Do you think oculus rift will support motion simulators?

Hi, this is what I want to do. What set-up and rig did you use. Is the oculus camera on or off your rig?
Thanks, Bruce

Valve is going to start shipping dev kits for the vive before the end of the month. I was over at their offices last week testing their stuff and left feeling like the next 2 years of VR will be absolutely dominated by Vive.

The lighthouse tracking is going to be open source, and you can attach the sensors to anything you want to position/rotation of in your VR experience, amazingly accurate.


I recorded my boss testing it:

I'll ask if I get the opportunity again, my co-worker was back there today, I'd have had him ask. The lighthouse stuff has 2 boxes you put at opposite ends of the room and each box has 2 lasers that sweep the room, one horizontally, one vertically. (looked like IR but they kept saying laser)

The headset and 2 controllers have sensors that the lasers can detect, and relay the pitch, yaw, roll, from each, as well as the exact position in 3d space. Only 1 lighthouse box needs to be in range.

He said the lighthouse stuff is going to allow you to put sensors on anything you want to track orientation of in 3d space. So you could put one on your motion chair, and track it's orientation independently from everything else.

The vive has smaller pixels, if you focus you can see the pixels but they're less than 1/4 the dk2 size, feels a lot better, but very similar to dk2 as far as view size, the lenses are a bit larger and probably easier to wear with glasses. It was completely smooth, no judder. There's also potential for using more than 1 gpu coming very soon........

One of my biggest complaints with Oculus all the way back to dk1 was that they weren't interested in adding motion controllers, so for our rift experiences we've used kinect v1 and v2 for body tracking, razer hydras, wiimotes, leap motion for hands, sixsense stem, and it's always been a sore spot to have to integrate multiple 3rd party sdks with oculus with whatever you're developing, the hydras like to skitz out, leap motion is better than it was a year ago but still meh. Sixsense's supply isn't reliable. Pre orders have been happening for more than a year. And Oculus to my knowledge still isn't considering controllers.

It's a huge impact to be able to reach out and poke stuff, turn stuff, grab stuff, throw stuff, etc. in VR and opens a lot more possibilities for use cases.

Hi guys, I have been mucking around with DK2 with motion for a while now - if you mount the cam to your frame it's completely fine. I have no idea why a graphics driver would "need to support" motion, they dont already for trip-screen, so why would Oculus? Don't tell me about seat-movers they are so flawed.

I have tried out SimTools software quite a bit on Motion stuff, and Dirt and iRacing are AWESOME in VR+Motion!! Euro trucks is pretty good too.

I usually just use Unity to make stuff, i'm happy to make a plugin for SimTools software (if someone can send me a link explaining how, or just what outputs I should feed it) and I'll happily make someone a driving VR+Motion demo. Let me know if you want to try it out in Sydney any time in the next month or so

I'm slightly concerned that "motion cancellation" would actually make me feel sick! Because it's the dislocation between movement perceived by the ears, and what is seen in the vision that makes me ill! If you had motion cancellation then the simulator would move, but your horizon view wouldn't. And it might make you (at least me) ill.

In racing when you corner, and the sim pitches over to simulate the lateral g, you instinctively move your head to counter, so I wonder what effect the motion cancelling would have then?
Has anyone experimented and tried it?

I know Palmer et all, are keen to ensure that the VR experience doesn't make you sick! So although I'm keen to try motion cancellation for better simulation of g forces, I'm glad My simulator is mostly wipe clean for the same reason!

The worst experience I've had so far with VR and motion sickness was trying to play Half Life, whilst seated. And simply trying to move forwards. View zooming and accelerating forwards, but ears saying "I'm not moving". This is all using the DK2 of course.

I'm just waiting for the first lawsuit from someone who's cat has gone crazy trying to chase those laser beams!

