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Linux Compatibility With VR Goggles?

Posted by kdawson on from the sees-things-we-don't dept.

WorldWarCheese writes "Many's the time I wish I had a little more mobility or comfort with my computer. Laptops are OK, but anyone interested can see right onto my screen; and a laptop doesn't quite have that 'cool' factor that VR goggles / headsets do. The problem is, whenever I've looked at the options, Linux compatibility is not mentioned. Is there a VR headset out there that is compatible with Ubuntu? If not, what could I do to make it compatible, and how feasible would that be?"

48 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. The VR Goggles... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...they do nothing!

    1. Re:The VR Goggles... by LoRdTAW · · Score: 2, Funny

      Poser. Real tough typists just give the keyboard a menacing look and it types for them.

  2. VR goggles, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Congratulations, your half-way to becoming the newest member of the Borg collective! Just need a machine suit and a bunch of implants, and the transition to your new life is complete. :D

    1. Re:VR goggles, eh? by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Congratulations, your half-way to becoming the newest member of the Borg collective! Just need a machine suit and a bunch of implants, and the transition to your new life is complete.

      Kevin Warwick has him beat. I'm surprised he didn't immediately pop up in a first post. He's a well-known figure in nerd subculture. If you haven't heard about his odd lifestyle choices yet, his autobiography I, Cyborg does much to explain his thinking.

    2. Re:VR goggles, eh? by TheP4st · · Score: 2, Informative

      I too am puzzled as to why somebody would drop 1300 bucks on a pair of 640x480 goggles when they can be had for 300.
      http://www.myvu.com/Myvu-Crystal-Standard-Universal-P85C24.aspx

      --
      "I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
    3. Re:VR goggles, eh? by JWSmythe · · Score: 4, Interesting

          He was talking about 3d glasses, if I recall correctly.

          But, for a while I used a pair of Sony Glasstron (PLM-A35) glasses. I had gone out to a worksite that was "suppose" to have a crash cart. They didn't. So I'm sitting there with a dozen servers, no monitor or keyboard, and no way to set the IP's when they finally do provide them.

          We went shopping, and found this crappy little store that had the glasses for like $200, or a 14" LCD screen for $400. This was a while ago. Since we were out of town, "what will fit in my luggage" was actually a big concern.

          It didn't have VGA inputs, so I got a VGA to RCA adapter, and started working. People at the datacenter got a kick out of it. I was sitting on the floor, keyboard in my lap, apparently staring off into space. :) The best part was, it fit nicely in my laptop bag.

          The extra cabling I had to tote around was a little annoying, but I could do an overnight trip with just my laptop bag and not have to check any luggage. This was pre-911. Since then, I have to check a bag just to bring a screwdriver. {sigh}

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  3. My name is Kent Mcclure by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Informative

    and I own those exact goggles.

    They're basically just a low res monitor... or a highly secretive way to watch porn without anyone knowing.

    If you're looking for stereoscopic support, that's up to your display driver manufacturer. Nvidia's stereoscopic mode barely works on Windows, let alone on Linux.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:My name is Kent Mcclure by YourExperiment · · Score: 5, Funny

      Your name is Kent Mcclure... I may remember you from such Slashdot stories as "Jobs Not Giving This Year's Macworld Keynote" and "How Do I Manage Seasoned Programmers?"

    2. Re:My name is Kent Mcclure by prefect42 · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's simply not true. I use Nvidia Quadro cards for active and passive stereo under linux, and have been for years. It works kinda like you'd expect stereo to work.

      --

      jh

    3. Re:My name is Kent Mcclure by Arancaytar · · Score: 4, Funny

      watch porn without anyone knowing

      With the caveat that people might still be able to see what you are doing just by looking at you.

    4. Re:My name is Kent Mcclure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >females don't watch porn

      Sounds like you are involved with the wrong females :)

  4. Cool by bperkins · · Score: 4, Funny

    doesn't quite have that 'cool' factor that VR goggles / headsets do

    That word.
    I do not think it means what you think it means.

    1. Re:Cool by egandalf · · Score: 3, Funny

      Inconceivable!

      --
      Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
    2. Re:Cool by speroni · · Score: 2, Funny

      Anybody want a peanut?

