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?"

Comments

The VR Goggles...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they do nothing!

VR goggles, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:VR goggles, eh?

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:VR goggles, eh?

[JWSmythe]

    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}

My name is Kent Mcclure

[binarylarry]

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.

Re:My name is Kent Mcclure

[YourExperiment]

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?"

Re:My name is Kent Mcclure

[Arancaytar]

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.

Cool

[bperkins]

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.

Depends on what you want.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

There's the Z800

[zilt]

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.

Eyetap...

[GenP]

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

VR Lab

[blueg3]

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.

no freaking way

[Speare]

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.