A New AR Sandbox Support Forum

Apparently, the AR Sandbox is still a thing and going strong after ten years, with over 850 registered installations world-wide according to the AR Sandbox World Map. There was a lull in new installations and community activity during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, but things are picking up again, and with that I am seeing an increasing amount of requests for help arriving in my personal email.

An AR Sandbox.

The old AR Sandbox support forum, which was quite active and significantly reduced my support load, not only by allowing me to answer common questions only once instead of dozens of times, but also by community members directly helping each other, unfortunately went down due to hardware problems a good while ago, and there is currently no avenue of getting it back up.

So I decided to create a new AR Sandbox support forum on this here web site, as a hopefully temporary replacement. I was not able to move over any of the old forum content due to not having access to the original database files, which is a major pity because there was a ton of helpful stuff on there. I am hoping that the new forum will accumulate its own set of helpful stuff quickly, and if/when I migrate the forum to a permanent location, I will be able to move all content because I have full access to this web site’s code and database. So here’s hoping.

This is the first forum on this web site, so I hope that things will work right from the start; if not, we’ll figure out how to fix it. Please be patient.

And as a quick reminder: These are the only official AR Sandbox installation instructions. Accept no substitutes.

KeckCAVES On Mars, pt. Oh-I-lost-count

Last weekend, we had yet another professional film crew visiting us to shoot video about our involvement in NASA’s still on-going Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, aka Curiosity rover) mission. This time, they were here to film parts of an upcoming 90-minute special about Mars exploration for the National Geographic TV channel. Like last time, the “star” of the show was Dawn Sumner, faculty in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, one of the founding members of KeckCAVES, and member of the MSL science team.

Unlike last time, we did not film in the KeckCAVES facility itself (due to the demise of our CAVE), but in the UC Davis ModLab. ModLab is part of an entirely different unit — UC Davis’s Digital Humanities initiative — but we are working closely with them on VR development, they have a nice VR environment consisting of two HTC Vive headsets and a large 4.2m x 2.4m screen with a ceiling-mounted ultra-short throw projector (see Figure 1), their VR hardware is running our VR software, and they were kind enough to let us use their space.

Figure 1: Preparation for filming in UC Davis’s ModLab, showing its 4.2m x 2.4m front-projected screen and ceiling-mounted ultra-short throw projector, and two Lighthouse base stations.

The fundamental idea here was to use several 3D models, created or reconstructed from real data sent back either by satellites orbiting Mars or by the Curiosity rover itself, as backdrops to let Dawn talk about the goals and results of the MSL mission, and her personal involvement in it. Figure 1 shows a backdrop in the real sense of the word, i.e., a 2D picture (a photo taken by Curiosity’s mast camera) with someone standing in front of it, but that was not the idea here (we didn’t end up using that photo). Instead, Dawn was talking while wearing a VR headset and interacting with the 3D models she was talking about, with a secondary view of the virtual world, from the point of view of the film camera, shown on the big screen behind her. More on that later. Continue reading

Welcome New VR Users!

Apparently, there were good sales numbers for VR equipment prior to the holiday season, and therefore a host of new VR users are coming in just about now. This meta-post collects a bunch of stuff I’ve written (or presented) in the past that might be of interest to some of those new users. These questions/answers are not hardware-specific, meaning they apply to any current-generation VR system (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, all the Windows Mixed Reality headsets, PlayStation VR, …), and go beyond basic tech questions such as “how do I plug this in, install drivers, …).

There is one other issue for which I do not have a full article, but it’s quite important for new users: VR sickness (aka motion sickness, simulator sickness, …). Today’s VR headsets, at least the ones doing full head tracking (that means Rift/Vive et al., and not Gear VR, Oculus Go, Google Cardboard, …) should not cause VR sickness per se. These days, it is primarily caused by artificial locomotion in games or applications, as I explain in the second presentation I linked above.

The important message is: do not attempt to fight through VR sickness! If you try to stomach it out, it will only get worse. Stop using VR the moment you feel the first symptoms, take a long break, and then try again if you want to continue with the application/game that made you sick. If you try to power through repeatedly, your body might learn to associate sickness with VR, and that might cause you to get sick even when merely thinking about VR, or smelling the headset, or similar triggers. Just don’t do it.

