Oculus rift

[xinaes]

Greetings,

I've been prototyping some stuff in libGDX that I'll be adapting to Oculus in the near future. I see that there was a proposal to do a GSOC project on support for Oculus that didn't end up happening. Not sure what anyone's plans for that are now. Potentially, I could be interested in contributing some effort to that if it would be useful (hopefully making something not too Oculus specific, so that the same API could be used for Google cardboard and other things as well).

In the short term, the path of least resistance for me will probably be to just get this project working in C++, but longer term I may be able to help on libGDX backend, or if there's some fork out there that someone made already it would be great to know about it. I might also try to get something working with Google Cardboard too in the near future (should then be applicable to the new Samsung thing and Gameface or any other Android based HMD system I'm not aware of).

Cheers,
Peter

[evilentity]

Libgdx support for vr would be great, but i wonder if nonnative would be performant enough on mobile. Any stutter or fps dip ruins the vr and thats extremely hard to eliminate with android/java.

[xinaes]

I suppose it depends on what kind of stuff one's computing... some of the things I want to do myself (generative art stuff in a similar-ish vain to my iPad app fractaleid only in 3d) are very light on resources and I expect would be fine, but maybe for it to be generally useful to game developers perhaps non-native Android is a problem.

Then again, if android/java is so suboptimal, then why are we here at all

I don't know how much the ART runtime being more AOT helps with this - when I tried it briefly on my phone it caused all sorts of pain because I ran out of space.

[Magnesus]

I wonder how would 2D games look on such device. I'm tempted to buy Google Cardboard just for the fun of testing it out. Similar technique to paralax scrolling could be used for a simple 3D effect I think. VR works just like SBS 3D videos, right? Lleft side of screen for left eye, right side for right eye?

[BurningHand]

I bought a Cardboard unit to try it out. That's pretty much how it works. The Cardboard api handles calculation of eye transforms for you, so you just need to apply them to your matrices. I was in the process of fleshing out support for that with the Android backend but got busy on other things.

[xinaes]

I actually got a cardboard kit but was slightly held back by not finding glue that wasn't glued shut... I should do that this evening.

I can't imagine it's going to be hard getting it all working anyway, but the devil's always in the details.

[evilentity]

I dunno using vr for 2d game or art just screams gimmick.

Why not native? http://gamasutra.com/view/news/224894/Q ... opment.php

[xinaes]

I dunno using vr for 2d game or art just screams gimmick.

We'll see...

[Magnesus]

I dunno using vr for 2d game or art just screams gimmick.

I would probably do it just for fun. I have 3D TV that supports side-by-side 3D mode, so I might test it on it one day, but am not sure yet how (framebuffer and rendering each frame twice - each time to a half of the screen - with some shift of layers is most likely the best solution, right?).

[xinaes]

I got around to putting together my Google cardboard kit yesterday and would say it's definitely worth the time (assuming you already have an appropriate phone, of course).

Fairly quickly up and running prototyping some libGDX stuff with it, too.