Oculus Rift and DCS World Discussion

The main problem with the oculus rift in its current state is the low resolution. If you want to use it for flight simming you need at least full hd resolution (1920x1080). Especially for reading the instruments and gauges in the virtual cockpit. I use a big touch screen (1.40 m x 0.80 m) that gives me 90 degree fov (comparable to the oculus rifts fov) with a resolution of 1920x1080. And I can say I wouldn't go lower with the resolution.

The second problem is with manipulating the virtual cockpit controls. Many of you suggested devices like kinect or leapmotion. But I think some gloves that gives you haptic feedback will also be needed.

 

Until these problems are solved I stay with my big touch screen and trackir: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=89624

This is only a problem with the dev kit. It has a bunch of problems, this being one of them. The final version is slated to have a much higher resolution.

I think he meant smaller FOV because it's farther away

Correct.

To further that, the dev units are not the final spec, they are simply cleaned up proto types being distributed to backers and companies that request one for use in developing their software with.

Using the mouse in this setup would kill the immersion.

Why would kill the immersion?

As long as you see only the virtual reality no immersion is lost.

Or you think about viewing the mouse cursor (cross) in the image?

There has to be a way to interact with the computer. Mouse is one of the best here because it does not require to look at it; keyboard does not qualify.

Why would kill the immersion?

As long as you see only the virtual reality no immersion is lost.

Its more immersive to manipulate the virtual cockpit controls "directly" with your fingers. That is why most people that use helios use it with a touch screen and not with a mouse.

For doing this with oculus rift you would need a device/tracker that scans your arm/finger position (in three dimensions) and translate them into the virtual reality. To achieve a realistic mapping from the real world to the virtual world the tracker has to scan an area around you that has the size of the real cockpit. This is where leapmotion fails. Leapmotions interaction space is only 8 cubic feet. I think kinect can scan an area of this size but lacks the ability of recognizing small motions eg. finger motions. Thus, waiting for a kinect-leapmotion-combined-device ...

I don't think a mouse would be that bad for immersion. It would be a matter of testing or preference as to whether being cockpit-stabilised or view-stabilised would be the better option.

The leap is probably not as useful as everyone's imagining. The two main problems are the lack of an absolute position reference, reducing it to basically a mouse you have to hold your finger up to use, and the means of registering a click. No way in hell I would want to risk accidentally flicking the wrong switch.

As for the pixels-per-degree question, I ran some quick calculations on my current setup. I have a 1920x1200 monitor, 520mm wide, 750mm from my eyeballs. Some quick trig shows that the monitor occupies about 40 degrees of my vision. That's 198 px/deg. The current dev version of the rift has a screen 1280 px wide, split between two eyes, over a 90 degree FoV. This gives a puny 14.2 px/deg. However the optics are structured such that ths distribution is uneven. This fact and the high sample rate headtracking (1kHz) further muddy the waters between direct comparisons. I think in terms of raw visual acuity the OR lags behind, but in terms of immersiveness it wins in spades.

Mouse is the only solution I can see working so far with Oculus. Trackball even better IMHO.

My current setup is trackball based. I don't care for a touchscreen monitor for the cockpit although I could easily get one instead of the current normal monitor.

I guess I am a fan of a "DeskPit". HOTAS plus trackball, good enough for me.

Yeah, I don't see a problem with a HOTAS+mouse combination with the Rift. This is a perfect add-on for flight-sims and maybe ArmA, depending on how well and fast the screen works. I just hope the head tracking is well done.

Unpacking the Dev kit video!

Wags... I should have mine in the next week and a half, we can start testing!!!

Wags... I should have mine in the next week and a half, we can start testing!!!

Me too, one of the first backers here. Can't wait to try it out, but I know what to expect, already have few HMDs in my collection.

I am not even sure I will be able to use it since I wear glasses but I am still looking forward to seeing it.

I am not even sure I will be able to use it since I wear glasses but I am still looking forward to seeing it.

A few of the developers of the OR wear glasses. It ships with a variety of lenses to adjust the diopter for most common prescriptions, as well as an adjustable pinion to move the screen and lens assembly further from your eyes to make room for glasses if the lenses don't work for you.

