Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday July 17 2020, @12:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the wishful-thinking dept.

I had an experience with an HTC Vive a couple of years ago, and I'm now considering getting the hardware required to do proper VR.
Obviously, I'd like to play games, but I'm also interested in visualising data (in particular I see that VTK supports OpenVR).

So I was wondering whether anyone in the community here has succeeded in getting this to work under linux, and if they can comment on the hardware required.
I'd be grateful for any insights.

As I understand it, it's best to get 120FPS, otherwise the brain doesn't like it.
I see that system76 has a "thelio major" desktop that can handle a range of NVIDIA cards, but I honestly don't know which would be the minimum that still gets me reasonable performance.
Is it important to have a lot of memory, a lot of cores?
Will I be able to change the level of detail in games to gain in FPS?
Right now it looks to me like I'd need more than 3000 euros for the whole thing (computer+htc vive).
My wife may not approve.

In any case, with the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus in the winter, I'm under the impression a working VR system would be a reasonable addition to the "don't go crazy" activities around the house.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by hubie on Friday July 17 2020, @02:14PM (1 child)

    by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 17 2020, @02:14PM (#1022893) Journal

    No, I'm afraid I'm not of much use on the display side. You might want to check out the site for the stereopi [stereopi.com] project. They've implemented a stereo camera on a little pi and their website has a blog section [stereopi.com] where they go into interesting projects. Perhaps there are display options/ideas to be mined from there.

    I did see this arXiv paper [arxiv.org], which might be in the direction of what you're looking for on the code side of things.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Friday July 17 2020, @03:27PM

    by Rich (945) on Friday July 17 2020, @03:27PM (#1022921) Journal

    Thanks for the leads, at least I learned something new

    - The arXiv paper uses a display from lookingglassfactory. it's a passive no-glasses 3D display with a 50 degree FOV; the 15 inch model for three grand, the 9 incher start at 600$. Looking at the specs, these probably must be seen to be believed. The "how it works" vaguely mentions 45 separate views in a lightfield, so it might be a bit resolution challenged, or, I fear, worse for my plan, it can't directly work from stereo images (however they seem to have tools to convert stereo images to what they need). Absolutely nothing about active shutters, though.

    - The raspi foundation are asshats wrt the cameras, including a dongle chip, but because they couldn't get away with that with industrial customers, their locked-up driver doesn't check the dongle on compute modules, and there's a nice stereo camera setup with a fitting CM3 carrier from a shop called "waveshare".