Monday, January 25, 2016

Got new or custom HMD? Need direct render, time warping, distortion correction and game engine integration?

Google Concept from Sensics
Let's assume you built a new HMD. You've done all the hardware work - figured out the optics and display setup, created driver boards, integrated a motion tracker and perhaps an eye tracker, worked out the ergonomics issues. It's a lot of work and you should be commended on doing it.

How do you get software support for it? Specifically, you probably want to:
- Model the field of view and allow users to correct any optical or color distortion
- Obtain support for direct render and asynchronous time warp
- Get Unity and Unreal drivers for your trackers
- Get some demo content and some cool games running on it
- and, in general, make it easy for others to support your new creation.

 A solution to consider is OSVR. By integrating your new HMD into the open-source OSVR framework, you can get all that done (and more) very quickly. Get low-latency rendering for your HMD; correct distortion in one of several possible ways; support for many game engines; debug and demonstration software.

OSVR already supports many devices (full list here) and based on the work team Sensics did with several HMD vendors over the last few months, we put up documentation on how to add an HMD to OSVR. You can find it here and it is part of the official OSVR developer documentation repository.

Let me know what you think and how we can make it easier to get this done.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi!
What should I do to obtain DirectMode support for my custom HMD?
Can you please help me with that?
Is it possible just by creating pull request to OSVR render manager?

Thanks for help!

VRGuy said...

See https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/blob/master/Extending-OSVR/AddingHMD.md or contact support at osvr.org