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RaceRoom Racing Oculus DK2 and Simracing

Discussion in 'Virtual Racing League' started by carloscasas, Oct 30, 2014.

  1. Blame73

    Blame73 Well-Known Member

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    I really can't understand your posts...
  2. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    Not sure either but think @Chumet1 means suffering from VR sickness when using a Rift.
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  3. John Hien Nguyen

    John Hien Nguyen Member

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    This is a post I made to silent hill just then:
    "Hi Craig, i did some more testing and there's a problem. Originally I was using a simple test program instead of a computer game, but ran into problems running it with a real game. The issue is that oculus only release the source to their SDK and not their drivers. This means you would have to integrate my changes into every game you wanted to play. This is of course not possible because no game developer will do this for you. You can't even replace a modified game dell file because the oculus sdk is directly integrated into the game exe file.

    I read on the oculus forums that Oculus will not be releasing the source for the drivers (this would allow us to support all games without modification). There are some people on the boards rallying Palmer lucky to support motion platforms but this is a very low priority issue for them and they don't seem to be interested.

    Sorry to get your hopes up, I gave it my best shot. I ended up selling my dk2 because I was so disappointed.
    John"
  4. SeatTime

    SeatTime Well-Known Member

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    I'm still using my DK2 - works OK with motion for most sim games - although large changes in surge have me moving toward or away from the virtual steering wheel. From my experiments, vibration is the killer of camera tracking for Oculus and motion sims. Which is why it is better to have the camera mounted off the rig. I've although have had some success with dampening the vibrations for an on Rig camera (not able to implement all required changes to current SIM). Currently building another Sim with these design ideas included.
  5. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    At least you gave it a shot @John Hien Nguyen.

    Vection VR takes the same approach you tried and make the modification available to game developers. So that is how LFS got support. It is less than ideal. It is such a shame Oculus seems wedded to defining tracking based on the ground plane only.
    Last edited: Dec 23, 2014
  6. Kirk

    Kirk Member

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    Oculus is so hackable it's almost a joke. Their are MANY ways to augment the sensor data.

    For starters, no positional processing takes place in their drivers. It's all user mode in their service, you can attach and mod at will w/o futzing around with driver signing.

    Second, sensor data is sent by HID. You can attach anything that talks HID and lie to it. Arduino Micro comes to mind.

    Third, you don't even have to lie. You can attach anything that gets you HID data and write to the same pipe their drivers use had someone actually plugged in the Rift's USB cable.

    You don't even need an additional IMU (although it makes it easy, simple matrix math). You can take the data right from your POTs.

    Also, the firmware is software updateable and has plenty of free space. The CPU is a STM32F103xx, if you have IDA and understand ARM, you can mod the firmware to do sensor fusion between multiple IMUs w/o any extra stuff. Never done that myself, but it's there. It's not encrypted, only has a simple header before the interrupt vectors.

    Anyway, have a look at their service exe. About 80% of it deals with the camera and display, stuff you won't need to mess with. Only a small portion deals with the IMU, and it gets all its data from a pretty central location. You can spoof an event to make it close and re-open the device, which means you can change at will where it's getting it's data with a simple call to writeprocessmemory.

    Seriously, it's a million times easier than all the stuff you guys do to get games working on your sims.
    • Informative Informative x 1
  7. SilentChill

    SilentChill Problem Maker

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    Cool so you gonna make some kinda mod so it offsets the movement for us all ??? ;)


    Sounds easy peezy !
  8. Kirk

    Kirk Member

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    The seat for my sim doesn't arrive until after new years (one of the last things I needed), so I have to do this for myself at some point anyway.

    I was originally going to just augment and emulate the Rift's USB HID, but after seeing these messages and giving a look at the actual drivers (and then the service exe), it occurs to me that's a far superior approach.

    The goal, of course, is to get at it in a way that doesn't change from one version to the next (seldom do manufactures change internal names of things like named events, pipes, driver interface guids, etc.). It looks to be simple to force the service to rescan and actually find something it wasn't actually looking for and be happy. From there, everything else would operate as normal, just that the data it's processing is a bit different than what the HMD alone is providing.

    At a slightly less desirable location, there are routines that calculate the orientation of the eyes and neck, scale, etc., all as C++ functions. These are far more likely to change, but might stick around for many small revisions.

    I have some spare IMUs and arduinos, and holiday time off work, I'll give it a go.
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  9. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    @Kirk that would be wonderful if it is both a stable solution and one that can be packaged as part of a motion patch, as we already have to go do that anyway.

    It really is the most critical issue for motion sims and the Rift, hence my encouragement of dialog between those who have interest in the Rift and those who are actually building the SimTools plugins.

    Please do give your ideas a go and post the outcome. You will find a really strong group of members here as your cheer squad!
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  10. SilentChill

    SilentChill Problem Maker

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    @Kirk that would be cool if you try. I would love to be able to but have no idea how these things work.

    Good luck :)
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  11. nclabs

    nclabs Active Member Gold Contributor

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    I'm here for any kind of support!
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  12. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    Any progress or hurdles to report @Kirk?

    It may be that in the long term the easiest way forward to integrate VR and motion simulation is to not use the Rift, given the the Open Source OPVR initiative will provide direct VR interface access: http://www.osvr.com/
  13. Kirk

    Kirk Member

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    I finally received my racing seat / bolts / harness a couple days ago, the originals were lost by the mailman. Fortunately, Amazon replaced for free (sent by fedex). It's the first time I've ever had the post office screw things up that badly.

    I have no progress to report, unfortunately.

    That said, there isn't anything proprietary in the rift. The IMU in the rift is directly exposed, as is the camera data. You could wrap it in open sourced code, at the expense of sacrificing compatibility with the plethora of software that is already "rift aware" (although it could probably also be done in a way that you can keep the best of both worlds, and you could also shim a "fake" rift to look like a real one the same way).

    It's not like TrackIR where the company went out of their way to ensure you were using the product as intended.

    Anyway, I hope to get a chance to look at if further soon.
  14. bob williams

    bob williams OSW sfx100

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    interesting stuff, never thought the rift would have problems on a motion platform.. I hope this is going to work out, because my triple head setup is aging..
  15. vell

    vell New Member

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    I wonder what effect it presence with Oculus and you can to link it with sim?
  16. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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  17. vell

    vell New Member

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    Can I use the Oculus with Dirt 3 ?
  18. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    You would have to use VorpX to get Dirt 3 on the Rift, which I don't consider is worth the trouble or the expense. A better option would be Richard Burns Rally or Dirt Rally, as both have Rift support, though Dirt Rally is still in its early phase of development. Here are examples by @SilentChill:



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  19. jefesant

    jefesant Member

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    Very nice . So the PROJECT CARS on mi experince is so bad to much lag..and the game is running on good FPS I don't now whats the problem.
  20. noorbeast

    noorbeast VR Tassie Devil Staff Member Moderator Race Director

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    You need a pretty powerful computer for Pcars and the Rift, plus lower the settings a bit.

    What are your computer specifications?
    • Agree Agree x 1