Suggested Support for Modern VR HMDs and/or Motion controllers

[HeadClot]

Hey,
Since Consumer Entertainment Show 2016 is coming up tomorrow (4th through the 9th) and will have a very heavy focus on VR HMDs.

I am curious if the Terasology team has plans for modern VR HMD Support and/or motion controllers.
I know that terasology has support for the Dev kit 1 version of the rift. But not sure other than that.

So VR HMD's such as:
Oculus Rift CV1
HTC Vive CV1
OSVR Hacker development kit
etc.

That said - I know that Oculus and Google has set some guidelines for making VR ready applications.

Spoiler: Rift Requirements

System requirements for running the Rift CV1 -

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater.
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater.
• 8GB+ RAM.
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output.
• 2x USB 3.0 ports.
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer.

Lastly Requirements for "Presence" In VR.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-shares-5-key-ingredients-for-presence-in-virtual-reality/

Spoiler: The future of Virtual Reality

Edit: More details for VR Stuff and Talks

 

[manu3d]

Thank you @HeadClot for the post. You write:

"I am curious if the Terasology team has plans for modern VR HMD Support and/or motion controllers."

From a technical perspective Terasology supports Oculus VR. By my understanding tests with Oculus Dev Kit 2 have been successful, in the sense that it works as advertised. Unfortunately the code that does it all is very fragmented and all over the graphics engine. We'd need to extract it and eventually abstract it to support other hardware too. To do this well some redesign of the high-level architecture of the graphics engine would be in order. I have thrown some ideas in issue #1741 and some discussions have occurred in the associated forum thread. But I haven't managed to make any progress on that. It's kind of a high-level concept that would be nice to implement and would help move toward a broader compatibility with devices like those you mention. But ultimately it all boils down to manpower, something severely lacking, especially in the graphics engine department.

So: solid plans, no. Ideas on how to move in that direction and make those things easier for future Terasology developers? Yes. Timeline: unknown, sorry.

 

[HeadClot]

Thank you @HeadClot for the post. You write:

"I am curious if the Terasology team has plans for modern VR HMD Support and/or motion controllers."

From a technical perspective Terasology supports Oculus VR. By my understanding tests with Oculus Dev Kit 2 have been successful, in the sense that it works as advertised. Unfortunately the code that does it all is very fragmented and all over the graphics engine. We'd need to extract it and eventually abstract it to support other hardware too. To do this well some redesign of the high-level architecture of the graphics engine would be in order. I have thrown some ideas in issue #1741 and some discussions have occurred in the associated forum thread. But I haven't managed to make any progress on that. It's kind of a high-level concept that would be nice to implement and would help move toward a broader compatibility with devices like those you mention. But ultimately it all boils down to manpower, something severely lacking, especially in the graphics engine department.

So: solid plans, no. Ideas on how to move in that direction and make those things easier for future Terasology developers? Yes. Timeline: unknown, sorry.

Hey thanks for the reply @manu3d.

I got one last question - Is there a bounty on up to date VR integration for Terasology?

I think that if this was posted in the right places it would get allot of attention.

Just saying.

 

[manu3d]

@Cervator is the person to speak to for bounties. I'm not quite sure how they work, i.e. do they have to add up to the currently available budget? If so there might be other priorities, and in general I'm curious to see what will come out of them more long term. I.e. will mercenaries only interested in money come out of the woodwork and provide solutions that fulfill the specific requests short term but that do not really fit the bigger picture long term? I might be too cynical and it might all work very well, but I look forward to see what this experience will bring more long term.

 

[HeadClot]

@Cervator is the person to speak to for bounties. I'm not quite sure how they work, i.e. do they have to add up to the currently available budget? If so there might be other priorities, and in general I'm curious to see what will come out of them more long term. I.e. will mercenaries only interested in money come out of the woodwork and provide solutions that fulfill the specific requests short term but that do not really fit the bigger picture long term? I might be too cynical and it might all work very well, but I look forward to see what this experience will bring more long term.

I will talk you guys about this on IRC. I feel that the bounties can be a great way of getting professional software engineers to fulfill requests that we have. That is the short of it.

 

[Cervator]

Submitted a new issue with a small bounty to get started. I'm happy if bounties help, and we can start little symbolic seed bounties with available funds, but nowhere near the kind of bounties that would actually pay for the work

Issue includes a bunch of details and links to here and elsewhere. Also marked it as a GSOC candidate if somebody really wants to work on VR over the summer with a full generic implementation in mind.

 

[HeadClot]

Submitted a new issue with a small bounty to get started. I'm happy if bounties help, and we can start little symbolic seed bounties with available funds, but nowhere near the kind of bounties that would actually pay for the work

Issue includes a bunch of details and links to here and elsewhere. Also marked it as a GSOC candidate if somebody really wants to work on VR over the summer with a full generic implementation in mind.

I will contribute to this bounty very soon.