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Linux Compatibility With VR Goggles?
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?"
...they do nothing!
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep bugging Steve to release the Eyetap. AR is way cooler than VR!
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.
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.
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We geeks thing wearing a HMD is 'cool', most everybody else things you're a dork.
So in other words it changes nothing.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.