Response to Palmer Lucky Political Donations

One of my goals in getting involved in VR was to help make it an inclusive platform. The news that Palmer Lucky has been donating money to organizations devoted to creating and distributing racist and sexist memes was disappointing to say the least. While I have not posted much on the blog lately, I want to make clear that I am offended by and opposed to the goals of Nimble America and the alt-Right.

Looking forward, I want to note that while I plan to continue writing about developing for the Oculus Rift as it is the VR hardware that I own, my next purchases may take me in another direction.

Got My Oculus Rift CE

I got my Oculus Rift CE over the weekend.

So far I'm happy with the new design -  it is fairly comfortable to wear.  The setup program is easy to follow - I had it up and running a few of the demo programs pretty quickly and without trouble.  So far, this looks like a nice upgrade.

Unity 5.3 + Leap: A Look at Orion

A while ago I posted a demo about raising your hand to get a character's attention using the Leap motion.  I was asked recently to take a second look at this demo as the code in that example appears to no longer work using Leap Motion's Orion release. I had not downloaded Orion yet, so this seemed like a good excuse to do so.

After updating everything, I took a look at one of the featured examples, Blocks and my first impression was quite good. This was by far the best hand tracking I have experienced with the Leap.  Thumbs up for sure.

Next I started assembling my own scene to see if I could get the Orion hands to display. I created a new project, set the project build settings for VR (Edit > Project Settings > Player, then ensured that Virtual Reality Supported was checked), and created  a basic scene with plane, a cube, and a directional light.  After importing the  LeapMotion_CoreAsset_Orion_Beta_4.0.1 package, from the LeapMotion assets, I dragged the Prefab > LMHeadMountedRig into the scene.

I gave it a quick test run, but no hands. I quickly realized that I had not followed steps 4 and 5 of the setup guide  to properly add the hand models, both to the scene and to the Hand Pool script attached to the LeapHandController.

After adding the hand models, I gave it a test run and I had hands in the scene.

Now back to the original question, could I  replicate the hand waving demo I created for my earlier post using Orion. In that demo I had a single character idling, minding his own business who, when the user raises their hand,  waves back with a speech bubble appearing saying “Hello, there!”.

I next added a rigged character and the speech bubble.  For the character motion  I used the same animation and animation controller as in the previous demo.

Finally I imported the wavehello.cs script.  After importing the wavehello.cs script, the first error I needed to address was that the namespace name HandController could not be found.

From the short example posted in the setup guide, it appears that the HandController has been replaced by LeapProvider.

The note on that page, says
" In almost every case, you should get Frame objects from the scene’s LeapProvider object. The LeapProvider transforms the frame data into the proper frame of reference. If you get a frame from the Leap.Controller object, the data will still be in the Leap Motion frame of reference and will not match the hands displayed in the scene."

To that end,  the next step was to create a Frame object and  get the CurrentFrame.

Frame frame = provider.CurrentFrame;

Then to get the hands, I looked for each Hand object in the frame.

foreach (Hand hand in frame.Hands)

And just as I did before, I looked at the Y position for each Hand object, and compared it to the Y position of the CenterEyeObject. To simplify things a bit, I only looked at the right hand (hand.isRight) so that I don't need to account for the situation where one hand is up and one hand is down.

The other change from the old script here is that you no longer use the GetPalmPosition() method and instead simply use hand.PalmPosition.y. Here is the  new Update function:


void Update()
{

  // Get the current frame.
  Frame frame = provider.CurrentFrame;

  foreach (Hand hand in frame.Hands){
    if (hand.IsRight){

      if (hand.PalmPosition.y >= centerEyeAnchor.transform.position.y - 0.03f){
        anim.SetTrigger("Wave");
        changeMenuDisplay(speechbubble, 1);
        Debug.Log("Hand above");
      }else{

        anim.SetTrigger("Idle");
        changeMenuDisplay(speechbubble, 0);
        Debug.Log("Hand below");
      }
    }
  }
}


The new script is on GitHub.  

An Alien on an Elevator

In my Earth Elevator demo that I created,  for extra fun,  I added a stranded alien at the inner core. If you wave to the alien, it gets on the elevator with you for the trip back up to the surface.

