Hey, friends of virtual space
Last week I received my Vive. And to say just a few things: it is freaking amazing. Walking around freely in virtual space is easily the holy grail of VR, and having virtual controllers that are represented 1:1 in both physical and virtual space is key to immersive manipulation (the possibility to “skin” them is even cooler though).
Right now, of the main content engines only Unity3d and Unreal provide easy access to the tech. While this is certainly viable for testing, I would prefer to have it available in vvvv. Who else?
There is an sdk called OpenVR from Steam, which provides access to the “poses”, which means the place and rotation of the controllers, and the two eyepoints. It seems quite well thought out, as it even provides ways to get future estimates of the poses to make latency feel even tighter.
It is basically C, but there are some interop mechanisms demonstrated for the unity interface.
From what I gathered, the main cornerstone is something called Compositor, which kinda “takes” a context from EX9 or DX11 (or even OpenGL) and “presents” it in the vr glasses.
Now, my personal opinion is, it is vital for the future course of vvvv to support VR. Unfortunately, the c interop stuff is still something I cannot wrap my head around, so “just making it myself” is not an option this time.
This post is really about asking about interest. Who else’d be willing to go down the rabbit hole that is VR?
Also, I’d like to ask the devvvs and vux (as they are maintaining EX9 and DX11 respectively) if they see a way to incorporate it into their pipelines.