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Oculus Rift Development Kit

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Voice recognition?

At least for all the keyboard stuff.

 

gb.


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While I am pretty sure this would make my cockpit hardware mostly unusable, I think what would make it more practical is if the mouse only moved relative to the VC...e.g. if your mouse was over the heading bug switch and you moved your head (or the cockpit was shaking) the mouse would stay over the switch. 


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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Very interesting technologically, but useless for FSX because:

 

a. I cannot see my hands and therefore I loose the advantage of hand-eye coordination for my motor functions (moving stick and throttle with my hands)

b. I cannot see the keyboard. How do I program the FMC?

c. Motion sickness (the same as with tracking devices - ie TrackIR)

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If you ever wanted a more frank opinion (and more related to our hobby) about the Oculus Rift then this is it.

 

http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=36461

 

Jason Williams is on the 777 development team (Rise of Flight) and also the former product manager at Natural Point (TrackIR).

 

Incidentally he says that 777 MAY adapt it for Rise of Flight. But he concedes that TrackIR is most likely a better solution. He also says that there may be a problem coding 2d screens, so a 737 hud for instance could be an issue or at least a hurdle to get accross.

 

Rhydian

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Wow, nice fine. Thanks for that. 

 

"Is it better than TrackIR? No, it’s a different approach to the same issue and both do their jobs. Both devices are innovative tools for gaming and flight-simming. Assuming, of course, Oculus has finds a home in this community. We already know TrackIR is indispensable for many in our community."


Soarbywire - Avionics Engineering

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Looks like the dev units have started shipping. When you getting yours Omni? Would be interested to hear what you think of it first hand. As someone said on that forum, this is like Alpha stage and just the tip of the iceberg. It has huge potential in my opinion.

 

I remember when TrackIR first came out, naturally people were skeptical about it. But quite frankly I couldn't use any flight sim without it.

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While I look forward to the OR kit reaching consumers (I funded them on Kickstarter a long time ago), there are some fundamental, well lets call them problems, with the way Virtual Reality works and why it may be unsuitable for use in FSX.  That's of course assuming you could get it to work in FSX as the developers have said from the outset that support for the hardware has to be coded into the game.  Initially that was only Doom3 although as mentioned above there's a couple of others now like TF2 and Doom3 now won't be available for the OR at launch.

 

Some of you are dancing around the idea that you'll be able to get by with using the mouse to manipulate controls to compensate for not being able to see the keyboard any longer, but you really need to have a good think as to how you would achieve rendering the mouse cursor in a 3 dimensional space.  The mouse in progs like FSX only works in a 2d overlay of what you are viewing in a 2d representation of a 3d space, as soon as you add depth to the picture things get iffy.  There's no simple way to render the cursor as it will move differently relative to each eye. You can possibly render only on one view and use that, although you may find issues with the cursor fading in and out as the brain swaps data from each eye, and also if the cursor resides in a blind spot.

 

You also need a high frame rate to prevent lag and induced motion sickness.  The OR gets around the issue posed by current 3D screen implentations by rendering each eye's view on a separate part of the screen, so 30fps is 30fps unlike running on a 3D monitor with glasses where to achieve 30fps you actually need to render at 60fps (30fps for each eye.)  Rendering on the OR will be speedy due to it currently only being a low resolution display - the goggles contain a single 1280x800 screen divided in the middle for two effective rendering spaces of a maximum of 640x800 (less actually, due to the greater than zero thickness divider in the middle.)  

 

The way the image is rendered is also non standard, requiring lenses to focus a larger portion of the screen into a smaller area to allow an effectively higher resolution right in front of your eye (taking advantage of the higher resolution of receptors in the fovea) and lower resolution out towards the edges which would ordinarily be in your peripheral vision and hence the lower res would be undetectable.  It's a neat solution but tricky to describe and I can't be arsed making diagrams.  The inevitable downside to this though is that you then must remain with your eyes fixed on a single point directly in front - as soon as you move your eyes to glance around you're shifting your focus to a lower resolution part of the screen.

 

I'm not trying to rain on everyone's parade here - this is a very exciting bit of kit; just not likely for FSX.  I'm speaking from experience here, I spent several years working with commercial simulators for the mining industry here in Australia and we looked long and hard at VR solutions without being able to overcome their shortcomings before going back to very large projected displays.

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Looks like the dev units have started shipping. When you getting yours Omni? Would be interested to hear what you think of it first hand. As someone said on that forum, this is like Alpha stage and just the tip of the iceberg. It has huge potential in my opinion.