      --
      Eschew Obfuscation
    3. Re:Cool by windsurfer619 · · Score: 2, Funny

      I cannot conceive of a peanut.

  5. Contact the company? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The model you're linked doesn't specify compatibility, though it does list its inputs:
    VGA / SVGA / XVGA Input: Scaled to SVGA (800 x 600)

    It 'might' work out of the box like a plug and play monitor but it also may not.

    The best way to check on Linux support is to contact the manufacturer of the devices you are looking at.

    Custom drivers can be made for linux but it is easier for people to do so with the cooperation of the original developers.

  6. Depends on what you want. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are, now that small LCDs have gotten cheap, numerous "display glasses" type products that toss an LCD in front of each eye and have some sort of video input(generally VGA or composite, sometimes both or other). Basic VGA-in display glasses should work exactly like any other monitor on virtually anything. No guarantee that the EDID isn't complete nonsense; but it should basically work.

    Any sort of OMG Stereoscopic Vision! drivers, though, will probably be useless in Linux. Those guys claim to support stereoscopic shutter glasses under certain conditions; but seem to be aiming at the Real Serious Workstation market. If you can deal with normal, non-3D glasses, you should have no problems, 3D, possibly not so much.

    1. Re:Depends on what you want. by mikael_j · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was actually messing around with that idea for a while, unfortunately I was hindered from putting my plans into practice due to the cost of good VR headsets. What I was going for was a setup with three or four small webcams, two regular ones and one or two modified to act as IR cameras, a few IR LEDs to provide illumination when needed and then trying to integrate the whole thing with various pieces of hardware and software. One idea that didn't seem too hard to get working was maps + GPS displayed in 3D, sort of a poor man's Google Earth strapped to your head.

      /Mikael

      --
      Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  7. Re:VGA Connection by binarylarry · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, 800x600 is a little different when the screen is literally an inch from your eyeball.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  8. Should be Standard VGA, No? by camperdave · · Score: 2, Informative

    VR goggles are nothing more than miniature displays that are mounted on eyeglass frames, so I doubt there'd be a compatibility issue, per se. You may have to get your hands deep into the xwindows config files to fine tune things, though, because they likely won't be set up already. Apart from that, they should just appear to be a standard VGA display, I would think.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    1. Re:Should be Standard VGA, No? by N1ck0 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Normally dual displays just expand the size of the viewing area from one camera point. To have stereoscopic support 3D images need to have 2 viewing cameras setup, at a slightly different offset; viewing the same object from different angles.

      So a dual monitor desktop still has just one perspective, for 3D you need 2.

      Its a lot easier to do this with dual displays, as you only really need to modify the camera config in openGL, or your F/X API of choice (of course this is best done in the software itself or via the driver).

      The alternating left-right eye, or polarizing, glasses are a bit harder to do properly. For those you need to synchronize to the frames coming out of the frame buffers (or else its easy to send the right image to the left eye, and vice versa...and also have all sort of sync problems). Most of these never became very popular in the PC world, most of the support for polarized glasses is found in the SGI realm.

    2. Re:Should be Standard VGA, No? by blueg3 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Someone, somewhere is doing it wrong. VR goggles should work fine if you're farsighted. The actual location of the display isn't what matters, it's the distance your eyes need to focus to in order to bring the image into focus. With proper image separation, you should be able to focus on "distant" objects in VR goggles.

      On the other hand, often, focusing on any object for someone with normal eyesight using VR goggles is challenging.

  9. Problem with VR glasses by NinthAgendaDotCom · · Score: 2, Insightful

    is that they are all low-res. I don't think I've heard of any that are above 1024x768, and even that's considered high for those. They're gimmicks. I think they're just too bulky still. People don't want to have to put something on their faces.

    --
    -- http://ninthagenda.com/
    1. Re:Problem with VR glasses by scubamage · · Score: 2, Informative

      They do have high res ones, but they're so prohibitively expensive that I doubt anyone on here would get a pair without a hefty research grant and a very specific reason to use them. It took some heavy searching before to find one when I was interested. I sadly can't turn up any links now.

