A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline

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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