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.

Cardboard vs Rift

Over the last few weeks we've finally had time to start playing with Google Cardboard - and I must say we are impressed. Whereas Oculus DK1 was great, but then DK2 was such a pain that we dread getting it out of the cupboard Google Cardboard is a joy to use, and might even drive me to buy an Android phone!

For those that aren't familiar with Cardboard it IS just a cardboard holder (and a couple of lenses) for your smartphone. You can build one yourself (details at https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/), or buy a kit for about £10 on Amazon. Then fold the eye hood over, slide your mobile phone in and away you go. The phone's sensors are used to do the basic rotational head-tracking, and there's a single button on the box which triggers a single touch to the screen, and that's it.

What stunned us at first was the quality. With a MotoX its about the same as DK2, and with a Samsung Galaxy S6 it feels better than DK2. You don't get lateral head tracking, which needs an extra sensor anyway on the Oculus, but that's hardly vital. The big downside is that you have to hold the box in place with your hands (the strap that came with ours was useless), so you can't hold a game controller or joystick to control your movement. However the big upside is that you just have to hold the box in place with your hands!  Just pick up and go. No complex PC configurations, no leads running everywhere and trying to peek out from under the headset to see the keyboard. Just hold it to your eyes and you are away! Combine this immediacy with the fact that anyone could have hundreds of these available ($10 each and bring-your-own-phone) in a class or business and all of a sudden VR seems much more feasible right now from a business point of view.

The big technical challenge initially is how to design the UI. You only have gaze and one button, and it's interesting that the most common solution at the moment is actually the same as we developed for the Oculus Rift version of Daden Campus -  if you stare at something it becomes active, and they either stare a bit longer and it activates, or it waits for the key press to activate. Simple. Using this model even movement becomes easy to implement, stare at you feet to start moving, you walk in the direction you are looking so you can steer as you go, look at your feet again to stop.

We're now working up our first Cardboard demo app which we should have available in the next few weeks, and then we'll do a Cardboard version of Daden Campus and build Cardboard support into all our demos and projects from then on. I'll then have to have a Cardboard on me whenever I go to events and meetings, and the Android phone to go with it!

All we now need is a simple head-frame to give you the proper hands-free for when you need it, something like a cross-platform Samsung VR Gear, or better still a low cost option like the Durovis or XG VR.

If you'd like to read more about VR then download our white paper on Virtual Reality, and if you'd like to have a demo, or would like us to create a VR experience for you, your students, employees or customers then just get in touch. 

Virtual Reality for Immersive Learning - Presentation

We've just put our virtual reality presentation on Slideshare. This hopefully takes a balanced view of the potential, and issues, for virtual reality in the training, learning, education and visualisation spaces based on our own first hand experience of Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 and integrating them into our applications. You can also download the original white paper.

If you'd like a demo of the VR work we've done so far let us know and we'll see if we can arrange a demo.