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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The Hyperbase is still alive and preparing for the Rift

Cough, cough... Hello? ..."ello, ...ello..."
seems it is about time to dust off the microphone and start spreading some news again.
The latest developments around the Oculus Rift have for sure rekindled my interest in becoming a more active part in the Hyperverse once again.
Time to update the base and prepare it for the thousands of visitors gathering there every day ;-)

...and now to something completely (?!?) different: bringing together what belongs together: the opensim world(s) and 3d head mounted displays!
Yay!
What?
Who?
How?

Ok, CUT, next shot....

So, there is that fancy new hype thing called the Oculus Rift out there. Everybody wants to see it or have one (in fact i ordered a dev kit too).
It will be wonderful to finally be able to "really enter" our worlds and "be there"!
But: at this moment only very few have the priviledge to do so because:
so far most of the developers seem to concentrate on integrating the Rift with DirectX graphics and engines like Unity3d, Unreal and others, but the opensim viewers run on openGL, so thats another story.

Fortunately there is some light on the horizon:
Cracker Hax is working on adapting the SL viewer
Kirstenlee Cinquettis viewer has already anaglyphic stereo rendering and finally
there are "official" rumors that Linden Lab is working to integrate the Rift fully into their viewer.

For sure it will take a huge effort to make a viewer fully usable wearing a head mounted display considering you dont see your keyboard and have a rather limited number of pixels to display your UI with, but even the basic functionality to render a full immersive stereo world and be able to look around in it by moving your head will make a lot of yaws drop.

There will be plenty fields of development: from creating optimized renderers via implementing alternative steering methods (Razer Hydra, anyone?) to a complete redesign of the UI.

So: lets try to motivate some of the highly talented viewer developers out there to start creating the next puzzle piece of the Hypergrid: full 3d immersion!

1 comment:

  1. Good to see you blogging again, my friend. :)

    I too am hopeful someone will bring Oculus Rift support to Opensim viewers.

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