Tag Archives: Steam

An Illustrated Guide to Connecting an HTC Vive VR Headset to Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”)

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Running Vrui-based applications in glorious VR on an HTC Vive head-mounted display requires some initial set-up before Vrui itself can be installed and configured. This step-by-step guide will build upon an already-installed Linux operating system with high-performance graphics card drivers, specifically upon the current (as of 12/17/2018) version 19, code-named “Tara,” of Linux Mint, one of the most popular and user-friendly Linux distributions. This guide picks up right where the previous one in this series, “An Illustrated Guide to Installing Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”),” left off.

If you did not follow that guide, this one assumes that you have a “VR ready” or “gaming” PC with a powerful Nvidia GeForce graphics card, an installation of the 64-bit version of Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”) with the MATE desktop environment, and the recommended proprietary Nvidia graphics card driver. And an HTC Vive VR headset, of course.

Graphics Card Driver Set-up

Using a Vive headset with Vrui requires a change to the Nvidia graphics card driver’s configuration. Nvidia’s driver scans connected display devices for known VR headsets, and hides detected headsets from the desktop environment. This does make sense, as headsets are not standard monitors, and it would be awkward if windows or dialogs were to show up on a headset’s display. That said, here’s one relatively large quibble: headset filtering should happen earlier during the boot sequence, not just when the graphics card driver is loaded. As it is, headsets are still enumerated during boot, meaning that boot screens, BIOS menus, boot menus, etc. often show up on the headset, causing real problems. Anyway, carrying on.

Unfortunately for Vrui, there is currently no way to activate a hidden headset from inside an OpenGL-based VR application. For the time being, this means headset filtering in the driver needs to be disabled. To do so, open a terminal window (click on the terminal icon in the panel along the bottom screen edge, or right-click anywhere on the desktop and select “Open in Terminal” from the pop-up menu), enter exactly the following command into it (also see Figure 1) and press the Enter key (the $ sign indicates the terminal’s input prompt; don’t type it):

$ sudo xed /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-Vive.conf

Figure 1: Creating a configuration file fragment using the xed text editor.

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Gaze-directed Text Entry in VR Using Quikwrite

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Text entry in virtual environments is one of those old problems that never seem to get solved. The core issue, of course, is that users in VR either don’t have keyboards (because they are in a CAVE, say), or can’t effectively use the keyboard they do have (because they are wearing an HMD that obstructs their vision). To the latter point: I consider myself a decent touch typist (my main keyboard doesn’t even have key labels), but the moment I put on an HMD, that goes out the window. There’s an interesting research question right there — do typists need to see their keyboards in their peripheral vision to use them, even when they never look at them directly? — but that’s a topic for another post.

Until speech recognition becomes powerful and reliable enough to use as an exclusive method (and even then, imagining having to dictate “for(int i=0;i<numEntries&&entries[i].key!=searchKey;++i)” already gives me a headache), and until brain/computer interfaces are developed and we plug our computers directly into our heads, we’re stuck with other approaches.

Unsurprisingly, the go-to method for developers who don’t want to write a research paper on text entry, but just need text entry in their VR applications right now, and don’t have good middleware to back them up, is a virtual 3D QWERTY keyboard controlled by a 2D or 3D input device (see Figure 1). It’s familiar, straightforward to implement, and it can even be used to enter text.

Figure 1: Guilty as charged — a virtual keyboard in the Vrui toolkit, implemented as a GLMotif pop-up window with rows and columns of buttons.

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