade later, and you can't easily get one.
It's been interesting to watch VR's widespread innovate-startup-acquisition-unavailable dynamic, and contrast it with say the ferment of HCC. It attracts investment, but devastates the market ecosystem, and cripples research.
Not that they have a camera. And I've no idea what their latency is. I'm just observing that by not aiming at the gaming market, they might address points in market space that are largely neglected at present.
My immediate thought went to seeing if a VR headset could be created with a 200+ degree field of view similar to a Pimax or StarVR using two of these displays!