The Second Life™ blogosphere is mostly silent on the state of VR in SL. A few blogs are covering the release of a sort of updated CtrlAltStudio viewer, version 1.2.6.43412. This is a viewer based on the Firestorm viewer version 4.6.9 from December 2014.
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The viewer does support Oculus Rift CV1… the commercial retail consumer product. Continue reading
Hamlet at New World Notes is pointing out David Rowe has a SL VR Viewer working. The page Hamlet linked to is out of date. The new news is in the comments where David says,
Oculus Riftを貰った
David Rowe Post author5 Jul 2016 at 11:22 am
Just tried LL’s Rift viewer and, well, it’s surprisingly un-good. It’s like the graphics are being fed from the wrong framebuffer object or the pipeline is being misconfigured when you switch into HMD view. Intentional or bugs? I suppose time will tell. The graphics should be able to be so much better (even if understandably the FPS isn’t so good)!
Links:
Note Jo Yardley’s comment about being able to use Vorpx with a regular viewer (i,e., like Firestorm, Alchemy, or LL’s regular viewer) to view Second Life in your Rift. I haven’t tried it myself but am told it can be used.
No Oculus Rift
Oz Linden has spoken. See Oculus Rift – CV1 Support.
2016-07-07 12:14 PM
Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.
By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.
We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.
We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).
We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.
Jo Yardley caught the post and published it on her site. Many of us are disappointed. But… Continue reading
I mentioned in the Third Party Dev article earlier today that the Oculus Rift Project Viewer updated. It jumped from version Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 (like 2 years old) to version 4.1.0.317313 (7/1/2016).
The video is dated: Mar 25, 2016. – Remember. Unless you run the video through a VR headset, it is totally bogus when it comes what the experience is like… Continue reading
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.
Bal Harbour
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.
Catwa Nicki Static Female Mesh Head
Her article also links to a review of the best under US$100 headsets. Continue reading
I didn’t notice this until today. David Rowe has explained that his Rift supporting viewer is not going to update until he gets his updated Rift headset. Reference.
✨ Energia ✨
He is also looking to hear something from the Lab on their Oculus Rift viewer. He tells us his code is more a quick and dirty to get something running. He seems to prefer the Lab’s code as being a better solution.
We know the Lab’s Rift viewer is an October 2014 version. It is being upgraded to current viewer code, of course. But, it also needs to be upgraded to the new Oculus code and enhancements (CV1). So, this is probably quite a bit of work. We don’t have any word on whether this version is just being caught up SL Viewer 5 code or also being updated to use CV1 tech. I would guess it is…
We also don’t know how much of a priority it is. I suspect while important it isn’t all that important. So, we have no idea when we will see an updated Oculus Rift viewer from the Lab or CtrlAltStudio.
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. Continue reading