  10. There's the Z800 by zilt · · Score: 5, Informative

    I wrote a linux kernel driver for the eMagin z800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z800_3DVisor ) HMD available here: http://antimass.org/z800/

    I will be updating it over the holidays to the latest kernel release as I've finally got some time to work on it.

  11. Re:Linux is a Toy Operating System by loonycyborg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Linux is a toy.

    So is Windows. But this fact doesn't prevent it from enjoying wide hardware support. So this is non-issue.

  12. Eyetap... by GenP · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Keep bugging Steve to release the Eyetap. AR is way cooler than VR!

  13. Kevin Warwick by titzandkunt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Kevin Warwick may be a "well-known figure in nerd subculture", but among nerds in the know, he's widely regarded as a shameless self-promoter, all-round media-tart and frankly, a bit of a joke.

    His claims and ideas put him more into the realms of science fiction author / futurologist, rather than serious scientist / engineer.

    Here's a gem, courtesy of The Reg: Captain Cyborg pushes kid chipping via Maddy abduction case

    --
    Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
    1. Re:Kevin Warwick by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Funny

      All those students get turned into cybermen using implants bought with the cash though. Kevin Warwick is an evil, evil man.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  14. My name is Kent Mcclure.... by 117 · · Score: 2, Informative

    .... you may not remember me as I am neither Kent Brockman, nor Troy McClure.

  15. VR Lab by blueg3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Clemson VR lab uses (or used, at least) Linux workstations to run provide input to their VR goggles. Compatibility shouldn't be an issue, but you basically have to provide content yourself -- things won't automatically be cool. We didn't even use any kind of support in the drivers -- the goggles were two 640x480 screens, but were treated as a single 1280x480 screen. We just used OpenGL to draw two versions of our scenes from slightly different positions and presented them side-by-side so that they mapped properly onto the goggles.

    Note: VR goggles are not actually cool to use. They're remarkably uncomfortable, both for your head and your eyes, and they have terrible resolution.

    1. Re:VR Lab by Eponymous+Bastard · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Since you seem to be knowledgeable about the subject:

      Do you know of any VR Goggle with a wide field of view? Everything I see has at most 40 degrees field of view, which would be like looking through a tunnel. I can get a wider field of view by standing near my monitor (Which I do).

      For things to be inmersive I would want the display to include my peripheral vision, even if only with very low resolution on the sides. I don't want to feel like I'm wearing swimming goggles.

      My personal use for it (together with head/eye tracking) would be to write a window manager where I can hang windows all around me, and where I can switch windows by looking at them. Compiz already renders to the screen with OpenGL from intermediate buffers, extending it to a wider canvas shouldn't be that hard. It's basically being inside the spinning cube (or ring, really). But the low resolution, tunnel vision and now your comfort argument make it an unattractive proposition.

  16. Cool == Dorky by drenehtsral · · Score: 2, Informative

    Y'know, as somebody who has done the whole 'wearable computer' thing, just a warning: We geeks thing wearing a HMD is 'cool', most everybody else things you're a dork. (Some people even took me for a suicide bomber with my battery packs). *sigh*

    --

    ---
    Play Six Pack Man. I
    1. Re:Cool == Dorky by genner · · Score: 3, Funny

      We geeks thing wearing a HMD is 'cool', most everybody else things you're a dork.

      So in other words it changes nothing.

    2. Re:Cool == Dorky by tchuladdiass · · Score: 2, Informative

      And there was a point in time when wireless bluetooth headsets looked dorky. They still do, however they have become somewhat accepted.

    3. Re:Cool == Dorky by scheme · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And there was a point in time when wireless bluetooth headsets looked dorky. They still do, however they have become somewhat accepted.

      If they don't look dorky, they make you look like a self important asshole. Or you might get the best of both worlds and look like a dorky, self-important asshole.

      --
      "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
  17. Comfort? by socrplayr813 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Many's the time I wish I had a little more mobility or comfort with my computer.

    Even nice headphones get uncomfortable after long periods. I can't imagine bulky goggles are terribly comfortable...

