Category Archives: VR Hardware

Reviews of, and analyses of the capabilities of, VR-relevant hardware.

Hacking the Oculus Rift DK2, part II

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Note: This is part 2 of a four-part series. [Part 1] [Part 3] [Part 4]

The final update/edit to my previous post was to report that I had managed to synchronize the DK2’s tracking LEDs to its camera’s video stream by following pH5’s ouvrt code, and that I was able to extract 5-bit IDs for each LED by observing changes in that LED’s brightness over time. Unfortunately I’ll have to start off right away by admitting that I made a bad mistake.

Understanding the DK2’s camera

Once I started looking more closely, I realized that the camera was only capturing 30 frames per second when locked to the DK2’s synchronization cable, instead of the expected 60. After downloading the data sheet for the camera’s imaging sensor, the Aptina MT9V034, and poring over the documentation, I realized that I had set a wrong vertical blanking interval. Instead of using a value of 5, as the official run-time and pH5’s code, I was using a value of 57, because that was the original value I found in the vertical blanking register before I started messing with the sensor. As it turns out, a camera — or at least this camera — captures video in the same way as a monitor displays it: padded with a horizontal and vertical blanking period. By leaving the vertical blanking period too large, I had extended the time it takes the camera to capture and send a frame across its host interface. Extended by how much? Well, the camera has a usable frame size of 752×480 pixels, a horizontal blanking interval of 94 pixels, and a (fixed) pixel clock of 26.66MHz. Using a vertical blanking interval of 5 lines, the total frame time is ((752+94)*(480+5)+4)/26.66MHz = 15.391ms (in case you’re wondering where the “+4” comes from, so am I. It’s part of the formula in the data sheet). Using 57 as vertical blanking interval, the total frame time becomes ((752+94)*(480+57)+4)/26.66MHz = 17.041ms. Notice something? 17.041ms is longer than the synchronization pulse interval of 16.666ms. Oops. The exposure trigger for an odd frame arrives at a time when the camera is still busy processing the preceding even frame, and is therefore ignored, resulting in the camera skipping every odd frame and capturing at 30Hz. Lesson learned.

Figure 1: First result from LED identification algorithm, showing wrong ID numbers due to the camera dropping video frames all over the place.

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Hacking the Oculus Rift DK2

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Note: This is part 1 of a four-part series. [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

Over the weekend, a bunch of people from all over got together on reddit to try and figure out how the Oculus Rift DK2’s optical tracking system works. This was triggered by a call for help to develop an independent SDK from redditor /u/jherico, in response to the lack of an official SDK that works under Linux. That thread became quite unwieldy quickly, with lots of speculation, experimentation, and outright wrong information being thrown around, and then later corrected, but with the corrections nowhere near the wrong bits, etc. etc.

To get some order into things, I want to summarize what we have learned over the weekend, to serve as a starting point for further investigation. In a nutshell, we now know:

  • How to turn on the tracking LEDs integrated into the DK2.
  • How to extract the 3D positions and maximum emission directions of the tracking LEDs, and the position of the DK2’s inertial measurement unit in the same coordinate system.
  • How to get proper video from the DK2’s tracking camera.

Here’s what we still don’t know:

  • How to properly control the tracking LEDs and synchronize them with the camera. Update: We got that.
  • How to extract lens distortion and intrinsic camera parameters for the DK2’s tracking camera. Update: Yup, we got that, too. Well, sort of.
  • And, the big one, how to put it all together to calculate a camera-relative position and orientation of the DK2. 🙂 Update: Aaaaand, we got that, too.

Let’s talk about all these points in a bit more detail. Continue reading →

Fighting black smear

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Now that I’ve gotten my Oculus Rift DK2 (mostly) working with Vrui under Linux, I’ve encountered the dreaded artifact often referred to as “black smear.” While pixels on OLED screens have very fast switching times — orders of magnitude faster than LCD pixels — they still can’t switch from on to off and back instantaneously. This leads to a problem that’s hardly visible when viewing a normal screen, but very visible in a head-mounted display due to a phenomenon called “vestibulo-ocular reflex.”

Basically, our eyes have built-in image stabilizers: if we move our head, this motion is detected by the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear (our “sense of equilibrium”), and our eyes automatically move the opposite way to keep our gaze fixed on a fixed point in space (interestingly, this even happens with the eyes closed, or in total darkness).

Figure 1: Black smear. It’s kinda like that.

