• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

VRidge - Oculus Rift Emulator for Cardboard

Krejlooc

Banned
Since Oculus Rift is kinda expensive, we made a software to play PC VR games on Cardboard type headsets as an entry level for high end VR.

It is a complete Oculus simulation with full head tracking like it is supposed to be.

You can see in the gif how it works. You can try it out at: https://riftcat.com/vridge

Long story short - this lets you play titles meant for Oculus Rift using your phone in a cardboard shell.

pbU7H8A.gif


Contrast to stuff like Trinus:

Trinus streams active window and translates head rotation into mouse movements. VRidge is complete runtime replacement (oculus runtime is not even required) with low level hooks that emulate Oculus.

Link to reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/49tpy5/we_made_pc_vr_simulation_on_cardboard_with_head/
 
I've mentioned a few times that if VR is going to become mainstream it's going to be thanks to mobile.
Everyone has one and to make it VR compatible it all you need is a piece of cardboard or plastic ranging from 15-99 bucks.
Making headset exclusives is a grabage way to try and sell high end head sets as well just fragmenting the limited market.
 

pestul

Member
just google it. There are several DIY guides. There used to be a pair of binoculars people would buy from Walmart that were about $8 that had correct focus lenses, or you could use certain Hasbro view master clones.
Hmm I wonder if there are any toy lenses for the Nexulous Rift (Nexus 7 cardboard).
 

kinggroin

Banned
I tried this with Trinus a bit back. It works, but the refresh is horrible (tons of judder). Otherwise, it feels no different than the experience I had with the og Rift.


So there you go.
 

kinggroin

Banned
Hi f you guys go cardboard, do yourself a favor and take the time to fit a foam insert for the bridge of your nose and forehead. It'll help with light leakage too.

Then find a way to strap it to your face. Holding it with your hands will seriously affect immersion
 

Ruff

Member
Will this work with GearVR? Using the built in headtracking and default refresh rate from the phone is sick inducing :/
 

jediyoshi

Member
just google it. There are several DIY guides. There used to be a pair of binoculars people would buy from Walmart that were about $8 that had correct focus lenses, or you could use certain Hasbro view master clones.

I bite, some one teach me how to use Google!
 
Hmm, this sounds cool. I was able to get one of those free Star Wars Cardboard things from a few months ago and will be getting a GearVR due to having preordered an S7 Edge. I'll be trying this out, though my PC probably won't be powerful enough to run it well.
 

Chris_C

Member
Possibly a silly question, but I still don't understand how positional tracking works without a camera or markers.
 

Ruff

Member
You can disable the GearVR process with package Disabler and use the gear like a cardboard headset

Sure but I believe that disables the Oculus sensors in the headset, and desn't take advantage of the OS level changes GVR gives that result in a -20ms latency and unlocked low screen persistance. I saw he hopes to work on it anyway, so i hope for the best.

Possibly a silly question, but I still don't understand how positional tracking works without a camera or markers.

It doesn't with this, It only uses rotational tracking.
 

Cartman86

Banned
Don't even bother trying this. Chance of it not making you sick is 0. Cool for possible future phones (and competing headsets like the Vive) that can match the frame rate and resolution. Plus no positional tracking=shit. Please don't kill VR mobile, please don't kill VR.
 

kinggroin

Banned
Don't even bother trying this. Chance of it not making you sick is 0. Cool for possible future phones (and competing headsets like the Vive) that can match the frame rate and resolution. Plus no positional tracking=shit. Please don't kill VR mobile, please don't kill VR.

How did you make it work? Damn near no one can get the game to display on the phone. Devs are looking into it.
 

Cartman86

Banned
How did you make it work? Damn near no one can get the game to display on the phone. Devs are looking into it.

Oh no I didn't. I'm just being an ass. I really dislike mobile VR and my opinion is it just will not work right now. It doesn't have the quality nor hardware features to give the minimum required VR experience to create presence, not make someone sick, and actually wow you.
 

Chris_C

Member
It doesn't have positional tracking

Ah, the OP said "full head tracking" so I assumed position+rotation. In any event, I can get it to connect but whenever I try launching a game (Lost Valley VR) I get a blank screen on the PC and a black divided screen on the phone with the message "attempting to reconnect". I'll try another couple of games and call it quits if it doesn't work.
 
Don't even bother trying this. Chance of it not making you sick is 0. Cool for possible future phones (and competing headsets like the Vive) that can match the frame rate and resolution. Plus no positional tracking=shit. Please don't kill VR mobile, please don't kill VR.

Except that I don't get motion sick, ever.
 

Chris_C

Member
Got it working with "Coffee Without Words". It wasn't ideal. The video being streamed was extra-framey. Seemed sub-30fps (local rendering on my PC is well above 60fps)
 

Chris_C

Member
I've been waiting for that version as well. I know it's not as good as the real thing (OR), but it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

Based on my first experience though, it seems far, far less than ideal. It's possible that when they GearVR compatible version comes along the additional sensor data might help, but as I said above, the video being displayed is very framey, and it loses tracking very, very quickly.
 

Uhyve

Member
Except that I don't get motion sick, ever.
Hell, I'm still running a DK1 for testing purposes and even that thing with it's low res screen and lack of positional tracking doesn't make me sick... except for that time I messed up some camera code, that was actually really unpleasant.

Most of the time, I find motion sickness comes from incorrect calibration and unnatural movements in VR software. Mobile gaming may not be able to push graphics very far, but even Minecraft looks awesome in VR, you don't need stunning graphics to have a compelling VR experience. Plus phone screens are actually pretty good nowadays... better than the DK1 at least.

Oh, on topic though, I find it hard to believe that a program can do sensor readings on a phone, transmit that to a PC, do a screen capture, compress it, send the capture back to the phone and decompress it without causing substantial latency... I might believe if it was somehow wired to the PC. But in my experience, just the wifi transfers will add at least 20ms on a normal network. Hoping I'm wrong though, I mean, it would be cool.
 

Lister

Banned
Except that I don't get motion sick, ever.

I never get motion sick either, but the first time I tried google cardboard on my Galaxy S5, I broke out into sweats, had to take off the thing immediatley and felt nauseousness for a good hour afterwrds.

The issue was a very tiny, slight perpetual slide movement to the right. I think the app I was running was having an issue with the phone's sesonrs, or the sensor son my phoen weren't properly claibrated, I don't know. I fixed it by rebooting, but even so, some experiences were so low a frame rate that it didn't feel good to use for more than a few minutes at a time.
 
Oh, on topic though, I find it hard to believe that a program can do sensor readings on a phone, transmit that to a PC, do a screen capture, compress it, send the capture back to the phone and decompress it without causing substantial latency... I might believe if it was somehow wired to the PC. But in my experience, just the wifi transfers will add at least 20ms on a normal network. Hoping I'm wrong though, I mean, it would be cool.

Yeah, that's the part of this that I don't understand. Heck, normal, non-VR forms of "Remote Play" tend to result in an annoying amount of input latency, with the sole exception of the Wii U gamepad that streams at only 480p and was designed explicitly for this purpose.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
I can't believe how many in this topic are missing the point.

What this is not: a viable replacement for the Oculus Rift using your mobile phone.

What this is: the first real attempt at emulating an Oculus Rift on non-oculus rift hardware. These VR programs are not being interacted with in round about methods like translating your phone's IMU data into mouse input. As far as these programs know, they are connected to an actual Oculus Rift.

Which has enormous implications for cross-headset compatibility.
 
Top Bottom