Related though: Now oculus has announced the "touch" controllers, which may even ship with a second camera, and the fact that the oculus CV1 version will support "constellation" tracking of more than just the headset mounted ir led's. It may be that we would be able to mount some kind of IR led array to the simulator and have the camera track that for motion cancellation. The issue then would be where to stick it.
I wonder if perhaps a second set of IR leds could simply be worn on the chest of the person in the simulator. Possibly on the seat belt harness. To dislocate between the head and the body.

I can see myself sticking a wii light bar to my shoulders or something! Now I have oculus, I've given up caring what I look like wearing the thing! Haha!

Or perhaps you could just stick one of the touch controllers to the sim, and have oculus track that for motion cancellation. (same with one of the hand held controllers for the Vive actually) You could just use the motion data from one of the controllers.

If oculus decided to sell a second set of IR leds I'd probably overspend buying it!

Having actually tried a DK2 mounted to a five axis motion platform, the issue is with very fast movements of the rig causing oscillation of the DK2 tracking camera, which basically causes the camera to lose sync with the headset. One way around this is mounting the tracking camera off the rig, unfortunately if you do this then the actual motion of the rig is reflected in the DK2 which can sometimes be off-putting. The Motion Cancellation that is being talked about above is about removing this 'unwanted' motion by tracking the rig and subtracting that motion from the real game VR motion. From my experience if you get this right it actually reduces motion sickness as the motion of the rig matches what you see. Hope this explanation helps.
As I don't expect this Motion Cancellation issue to be sorted out any time soon, for my new Sim I have developed a mounting system that isolates the camera from these high frequency oscillation's, allowing it to be mounted back on the rig.

Ooh! I'd be interested in seeing your isolation system for that camera! I'm going off rig at the moment, because, as you say the camera vibrations, play havoc with tracking. Literally throwing you out of the car in both assetto corsa and Project Cars. If the camera was on the rig, it would help.

Wierdly it seems worse using the 6.0.1 runtime than it did with the version 5 runtime.
Perhaps there are more updates with the newer runtime, and it catches the vibrations more? Who knows!

I wonder if a Microphone anti vibration holder would do the trick when the camera is mounted to the rig. Around $11 on amazon. Something like these. Um, can't create a link yet. search for Microphone Vibration Suspension Diameter Condenser

Got to check out the Oculus CV1 and touch controllers. They will take pre orders on the touches when you order a CV1 but they won't be out till second half of 2016. CV1 is very nice though, big improvement over dk2.

Unfortunately the htc vive's lighthouses don't like vibration at all, either. One cool thing with the lighthouses is they're not connected to the computer, just power outlets, they just blindly project a grid into the room. You also can just use 1 lighthouse in front of you if you're not ever going to turn a full 180' away from it. And the best thing about the vive is it runs at 90fps+ even in Unity, dk2 gives 75fps max in same project, which really makes a huge difference.

I think it's more likely to find a smooth way to rotate the oculus tracking camera or vive lighthouse, than for either company to support (more work for them on tight deadlines as is) overriding the tracking. Rotating the lighthouse or oculus tracking camera would rotate the world in game automatically, just need to figure out a way to do it smoothly...

I have my DK2 camera mounted above my camera and it works really well with motion.

^ It was only 1 case for us that caused it during setup at a trade show, when someone drilled on the wall on the opposite side of one of the lighthouses it fritzed while the drill was running from the vibration.

Has anyone looked into using gimbals or vibration dampers to mount the camera to the rig? Something like a steadicam might work for reducing vibrations.
I'm still not decided as to which VR platform I'll be buying, but if one of them has a generic motion cancellation solution that'd be awesome.

Out of curiosity how much movement does your rig have? I'm planning on +/- 10 degrees in either direction (that's the most I can reasonably get with the motors at my disposal).
If I can get away with mounting the camera off-rig that would definitely be easier.
What about mounting the camera on a soft material that would absorb/damp the small vibrations before they can reach the camera? Or even attaching weights to the camera in conjunction to soft mounting points would help.
I do a lot of skiing, and the main way that people get smooth footage without breaking the bank is attaching their GoPros to large metal weights (it acts as a pretty good DIY steadicam)