Riding the  Earth Elevator with "Mr Grey". 

For me, riding an elevator with strangers can sometimes feel a bit awkward. Still, I was  quite surprised with how awkward I felt while riding an elevator with an alien.  And now that I've had this demo out for a while, I know I'm not the only one who feels that way.  When running the demo,  I've even had users feel too uncomfortable to continue the experience.   It is always fascinating to me to see how much more intense an experience feels in VR versus watching the same content on traditional media.

In case you were wondering, the alien is "Mr Grey"  from  the Alien and Cocoon Unity package by Duane's Mind.

LEAP VR Jam Educational Demos

My Earth Elevator VR experiment for the Leap Motion 3D Jam was highlighted on their blog in the Education group today.

I am fascinated by using the Rift and Leap for immersive learning and it is very fun to see what others are doing. Other entries that look interesting include VRΩ by Vragments and ChemGrabLab by Christine Hart. VRiΩ  is a VR experience where you shrink down inside a human body and wander through a respiratory tract to fight cancer cells and ChemGrabLab uses the Leap to allow you to interact with some of the more hazardous substances available from the safety of your armchair.

LEAP Motion 3D Jam Entry

I'm working on an entry for the Leap Motion 3D Jam. The Earth Elevator is an educational VR experience where you take an elevator to the center to the earth. The elevator makes several stops along the way to provide you with information about each layer and time to look around.

This project builds on other work I've covered on this blog in these posts:  Using Unity native VR,  Re-centering the avatar and knowing when the health and safety warning has been dismissed, Seeing your hands in VR , Hand selection UI prototype,  Raising your hand, and Thought bubbles in a Rift scene using world space canvases.

This demo requires a Rift DK2, a LEAP Motion, Windows 8 or later, and Oculus Runtime 0.7.  If you want to try it out, you can download it from the 3D Jam web site.

I'm considering adding a table with samples from each layer that you can pick up and look at a bit more closely. Don't know if I can get it done in time for the jam, though.

Unity 5.2.1: Three quick tips for improving the VR user experience

For demos that I work on, there are three simple things that I always do to create a better user experience:

• make sure the Oculus health and safety warning (HSW) has been dismissed before any other information is displayed
• give the user the option to re-center their avatar after they’ve put the headset on and settled in a comfortable position
• encourage the user to create a profile

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know this isn't the first time I've covered these topics. However, now that Unity includes native VR support I wanted to revisit these tips and show how to do them with Unity 5.2.1, the 0.7 runtime, and the Oculus Utilities for Unity 0.1-beta package.

Knowing when the HSW has been dismissed

The HSW is a big rectangle centered in front of the user. While it is semi-transparent, it blocks the user’s view significantly. For that reason, I like to make sure that is has been dismissed before displaying anything the user needs to interact with.

The Oculus Utilities for Unity 0.1-beta package provides a way to check to see if the HSW is still displayed:

OVRManager.isHSWDisplayed

This returns true when the HSW is displayed and false when it is not. Note that if you are running the application in the Editor, you won't see the HSW in the Editor window, however, the HSW will appear in the Rift view.

Re-centering the avatar

It is helpful to give users the option to re-center their virtual selves and this is one of the functions available as part of the Unity native VR implementation. 

 To re-center, add the VR name space and use:

VR.InputTracking.Recenter()

Encouraging the user to create a profile

If the user has not created a profile, the user may experience discomfort because the default IPD or height is different from their own. In previous versions,  you could get the name of the profile in use, and if the name returned was "default," you would know that the user had not created a profile. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a way to do that with the Oculus Utilities for Unity 0.1-beta package. I tried  using OVRManager.profile.username, but it returns "Oculus User" and not the name from the user profile. Looking at OVRProfile, it appears that only ipd, eyeHeight, and eyeDepth are retrieved from the current user profile (Note: you can get the user's eye height and IPD  using OVRManager.profile.eyeHeight and OVRManager.profile.ipd.)

For now, I’ll just stress the importance of creating a profile in the documentation. If anyone knows how to get the current user name, please comment!