 

I remember when TrackIR first came out, naturally people were skeptical about it. But quite frankly I couldn't use any flight sim without it.

 

I checked this morning and mine hasn't shipped yet. I paid for it Aug 31 -- I think that puts me up in the front line? 

 

I'm in Australia so I'm anticipating at least a 2 week ship time.

 

I am also in the process of moving houses in 2 weeks, so its being sent to my relatives in the meantime. 

 

It will be a little while before I can play with it, but I will surely share my findings when I get around to it. 


Soarbywire - Avionics Engineering

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Some of you are dancing around the idea that you'll be able to get by with using the mouse to manipulate controls to compensate for not being able to see the keyboard any longer, but you really need to have a good think as to how you would achieve rendering the mouse cursor in a 3 dimensional space.  The mouse in progs like FSX only works in a 2d overlay of what you are viewing in a 2d representation of a 3d space, as soon as you add depth to the picture things get iffy.  There's no simple way to render the cursor as it will move differently relative to each eye. You can possibly render only on one view and use that, although you may find issues with the cursor fading in and out as the brain swaps data from each eye, and also if the cursor resides in a blind spot.

 

 

Gosh, that's a good point, I never really thought of that. Good points here Derek.

 

Rhydian.

 

There is some more info being discussed on the Eagle Dynamics forums if anybody is interested.

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=93477&highlight=Dimensions&page=12

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VFR it's useful for stereo 3d use it with passive 3d monitor. Still, Occulus not ground breaking engough to justify using it. Stick with passive 3d monitor stereo for now it looks good.

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Some of you are dancing around the idea that you'll be able to get by with using the mouse to manipulate controls to compensate for not being able to see the keyboard any longer, but you really need to have a good think as to how you would achieve rendering the mouse cursor in a 3 dimensional space. The mouse in progs like FSX only works in a 2d overlay of what you are viewing in a 2d representation of a 3d space, as soon as you add depth to the picture things get iffy. There's no simple way to render the cursor as it will move differently relative to each eye. You can possibly render only on one view and use that, although you may find issues with the cursor fading in and out as the brain swaps data from each eye, and also if the cursor resides in a blind spot.

 

Have to agree.  I have been thinking about the mouse aspect of this most of all.  If someone can set aside their hardware while they're wearing the OR then they have to have an alternate way to handle the controls...right now that's a mouse.  But a mouse on regular monitors in a VC actually behaves strangely.  People that have TrackIR have seen it...you move your head and the view changes but the mouse stays right where it was physically on the screen so now, instead of being over the course knob, it's hovering over a different place in the cockpit.  And this problem is apart from the 3D aspects that you mention.  In my head, there has to be a different way of managing mouse movement...different drivers or a translation of the driver position of the mouse such that the mouse stays positioned relative to the VC.  That *seems* like the solution and yet I'd have to see it in practice to know if it would work.  Assuming you can get the mouse to 'stay' in its spot over a knob on the VC (and I have to keep in mind that the shape of the knob changes as your head moves around so that *on* the knob from one point of view is only *close* to the knob on another view) , what would the mind think if you were moving your head and the mouse was moving around with the movement of your head and trying to move to a control.  I *think* it would work but I can't say I'm sure.

 

In terms of motion sickness, like people on a ship in a storm, the ones that have been through it before do better.  The new folks spend a lot of the trip in the bathroom. It takes time but they get used to it.

 

In my mind OR is on to something but they've also discovered the new set of problems that go along with it that have to be solved.  FSX is not the only game that's in this 'boat'.


Gregg Seipp

"A good landing is when you can walk away from the airplane.  A great landing is when you can reuse it."
i7-8700 32GB Ram, GTX-1070 8 Gig RAM

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I'm dreaming to fly FSX with OR. I have a HOTAS set up so I guess the blocked vision with OR is not going to be a huge problem to me. I'm not that hard core to flight control hardware anyway.

 

I was worrying about the compatibility of OR with FSX, but apparently there is a driver VorpX that is specifically designed to make DX9-11 games compatible with OR. On their website they actually listed FSX among many games they claim to support. That's really a great news.

 

I've decided to wait for the 1080p consumer version of OR. I dream they will eventually make a 2560x1600 or even 4k version. Based on how OR works, a 4k version will have an effective resolution of 1960x2160 which makes me drool every time thinking about having a 110 degree of FOV with these many pixels!


7950X3D / 32GB / RTX4090 / HP Reverb G2 / Win11

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