DadenU Day: Oculus Rift CV1

By: Nash Mbaya

Upgrading Oculus Rift Unity SDK to Consumer Version 1 SDK

For our third Daden U Day I looked into updated some of our products which had Oculus support to the latest version CV1.

The Oculus Rift CV1 or Consumer Version One is the latest Oculus Rift model which was made available to the public as of March 28th 2016. I began the day by attempting to install the setup software downloaded from the Oculus website. It was all looking promising until the software prompted me to update my display drivers. I installed the latest drivers for the graphics card in my development machine which is an AMD Radeon 6800 series. After installing the drivers I opened the Oculus software installer once again and once again is asked my to update my display drivers. After some research(googling) I discovered that if your machine does not meet the minimum requirements it display that message. It will also not allow you to progress with the installation process until it is satisfied that the machine has a decent graphics card. I knew my graphics card was below par but I was hoping I could install the drivers and use the SDK for Unity for development. I was not interested in actually using to play.

Fortunately for me we are technology company so I found another machine to develop on. After downloading the latest version of the Oculus SDK. It was an easy process to upgrade SDK in the my Unity project (Daden Campus).

I would like to give a big thumbs up to the guys and girls at Oculus who put a lot of thought and effort into making the process simple. They didn't change much of how you add Oculus Rift support to your project but changed the underlying code. You still use the prefabs though the structure has changed slightly most of the classes still exit with the same names. By the end of the day I was able to run the Unity application and play through it. The only problems I was left having were related to the xbox controller which I'm still working on ...

P.S. We'll releasing Daden Campus onto the Rift Store once we've finished working on the controller and have got all the interactions working. You download the non-Rift version of the Campus and have a play to get an idea of what the space is all about.