Linux Compatibility With VR Goggles? 170
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?"
My name is Kent Mcclure (Score:5, 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.
Contact the company? (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.
Depends on what you want. (Score:5, Informative)
Any sort of OMG Stereoscopic Vision! drivers, though, will probably be useless in Linux. Those guys [prnewswire.com] 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.
Re:VGA Connection (Score:3, Informative)
Well, 800x600 is a little different when the screen is literally an inch from your eyeball.
Should be Standard VGA, No? (Score:3, Informative)
There's the Z800 (Score:5, Informative)
I wrote a linux kernel driver for the eMagin z800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z800_3DVisor [wikipedia.org] ) HMD available here: http://antimass.org/z800/ [antimass.org]
I will be updating it over the holidays to the latest kernel release as I've finally got some time to work on it.
Re:My name is Kent Mcclure (Score:4, 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.
Re:Should be Standard VGA, No? (Score:3, 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.
My name is Kent Mcclure.... (Score:2, Informative)
VR Lab (Score:5, 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.
Cool == Dorky (Score:3, 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*
Re:VR goggles, eh? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.myvu.com/Myvu-Crystal-Standard-Universal-P85C24.aspx [myvu.com]
Re:Problem with VR glasses (Score:3, Informative)
no freaking way (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.
Re:Cool == Dorky (Score:3, Informative)
And there was a point in time when wireless bluetooth headsets looked dorky. They still do, however they have become somewhat accepted.
Re:Should be Standard VGA, No? (Score:4, 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.
From an Earlier Time (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/hardware/drivers/linux-powerglove.README