Troubleshooting the SDK: Accessing the Head Tracker Data

For myself, people on the Oculus Developer forums who report issues and request help boil down into two main categories: people with display issues, people with tracker issues.  Display issue people are having problems with display splitters, monitor cloning, or getting the output to the correct window, or even getting the rift display to show any output at all.   Tracker issue people are having issues getting the tracker to properly represent the orientation of the Rift and convey that information to the application.  Today we're going to focus on tracker issues.

Improving on the Distortion Shader

In our last article we examined the distortion required by the Oculus Rift and created a shader similar to the one used in the example code in the Oculus VR SDK.  Similar, but not identical.  One big difference was that I broke out the code that did coordinate transformation into separate functions for clarity.  In addition, I used viewport coordinates instead of screen coordinates, again for reasons of clarity.

However, there is more that could be done to reduce the complexity of the shader and improve it's performance.

Understanding the Oculus Rift Distortion Shader

As much as any other single thing, the distortion shader is the heart of what makes the Oculus Rift possible.  It's enabled by incredible advances in computer rendering technology that have been driven by both the computer gaming industry and the movie and television entertainment industry.  Only in the past few years has the rendering power to apply fairly complex calculations to every single output pixel of a rendered frame has become ubiquitous enough that a product like the Rift could become possible.

Part of finding new applications for the Rift will come from a detailed understanding of how the whole system works.  For many, it's enough to be told that it's done with lenses and software the corrects for the lens distortion.

A more detailed understanding can be useful though, especially when you're trying to make something render properly and having trouble with the distortion shader and it's settings.

Digging Into the Oculus SDK - Part 2: Device Enumeration

In the previous post we examined the SDK in order to determine how better to trace into the code in order to learn what's going on when we issue commands using the public API.  Today we're going to go more into detail on how actual hardware is detected inside the SDK.

Digging Into the Oculus SDK - Part 1: The Worker Thread and the Command Queue

When working with new technology, it is not always immediately obvious where one should start when debugging an issue, attempting to experiment, or even just following the code to understand what's going on.  This is the first in a series of guides meant to share some hard-won understanding of some of the internals of the Oculus VR SDK; with luck you might find advice on where you need to focus your efforts to find a specific bit of functionality.

Welcome

Welcome to Rifty Business, a blog about all things related to the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, primarily focused on software development.

We intend to write articles on the inner workings of the SDK, best practices for developing software for the Rift, and projects we're working on to provide more insight into the software development process and working with a new piece of hardware like the Rift.

First up is a series of posts about debugging with the SDK...