Monthly Archives: August 2013

Happy birthday, doc-ok.org!

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It’s exactly one year ago that I posted my first article for this here blog. I think that is cause for some reflection and maybe some celebration. Has it been worth the effort? Am I on the way to achieving what I set out to do?

According to my “About This Blog” page, my concrete goals were to

…talk about insights gained or problems encountered while writing software, comment on things others have said, discuss my own opinions on how to do things the “right way” or the “wrong way,” post updates on software development, comment on new VR hardware as I get my hands on it, etc.

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Holovision revisioned

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Boy, do I hate being wrong. And I was very wrong about the Holovision — A Life Size Hologram Kickstarter project (don’t bother; page down permanently) I talked about in a previous post. Why was I wrong? Because I gave those people way too much credit. I questioned their claims of life-size holograms, I questioned their PR material (because it helped me address a lingering point), but I didn’t question their most basic claim: 3D. I guess I’m too gullible.

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The Holovision Kickstarter “scam”

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Update: Please tear your eyes away from the blue lady and also read this follow-up post. It turns out things are worse than I thought. Now back to your regularly scheduled entertainment.

I somehow missed this when it was hot a few weeks or so ago, but I just found out about an interesting Kickstarter project: HOLOVISION — A Life Size Hologram. Don’t bother clicking the link, the project page has been taken down following a DMCA complaint and might not ever be up again.

Why do I think it’s worth talking about? Because, while there is an actual design for something called Holovision, and that design is theoretically feasible, and possibly even practical, the public’s impression of the product advertised on Kickstarter is decidedly not. The concept imagery associated with the Kickstarter project presents this feasible technology in a way that (intentionally?) taps into people’s misconceptions about holograms (and I’m talking about the “real” kind of holograms, those involving lasers and mirrors and beam splitters). In other words, it might not be a scam per se, and it might even be unintentional, but it is definitely creating a false impression that might lead to very disappointed backers.

Figure 1: This image is a blatant lie.

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Stereo Sue

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I was just reminded of an article in The New Yorker that I read a long time ago, in June 2006. The article, written by eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks, describes the experience of an adult woman, Susan R. Barry, a professor of neurobiology herself, who had been stereoblind her entire life, and suddenly regained stereoscopic vision after intensive visual training at the age of 48. While the full original article, titled “Stereo Sue,” is behind the New Yorker’s pay wall, I just found an awesome YouTube video of a joint interview with Drs. Barry and Sacks:

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Installing and running first Vrui applications

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In my detailed how-to guide on installing and configuring Vrui for Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra, I did not talk about installing any actual applications (because I hadn’t released Vrui-3.0-compatible packages yet). Those are out now, so here we go.

Kinect

If you happen to own a Kinect for Xbox (Kinect for Windows won’t work), you might want to install the Kinect 3D Video package early on. It can capture 3D (holographic, not stereoscopic) video from one or more Kinects, and either play it back as freely-manipulable virtual holograms, or it can, after calibration, produce in-system overlays of the real world (or both). If you already have Vrui up and running, installation is trivial.

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Setting up Vrui for Oculus Rift

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As promised, here is a detailed guide to get Vrui version 3 running with an Oculus Rift (and optionally a Razer Hydra, since that seems to be the 6-DOF input device du jour).

Step 1: System Preparation

If you are already running Linux, good for you. Skip the next paragraph.

If you don’t have Linux yet, go and grab it. I personally prefer Fedora, but it’s generally agreed[citation needed] that Ubuntu is the easiest to install for new Linux users, so let’s go with that. The Ubuntu installer makes it quite easy to install alongside an existing Windows OS on your system. Don’t bother installing Linux inside a virtual machine, though: that way Vrui won’t get access to your high-powered graphics cards, and performance will be abysmal. It won’t be able to talk to your Rift, either.

One of the first things to do after a fresh Linux install is to install the vendor-supplied drivers for your graphics card (if you don’t have a discrete Nvidia or ATI/AMD graphics card, go buy a GeForce!). Installing binary drivers is much easier these days. Here are instructions for Nvidia and ATI/AMD cards. If you happen to be on Fedora, enable the rpmfusion repositories and get the appropriate driver packages from there.

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This is a post about Vrui

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I just released version 3.0 of the Vrui VR toolkit. One of the major new features is native support for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display, including its low-latency inertial 3-DOF (orientation-only) tracker, and post-rendering lens distortion correction. So I thought it’s time for the first (really?) Vrui post in this venue.

What is Vrui, and why should I care?

Glad you’re asking. In a nutshell, Vrui (pronounced to start with vroom, and rhyme with gooey) is a high-level toolkit to develop highly interactive applications aimed at holographic (or fully-immersive, or VR, or whatever you want to call them) display environments. A large selection of videos showing many Vrui applications running in a wide variety of environments can be found on my YouTube channel. To you as a developer, this means you write your application once, and users can run it in any kind of environment without you having to worry about it. If new input or output hardware comes along, it’s Vrui’s responsibility to support it, not yours.

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Vrui on (in?) Oculus Rift

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I wrote about my first impressions of the Oculus Rift developer kit back in April, and since then I’ve been working (on and off) on getting it fully and natively supported in Vrui (see Figure 1 for proof that it works). Given that Vrui’s somewhat insane flexibility is a major point of pride for me, what was it that I actually had to create to support the Rift? Turns out, not all that much: a driver for the Rift’s built-in inertial tracking unit and a post-processing filter to correct for the Rift’s lens distortion were all it took (more on that later). So why did it take me this long? For one, I was mostly working on other things and only spent a few hours here and there, but more importantly, the Rift is not just a new head-mounted display (HMD), but a major shift in how HMDs are (or will be) used.

Figure 1: The trademark “double-barrel” Oculus Rift screenshot, this time generated by a Vrui application.

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