That’s about it; now go ahead and enjoy your shiny new VR systems!

Want to Know More?

Here are a couple of other, more hardware-specific, topics:

Set-up Instructions for Vrui with HTC Vive Head-mounted Display

It’s been more than two years since the last time I posted set-up instructions for Vrui and HTC Vive, and a lot has changed in the meantime. While Vrui-5.0 and its major changes are still not out of the kitchen, the current release of Vrui, Vrui-4.6-005, is stable and works very well with the Vive. The recent demise of our CAVE, and our move towards VR headsets until we figure out how to fix it, have caused a lot of progress in Vrui’s set-up and user experience. The rest of this article contains detailed installation and set-up instructions, starting from where my previous step-by-step guide, “An Illustrated Guide to Connecting an HTC Vive VR Headset to Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”),” left off.

If you did not follow that guide and its prerequisite, “An Illustrated Guide to Installing Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”),” this one assumes that you already have:

  • a “gaming” or “VR ready” PC with a powerful Nvidia GeForce graphics card,
  • a full installation of a 64-bit Ubuntu-based Linux operating system, e.g., Ubuntu or Linux Mint, with the MATE desktop environment,
  • proprietary drivers for the Nvidia graphics card installed and working,
  • head-mounted display filtering disabled in the graphics card driver,
  • and a working installation of SteamVR.

If you use a Linux distribution that is not Ubuntu-based, such as my own favorite, Fedora, or another desktop environment such as Gnome Shell or Cinnamon, you will have to make some adjustments throughout the rest of this guide.

This guide also assumes that you have already set up your Vive virtual reality system, including its tracking base stations, and that your Vive headset is connected to your PC via HDMI and USB (I will publish a detailed illustrated guide on that part soon-ish). Continue reading

AltspaceVR Shutting Down

AltspaceVR, the popular virtual reality social platform, and the eponymous company behind it, will be closing their respective doors on August 3rd. This is surprising, as AltspaceVR has been around since 2013, was well-funded, had a good amount of users given VR’s still-niche status, and had apparently more funding lined up to continue operation and development of their platform (that funding falling through was, according to the announcement linked above, the primary reason for the impending shut-down).

But besides the direct impact on commercial VR as a whole, and the bad omen of a major player closing down, this is also personal to me. Not as a user of AltspaceVR’s service — I have to admit I’ve only tried it for minutes at a time at trade shows or conferences — but as someone who was, albeit tangentially, involved with the company and the people working there.

After having given a presentation at an early SVVR meet-up, I invited SVVR’s founder, Karl Krantz, to visit me at my VR lab at UC Davis. He made the trip a short while later, and brought a few friends, including “Cymatic” Bruce Wooden, Eric Romo, and Gavan Wilhite. I showed them our array of VR hardware, the general VR work we were doing, and specifically our work in VR tele-presence and remote collaboration. According to the people involved, AltspaceVR was founded during the drive back to the Bay Area.

In addition, I co-advised one of AltspaceVR’s developers when he was a PhD student at UC Davis, and I visited them in the summer of 2015 to give a talk about input device and interaction abstraction in multi-platform VR development. During that visit, Eric Romo also gave me my first taste of the newly-released HTC Vive Development Kit (Vive DK1).

For all that, I am sad to see them go under, and I wish everybody who is currently working there all the best for their future endeavors.

Possibly related to this, another piece of news surfaced today: AltspaceVR was named defendant in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Virtual Immersion Technologies, LLC, regarding this 2002 patent. I do not know whether this filing was a cause in AltspaceVR’s closing, but it is possible that the prospect of a costly court case, or stiff licensing fees, led to some investors getting cold feet.

Either way, this patent deserves closer scrutiny as it is quite broad, and has recently changed ownership from the original inventors to the plaintiff, who has so far been using it exclusively to sue VR companies for infringement. The fact that it specifically claims the use of video to represent performers or users in a shared virtual space might mean that it covers platforms such as our tele-collaboration framework, which would be unfortunate. I have a hunch that this patent, due to its arguably broad applicability, will be the subject of a major legal battle in the near future, and while there is a lot of prior art in multiplayer/multi-user VR, that video component means I cannot dismiss the patent out of hand.

