Unity 4: Using the player eye height from the user's profile

I had been planning on writing a post on setting the default character eye height in Unity a while ago but I got side tracked and then Oculus put out the preview version of the 0.3 SDK and Unity Integration package. The first preview version didn’t work for the Mac so, although I had read there were some significant changes, I wasn’t able to test them out. Now that it is available on the Mac and I’ve had some time to play with it, I wanted to come back to the character default height question.

The big change  for character height from version 0.2 to 0.3 is that the player eye height set in the Oculus Profile tool is now used by the OVRCamraController script by default to set the character eye height.

Previously if you wanted to use the player's height as set in the user profile, you needed to go in to the Inspector for the OVRCameraController script (attached to the OVRCameraController prefab) and check the box for Use Player Eye Hght. As of version 0.3, this box is checked by default.

Assuming that the player has created a user profile, this makes it easy to have a character of the player’s actual height and, even if a profile isn’t found, the SDK provides values for a default profile. But as we looked at in another post, Working around the SDK default profile setting for gender,  there are issues with those default values, as they are for what Oculus terms the "common user" (a.k.a average adult male) and not for the average human.

If the profile is currently set to the default, the solutions we looked at there included documentation, changing the SDK values, and giving the user an option to set a profile. Like working directly with the SDK, when developing with Unity, emphasizing in the documentation that a profile needs to be set is still a big part of the solution (and a good idea anyway). And, like working directly with the SDK, changing the default values is still not a good solution.

But unlike working directly with the SDK, when working with Unity, checking for the profile used is problematic. When using the SDK directly, there is a call to get the name of the profile being used.

ovrHmd_GetString(hmd, OVR_KEY_USER, "")

Unfortunately, the Unity integration package does not appear to to include a similar call for getting the user profile name. The OVRDevice script provides the following functions to get profile data:

GetPlayerEyeHeight(ref float eyeHeight);
GetIPD(ref float IPD);
IsMagCalibrated();
IsYawCorrectionEnabled();

As you can see, there isn't a call to get the name of the profile in use. So, what to do? One suggestion I saw on the Oculus forums, was to at least warn the user that the headset has has not been calibrated. You can do that by checking if magnetic calibration and yaw correction are false using OVRDevice.IsMagCalibrated() and OVRDevice.IsYawCorrectionEnabled().

While this is a good start, it would be nice if there was an easy way to allow users to see which profile is in use and to allow them to switch between available profiles.