A few of the developers of the OR wear glasses. It ships with a variety of lenses to adjust the diopter for most common prescriptions, as well as an adjustable pinion to move the screen and lens assembly further from your eyes to make room for glasses if the lenses don't work for you.

Oh, I am aware of that but it is still a YMMV situation.

I tested side by side view ports earlier... it should work fine, but need to interface head tracking. I wish there was a way to get positional tracking... Shoot, curious about how 3d will with the rift!

I was thinking how well this would go with Rise of Flight where the keyboard is so easily done without and there are no cockpit controls to touch.

Wags... I should have mine in the next week and a half, we can start testing!!!

I'll also have mine. Got it for Nthusim HMD utility development testing. :thumbup:

DCS World Oculus Rift Support - User Base/Community Expansion

im sure there is many post about oculus rift. sorry if i didnt search.

yes, oculus rift is amazing in terms of immersion,

no need for multimonitor..

yea, DCS modules are technical and involved simulation involving extraordinary about of key commands. (leap motion might be able to address this)

point of this thread is for me to say, DCS world should have oculus rift support, because when oculus rift drops, DCS can get a big player base from rift customers who have the hardware, and want to fly, and i think DCS would be missing out...

i know i will by a rift, and i will be looking for a flying game.

the genre is already lacking in decent fly titles. DCS fits the bill. with edge coming and other modules.. topped with the rift, makes an unbelievle experience, (even if i have to play in arcade mode)

MY Dream is DCS apache AH64A (or D) with Oculus Rift. (but ill settle for Mi24 or AH-1G with oculus rift)

Don't worry, i'm sure everyone in the commercial and professional simworld is keeping an eye on this one. I don't of how much worth a JDK is at the moment while there's no release version for the public to buy. They're waiting on better screens and several other stuff. I hear Chinese factories have que lists. :huh:

I have preordered soon after the Kickstarter was complete (would have done so earlier, but I was a bit short on cash back then). Side-by-Side viewport testing in DCS was fine so far, looking forward to NTHUSIM or even native support for this.

I also have 3 Leaps on the way, should be here end of March. The Leaps as mouse emulation would have the benefit of working without software changes, but native support in 3D space would be nice. Only thing missing then would be haptic feedback and G-Forces. Goodbye, outside world. DCS will become my OASIS then...

Perhaps we could also get MYO support in this thing.

Wags (or someone inside):

1.) Do you or one of your colleagues have backed the project?

2.) Have you considered support for Leap and/or MYO?

3.) Will you fix the HUD issues in 3D? If yes, when? ;)

Brad:

Any news on NTHUSIM HMD concerning DCS?

Oculus Rift Demo Report

Jason Williams of 777 (Rise of Flight) has posted his first impressions of the OR.

http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=36461

We can conclude that OR(dev kit) is cumbersome, blurry, no HD support, no scaled movement (1:1), and needs refinement before it is adopted. How does ED find it?

We can conclude that OR(dev kit) is cumbersome, blurry, no HD support, no scaled movement (1:1), and needs refinement before it is adopted. How does ED find it?

It seems that Jason has no previous knowledge of the product.

The oculus team have acknowledged a number of these points WRT the development kit. Most of these issues are related to the screen which is slow and not high res. But we have been told that this will be fixed for the consumer version.

As fas as the 1:1 for the head movement, who really knows. I know that what he says cannot be given as gospel as he obviously hasn't been following things and this is just how it was set up. That doesnt mean that this is how it will have to be and off the top of my head I can think of easy ways to give scale to it.

We can conclude that OR(dev kit) is cumbersome, blurry, no HD support, no scaled movement (1:1), and needs refinement before it is adopted. How does ED find it?

I got a dev kit here... Some comments:

Cumbersome? Don't we have to put on a headset anyhow for TrackIR? Instead of having to wear headsets, we can wear head buds. Weight is about the same.

Blurry - yep pretty much. Consumer version will be much better with the expected high res panel. I am however, very concerned about the optics - in addition to the blurry mess, there are strong chromatic abbreviations on the outside FOV.

No scaled tracking - this is none-issue. We want the ultimate sim experience, why do we want scaled movement? RL pilots gets fatigued, so should we then. A VR experience is about being embodied, not using our head to move a camera like TrackIR. In any case, you can always duct tape a TrackIR clip :) I suspect there will be more motion sickness issues with scaled movement though.