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On the road for VR: Oculus Connect, Hollywood

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After some initial uncertainty, and accidentally raising a stink on reddit, I did manage to attend Oculus Connect last weekend after all. I guess this is what a birthday bash looks like when the feted is backed by Facebook and gets to invite 1200 of his closest friends… and yours truly! It was nice to run into old acquaintances, meet new VR geeks, and it is still an extremely weird feeling to be approached by people who introduce themselves as “fans.” There were talks and panels, but I skipped most of those to take in demos and mingle instead; after all, I can watch a talk on YouTube from home just fine. Oh, and there was also new mobile VR hardware to check out, and a big surprise. Let’s talk VR hardware. Continue reading →

A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline

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I’ve recently received an Oculus Rift Development Kit Mk. II, and since I’m on Linux, there is no official SDK for me and I’m pretty much out there on my own. But that’s OK; it’s given me a chance to experiment with the DK2 as a black box, and investigate some ways how I could support it in my VR toolkit under Linux, and improve Vrui’s user experience while I’m at it. And I also managed to score a genuine Oculus VR Latency Tester, and did a set of experiments with interesting results. If you just want to see those results, skip to the end.

The Woes of Windows

If you’ve been paying attention to the Oculus subreddit since the first DK2s have been delivered to developers/enthusiasts, there is a common consensus that the user experience of the DK2 and the SDK that drives it could be somewhat improved. Granted, it’s a developer’s kit and not a consumer product, but even developers seem to be spending more time getting the DK2 to run smoothly, or run at all, than actually developing for it (or at least that’s the impression I get from the communal bellyaching).

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An Eye-tracked Oculus Rift

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I have talked many times about the importance of eye tracking for head-mounted displays, but so far, eye tracking has been limited to the very high end of the HMD spectrum. Not anymore. SensoMotoric Instruments, a company with around 20 years of experience in vision-based eye tracking hardware and software, unveiled a prototype integrating the camera-based eye tracker from their existing eye tracking glasses with an off-the-shelf Oculus Rift DK1 HMD (see Figure 1). Fortunately for me, SMI were showing their eye-tracked Rift at the 2014 Augmented World Expo, and offered to bring it up to my lab to let me have a look at it.

Figure 1: SMI’s after-market modified Oculus Rift with one 3D eye tracking camera per eye. The current tracking cameras need square cut-outs at the bottom edge of each lens to provide an unobstructed view of the user’s eyes; future versions will not require such extensive modifications.

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On the road for VR: Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo

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I just got back from the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo in the awesome Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just across the street from Google HQ. There were talks, there were round tables, there were panels (I was on a panel on non-game applications enabled by consumer VR, livestream archive here), but most importantly, there was an expo for consumer VR hardware and software. Without further ado, here are my early reports on what I saw and/or tried.

Figure 1: Main auditorium during the “60 second” lightning pitches.

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Here we go again with Apple’s holography patent

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I just found an article about my 3D Video Capture with Three Kinects video on Discovery News (which is great!), but then I found Figure 1 in the “Related Gallery.” Oh, and they also had a link to another article titled “Virtual Reality Sex Game Set To Stimulate” right in the middle of my article, but you learn to take that kind of thing in stride.

Figure 1: Image in the “related gallery” on Discovery News. Original caption: “Apple has filed a patent for a holographic phone, a concept that sounds absolutely cool. We can’t wait. But what would it look like? A video created by animator Mike Ko, who has made animations for Google, Nike, Toyota, and NASCAR, gives us an idea. Check it out here”

Nope. Nope nope nope no. Where do I start? No, Apple has not filed a patent for a holographic phone. And even if Apple had, this is not what it would look like. I don’t want to rag on Mike Ko, the animator who created the concept video (watch it here, it’s beautiful). It’s just that this is not how holograms work. See Figure 2 for a very crude Photoshop (well, Gimp) job on what this would look like if such holographic screens really existed, and Figure 4 for an even cruder job of what the thing Apple actually patented would look like, if they were audacious enough to put it into an iPhone. Continue reading →

3D Video Capture with Three Kinects

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I just moved all my Kinects back to my lab after my foray into experimental mixed-reality theater a week ago, and just rebuilt my 3D video capture space / tele-presence site consisting of an Oculus Rift head-mounted display and three Kinects. Now that I have a new extrinsic calibration procedure to align multiple Kinects to each other (more on that soon), and managed to finally get a really nice alignment, I figured it was time to record a short video showing what multi-camera 3D video looks like using current-generation technology (no, I don’t have any Kinects Mark II yet). See Figure 1 for a still from the video, and the whole thing after the jump.

Figure 1: A still frame from the video, showing the user’s real-time “holographic” avatar from the outside, providing a literal kind of out-of-body experience to the user.

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