Streaming and the Oculus Rift

[Lokno]

Hello everybody! Not sure I've posted here before.

 

I was watching the Idle Thumbs stream of Far Cry 2, and they were idly postulating whether they could stream themselves playing Far Cry 2 with the Oculus Rift, but have the gameplay stream itself look normal, and not the lens corrected two eye distorted dealie. 

 

I wrote to them, initially to explain it could be possible, but in researching my answer I started to figure out how to do it in practice.

 

The Vireio Perception driver creates a directx 9 proxy to hijack the API calls coming out of a dx9 game and present it to the viewer in stereoscopic 3D and warped for viewing in the Oculus. This works for a variety of games, including Far Cry 2. This is the driver that made playing Skyrim in the Oculus Rift possible, if not a little awkward. Its not perfect, but it's the only way OR support will come to some of these titles.

 

So before long I had a lengthy explanation of how to go about playing Far Cry 2 with a Oculus Rift, with some adjustments to the Perception driver to add additional views to the output which were undistorted. Trouble is, I made some mistakes, and didn't actually test it with the game before I sent them the details. Long story short, what I sent along is vary unusable. 

 

So I decided to come here and enlist some help from others with the Oculus Rift Dev Kits who would like to help me figure this out. There are two main issues I haven't worked out: 1) creating an entry in Perception\cfg\profiles.xml which make Far Cry 2 work well with the Oculus Rift, and 2) to design an effect file which correctly maps the eyes to the Rift, while also presenting undistorted views to the other monitors in an NVIDIA Surround configuration.

 

I attached my draft instructions and HLSL shader which goes into Perception\fx

The main idea here is to set up a virtual device spanning multiple monitors and then put undistorted views to the right the distorted ones directed at the OR headset. My current shader crops to 1/3 of the resolution but that's some serious tunnel vision. There is an attribute aspect_multiplier in the configuration files, but this variable isn't actually used in the source code. Work in progress, I guess.

 

Thanks in advance.

farcry_rift_instructions.txt

SideBySideRiftStreamdotfx.txt

[TychoCelchuuu]

  On 8/27/2013 at 3:38 AM, Lokno said:

The Vireio Perception driver creates a directx 9 proxy to hijack the API calls coming out of a dx9 game and present it to the viewer in stereoscopic 3D and warped for viewing in the Oculus.

Ah, yes. I recognize some of those words.

[toblix]

Wouldn't streaming VR like that just end up covering hundreds of people and goggles in vomit?

[osmosisch]

I think this thread is the first thing to make me want one of them headsets. Damn.

[Lokno]

  On 8/27/2013 at 7:00 AM, toblix said:

Wouldn't streaming VR like that just end up covering hundreds of people and goggles in vomit?

 

Heh, yeah. That's actually the point of what I'm trying to do; while the OR player will see the distorted views, the viewers of the stream will see a normal fps view, as you would in any other game stream. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

toblix might've meant that VR often makes people queasy if they aren't the one in control of character movement, especially for sudden movement like that characteristic of first person shooters.

[toblix]

  On 8/28/2013 at 5:10 AM, Lokno said:

Heh, yeah. That's actually the point of what I'm trying to do; while the OR player will see the distorted views, the viewers of the stream will see a normal fps view, as you would in any other game stream. 

 

 

  On 8/28/2013 at 5:51 AM, TychoCelchuuu said:

toblix might've meant that VR often makes people queasy if they aren't the one in control of character movement, especially for sudden movement like that characteristic of first person shooters.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to, though my impression was they were talking about streaming a distorted image for people to view on their Rift, which is the scenario I feel will lead to lots of chunks being blown. Seeing a normal view of them playing on the Rift would be cool, though.