Tag Archives: SteamVR

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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Keeping VR users from hurting themselves

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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 →