    --
    The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
  18. no freaking way by Speare · · Score: 5, Informative

    In my last contract, I worked a VR lab with lots of toys. I have tried everything from $60 to $40,000 head mounted displays. In case you're wondering, the $60 option is an NTSC TV fed into a dimly lit monoscopic visor, while for $40,000 you get an amazing 1280x1024 digital LCD stereoscopic per eye at 90Hz. Nowhere in that range is a device that you can wear to use a GUI or a CLI interface for more than about 40 minutes. Even if your eyeball's diopter requirements are calibrated very carefully, even if your visual acuity is excellent, even if the contrast is good and the font sizes are large and beautiful, you will just not be well-served by reading text on a near-range display for more time than that.

    It may be cute in the movies, but there are no options for head mounted displays that will do what you want to do, essentially live in the visor.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
    1. Re:no freaking way by blincoln · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It may be cute in the movies, but there are no options for head mounted displays that will do what you want to do, essentially live in the visor.

      Agreed. VR systems have a lot of challenges to address, but the biggest one IMO is the visual part. You've tried out a much broader range of HMDs than I have, but our experiences are very similar.

      I was disappointed enough that I've more or less discounted that type of interface until someone comes up with a high-resolution direct feed into the optic nerve or the brain itself. As someone who grew up reading cyberpunk fiction, I cannot stress enough how great that disappointment was.

      Outside of true VR, the Cave approach seems like the best one to me, but that won't address the question in TFS because it's not portable or private.

      --
      "...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
  19. Re:Content by Shag · · Score: 3, Funny

    You can probably get the goggles working fine, the problem is finding content for them.

    You mean the prospect of being able to do ls -lf in glorious 3-D color isn't sufficiently enticing?

    --
    Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
  20. Re:What is the actual question here? by smoker2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The point might be that you can use the goggles to project a running linux system. Yes it would be silly if you are sitting at a desk, but a decent wearable computer with goggles could be quite nice. Eye tracking for HID and what else do you need ?
    Network the thing and crowds could be linked together, etc, etc.

  21. Re:Use this instead by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Really, just skip the VR goggles all together; Set up your VR Environment, aka holo-deck if you want to akin it to Star-Trek. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment

    Yeah, but at exterior dimensions of around 35'x25'x13', its hardly portable.

    --
    Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
  22. Re:Content by FLEB · · Score: 3, Funny

    This adds a whole new dimension to the "schizophrenic or Bluetooth" game, watching people frantically waving their arms and ducking and peeking around nothing, mumbling "My files... where the %$#* are my FILES?"

    --
    Information wants to be free.
    Entertainment wants to be paid.
    You just want to be cheap.
  23. It works for me by Plazmid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've been running Nvidia's stereoscopic mode on my display with anaglyph glasses(red-green glasses) and it works fine with games, if you exclude the whole see the game in a nasty brown color. I am also disappointed there aren't any stereodrivers for more productive uses like 3d modelling programs.

  24. Re:Use this instead by netsavior · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, but at exterior dimensions of around 35'x25'x13', its hardly portable.

    If you had a holodeck it would not need to be portable because you would never need to leave...

  25. Re:Use this instead by thousandinone · · Score: 2, Funny

    Not an issue here, as long as the dimensions of Mom's basement exceed those.

  26. Re:Content by genner · · Score: 2, Funny

    This adds a whole new dimension to the "schizophrenic or Bluetooth" game, watching people frantically waving their arms and ducking and peeking around nothing, mumbling "My files... where the %$#* are my FILES?"

    You just discribed the average day at my office,

  27. From an Earlier Time by BigFootApe · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hi,

        Here's some software to read a Mattel Powerglove through the Linux
    serial driver, you must be using a Menelli box to interface to the glove.
    I also wrote a predictive filter to try and eliminate glitches, a TCP-IP
    server-client pair to read data in your application, a posture look-up
    table to recognise hand shapes, and a simple attempt at recognising 6DOF
    movement with vectors and tokenising them into gestures.
        I'm not supporting the software, but I will be hacking around with it
    again after Christmas, so the only condition on using it is to send me
    any fixes, improvements, and ideas on making it better.

    (there is a also an AMI PRO document to go with this stuff, which is
    the project report I wrote for my BSc degree.)

    http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/hardware/drivers/linux-powerglove.README