This morning I see the Vive has dropped in price. The retail price of a new Vive is now a mere US$600. That is better than the previous $800. But still expensive. Vive headsets have been going on eBay for about $500 for some time. Gear VR units are going for $65 on eBay.
HTC Vive – Aug 2017
Sansar is supporting Oculus and Vive. I have neither. So, how well they are supported and how easy they are to setup with Sansar, I don’t know. I have yet to get my Gear VR working with Sansar. So, I know that is difficult. I think I am down to a ‘controller’ problem. I have an Xbox 1708 controller on order (US$20-30±).
If you Google on Vive and SL, you may get the idea Vive and SL will work for VR. That isn’t the case. The information is almost all 2016 stuff written before the Lab dropped their SL VR project and CtrlAltStudio stopped VR Viewer development. I have been able to get SL into 3D, not VR, with my Gear VR. Not really worth the effort. It’s a nice novelty.
I have used the old CtrlAltStudio Viewer to see SL in VR. There is no Bento support. Until someone decides to merge the CtrlAltStudio code and an updated Firestorm there is essentially no ‘native’ VR support for SL. There is some third-party software for various games to get them into VR. Most of those are for DirectX games, not OpenGL.
Here is your chance to find out. Friday, there were two of these Product meet ups. I checked them out. You can find the schedule for meetings here. Friday morning’s meeting started at 9:30 AM PT. Another meeting of some kind was scheduled at 3PM and another Product Meet Up at 4 PM.
The Product meetings cover the same material in general. But, different people and different questions. I was too burned out to last through the second meeting. This 2-hour 15-minute meeting was tiring and I left early.
There is lots of interesting news. Most of the meeting is in voice. There is some text chat going on. The meeting moderators didn’t seem to be paying much attention to text chat. So, if you want to get noticed, have voice working.
Most of the people there are NOT using VR. One facilitator was and one wasn’t. So, avoid being bashful if you don’t have VR. Jump in with your desktop system and its boring old monitor.
In the first 15+ minutes, I was figuring out the audio. It is obviously location sensitive. Close, loud. Far away, whisper. The location used for audio is the camera location. Pressing F4 frees the camera. There is no support for the SpaceNavigator. So, I am using a combination of mouse and keyboard. Mostly sucks.
Mouse Steering – I use mouse steering in Second Life™. I found it works in Sansar too. F3 clamps the camera to the avatar. Right-click and drag, swings the camera around the avatar. Pressing W or Up while right-click-dragging the mouse allows one to steer while walking. The avatar turns to face camera direction when you start walking. Draging the right-click steers.
VR Controllers are still a problem for VR users. An interesting entry in the field is Neurable’s in partnership with eStudioFeature’s mind-controller… a think and it happens controller.
