Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Maria Korolov has an article on Hypergrid Business: How to set up your new mobile VR viewer. So if you have Google Cardboard and have been looking to get it working with a viewer…
There is a previous article titled: How to watch YouTube on Cardboard viewers.
Minor updates 2022/04
Calla Cela got settings for her NVIDIA card, specifically her 970, from NVIDIA tech support. She made this handy video. Using it I decided to check my settings it has been forever since I looked at them. zOMG! When the Lindens changed the install folder name, (like L O N G ago) my SL setup apparently went away…
There are some gotcha’s in her video. Nothing wrong. Just some places where you are likely to hit a wall.
Hypergrid Business has an article by Maria Korolov titled: Google takes strong early lead in VR. She points out that Google is catering more toward streaming VR than toward game play.
Her article also links to a review of the best under US$100 headsets.
In Second Life we run on OpenGL. Most Windows games run on DirectX. Microsoft has announced DirectX 12. It will essentially make NVIDIA 500 series and older cards obsolete. To use DX12 you’ll need a 600 or newer series card. This video explains what is happening. OpenGL is not left out.
It looks like ATI/AMD is making a replacement for OpenGL called Vulkan. It sounds like Vulcan is targeting more devices than DirectX 12. I expect to see Vulcan working on an Android mobile device way before DX12. I still have serious doubts we will see real time 3D render of good quality on mobile devices in the near future.
So, is the Lab planning to upgrade SL to Vulkan? I don’t know. I’ve asked. Vulkan is open source.
Word is OpenGL will still be developed. I think that odd. OpenGL is referred to in one place that came up in my research as a high level API, higher than Vulkan. The basic geek speak uses high and low to refer to how close you are to the hardware… the closer you get to the hardware the more programming you have to do. With higher level languages the more the language does for you.
Think of it this way… a low level addition command would be written as: place this value in Reg#1 and this other value in Reg2 then preform an XOR operation on then and place the result in Reg3 then move Reg3 to memory as variable X. A high level language would let you write the code as A + B = X and handle all the registers, operations and moves for you.
There are good reasons for using higher and lower level languages and API’s. But, generally we want API’s that produce more overall efficiency. From the other stuff said about Vulkan I would think it should be called a higher level API…. it does way more for the programmer. Whether it is higher or lower it is the next gen descendant of OpenGL.
For those of us playing in SL this means little today. But, suggests that play in Sansar will mean we will need a 600 series card or higher.
If you are looking for more details start at the Wikipedia: Vulkan API.
I suspect we have all heard about simulator sickness, akin to motion sickness, caused by latency/lag in providing images to VR headsets. Now NVIDIA is showing an experimental zero latency display. The site Road to VR has the story in an article: NVIDIA Demonstrates Experimental “Zero Latency” Display Running at 1,700Hz.
NVIDIA debuted their experimental display at GTC 2016. The current 90hz displays render an image every 11ms. NVIDIA gets an image on screen in 0.58ms. Wow.
Hamlet has an interesting survey up in: In Survey, New World Notes Readers Overwhelmingly Interested in Trying Project Sansar This Year. 65±% want to check out Project Sansar. 23±% are undecided. 10±% are NOT interested.
Since Sansar will be free to play (visit), the 23% waiting to hear more makes no sense to me. I’m waiting to get in so I can see for myself. I’m far too jaded to trust anyone’s opinion more than my own eyes and firsthand experience. If you are waiting on more information, isn’t that an interest?