VR medical visualization with 3D Visualizer

Now that Vrui is working on the HTC Vive (at least until the next SteamVR update breaks ABI again), I can finally go back and give Vrui-based applications some tender loving care. First up is 3D Visualizer, an application to visualize and, more importantly, visually analyze three-dimensional volumetric data sets (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Analyzing a CAT scan with 3D Visualizer on the HTC Vive. Cat included.

Continue reading

Keeping VR users from hurting themselves

Just the other day, I jumped on the wayback machine and posted an article about our work in immersive tele-collaboration, featuring research (and a video) from about four years ago. The shame! I figured it would be excusable that one time, and I would never do it again. Oh well, here we go.

Keeping VR users from hurting themselves

… or their expensive VR equipment.

It’s a pretty big deal. Virtual Reality, especially its head-mounted implementation, is quite good at overriding its users’ sense of place and space. “Presence,” or the feeling of bodily being in a place where one knows to be not, is a powerful and compelling experience, but it has a downside: users experiencing it lose touch with their real physical environments. Exhibit A: Figure 1 (granted, there are some concerns that the following video clip was staged, but let’s pretend it’s for reals).

Figure 1: When instinct takes over. Source: imgur

To prevent this kind of thing from happening — at least in most cases — Valve implemented a system called “Chaperone” into the SteamVR run-time framework that runs their and HTC’s Vive VR headset (and potentially other headsets, through Valve’s OpenVR layer). Continue reading

Remote Collaborative Immersive Visualization

I spent the last couple of days at the first annual meeting of “The Higher Education Campus Alliance for Advanced Visualization” (THE CAAV), where folks managing or affiliated with advanced visualization centers such as KeckCAVES came together to share their experiences. During the talks, I saw slides showing Vrui‘s Collaboration Infrastructure pop up here and there, and generally remote collaboration was a big topic of discussion. During breaks, I showed several people the following video on my smartphone (yes, I finally joined the 21st century), and afterwards realized that I had never written a post about this work, as most of it predates this blog. So here we go.

Continue reading

On the road for VR: The White House, Washington DC

Through a complex chain of circumstances, we got ourselves invited to demonstrate the Augmented Reality Sandbox at the White House Water Summit on March 22, coinciding with the United Nations’ World Water Day 2016, as part of the National Science Foundation‘s presence (NSF funded initial development of the AR Sandbox through an Informal Science Education grant).

Figure 1: Mark I standard-issue AR Sandbox in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, pre-exhibition.

Figure 1: Mark I standard-issue AR Sandbox in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, pre-exhibition.

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For Science!

I’ve been busy finalizing the upcoming 4.0 release of the Vrui VR toolkit (it looks like I will have full support for Oculus Rift DK2 just before it is obsoleted by the commercial version, haha), and needed a short break.

So I figured I’d do something I’ve never done before in VR, namely, watch a full-length theatrical movie. I’m still getting DVDs from Netflix like it’s 1999, and I had “Avengers: Age of Ultron” at hand. The only problem was that I didn’t have a VR-enabled movie player.

Well, how hard can that be? Not hard at all, as it turns out. I installed the development packages for the xine multimedia framework, browsed through their hacker’s guide, figured out where to intercept audio buffers and decoded video frames, and three hours later I had a working prototype. A few hours more, and I had a user interface, full DVD menu navigation, a scrub bar, and subtitles. In 737 lines of code, a big chunk of which is debugging output to trace the control and data flow of the xine library. So yeah, libxine is awesome.

Then it was time to pull the easy chair into the office, start VruiXine, put on the Rift, map DVD navigation controls to the handy SteelSeries Stratus XL bluetooth gamepad they were giving away at Oculus Connect2, and relax (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The title menu of the “Avengers: Age of Ultron” DVD in a no-frills VR movie player (VruiXine). Fancy virtual environments are left as an exercise for the reader.

Continue reading