Category: News-Opinion

On July 1st, I blogged about the new Oculus Rift project viewer designed to support both the DK-2 and CV-1. The release, coming almost two years after the initial project viewer was made available, had been long anticipated among Oculus Rift HMD users in SL, and so the response was initially enthusiastic in terms of people downloading  it.

Unfortunately, as I subsequently reported, thanks to feedback from TTech, Ai Austin, Rai Fargis – who raised BUG-20130 on the viewer (still open at the time of writing, although that may change) – and others, the new project viewer had more than a few issues with it, and was seen as something of a step back in terms of general usability.

Now it seems that the Lab have – for the foreseeable future, at least – decided to cut their losses in developing Second Life viewer support for Oculus Rift. Posting in the Oculus CV-1 forum thread, Oz Linden announced:

Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.

By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.

We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.

We want to prioritise our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).

We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.

Providing support for high-end HMDs within Second Life was always going to be problematic; most of the content found in-world is unoptimised (and our avatars even more so), so producing the means by which the viewer could comfortably meet the levels of performance required for such HMDs, such as a consistent frame rate of at least 75 fps (DK-2) or 90 fps (CV-1), was always going to be doubtful.

However, the Lab has remained reasonably bullish through about trying to offer an acceptable level of HMD support within Second Life – albeit it with caveats. For example, speaking at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday July 1st and just ahead of the Oculus Rift project viewer appearing, Oz said that offering HTC Vive support at some point for Second Life was something the Lab  “would like to be able to do”.

So what went wrong?

Well, we don’t actually know. Interestingly, most of the issues experienced with the new project viewer weren’t performance related, but focused on general usability: as UI problems, rendering issues, image resolution problems, etc., all of which had been acceptable on the previous release of the Oculus rift project viewer. Whether these point to something being fundamentally wrong with the viewer build, or whether there have been some intrinsic changes to the Oculus SDK software (the latest version of the viewer have leapt forward significantly in SDK support when compared to the last viewer)  which are not limiting options for integrating it into the viewer is hard to say.

All we do know is that from Oz’s forum comment, it would seem that fixing the problems which have been encountered would seem to be a non-trivial task – and once of potentially questionable value when compared to the possible return in terms of benefits to a broader cross-section of users other SL improvement initiatives might bring.

Does this mean the end of all attempts to provide HMD support in Second Life?

Again, that’s hard to say. In the short to medium term, I’d say most likely it does insofar as the Lab is concerned, given the general thrust of Oz’s comment. but that doesn’t mean a third-party developer might not be sufficiently motivated to at least take up the challenge and see how far they can get. Longer term, however, the door might not be so firmly closed.

HMD technology is still in its infancy. so who knows what might come down the road in a couple of years time, and how it might influence the Lab’s thinking with regards to Second Life? Time ell tell on that one.

With thanks to Baz DeSantis for the nudge.

Update: July 8th: Linden Lab has suspended viewer support for the Oculus Rift. This article has been updated accordingly, notably with strikethroughs on links which are no longer valid.t.

On July 2nd, I posted about the release of the latest Oculus Rift project viewer, version 4.1.0.317313. As I’m actually Riftless, I could do little more than take a surface poke at the viewer and leave it to others to have a more detailed look – and they have done so, and found things to be less than favourable.

Ai Austin / Austin Tate is perhaps best placed in terms of overall feedback having gone through using an Oculus Rift HMD with the new viewer in several scenarios, all of which he has documented in his own blog, some of his initial finding having been reported in the comments following my original article. The problems he’s encountered include:

• In all cases and with all graphics settings tried, the HMD view is over bright and washed out pastel in colour. He also notes the Pixel Luminance Overdrive setting, which had been present in earlier versions of the Rift project viewer is now absent
• A failure to show any objects, wither in-world or attached to an avatar, with full or partial transparency when in HMD Mode (so, avatar hair, for example will not render). AI found that disabling Atmospheric Shaders in the viewer resolved this – but is not entirely a desirable solution
• The image resolution in the HMD is low and jagged, and altering the viewer’s graphics settings apparently has no impact
• Numerous UI-related issues in HMD mode, including: UI elements in fixed positions which cannot be changed via viewer settings; object and avatar labels and interaction icons fail to show; mouse pointer fails to display
  
• Additional visual and display issues.

His experience mirrors that of other Rift users, including TTech (who also commented on this blog), and a number of users who have tried this 4.1.0 release of the viewer and have commented on the Oculus Rift forum thread ( see feedback commencing with this message onwards).

Commenting on the viewer at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, July 5th, Oz Linden said:

At this point, I don’t have any real comment.  It’s a Project Viewer, and one explicitly labelled Experimental at that… the point is for people to try it and let us know what they find out.

To help let the Lab know what people find out in using the viewer, I’d like to point to a bug report – BUG-20130 – raised by Rai Fargis.

While I am flattered that staff at the Lab do read this blog, if you are experimenting / trying the new Oculus Rift project viewer and experience specific issues, please add them to bug report rather than documenting them in the comments following this article (general feedback here is welcome, obviously). Doing so, and including with information on your system set-up, relevant log files, etc., guarantees your feedback is seen and recorded by the Lab, encouraging them to investigate issues.

When reporting problems, one thing to keep in mind is that this version has leapt forward several iterations in terms of the Oculus SDK; therefore comparisons with earlier versions of the viewer may not be helpful (outside of possibly pointing to removed options which proved useful in dealing with specific issues in the past). Rather, specifics of issues encountered with this version will offer a better means for the Lab to start / continue investigations.

At the moment, viewers operating in HMD mode have no means to tell the simulator they are doing so. Therefore, the Lab doesn’t have a means of accurately determining the numbers of people using Rift HMDs – and metric which could be useful in the future; as such, it is something which may change with a future update to the viewer.

With thanks to Ai Austin, TTech, Rai Fargis, and Jeanette Doobie

Update: July 8th: Linden Lab has suspended viewer support for the Oculus Rift. This article has been updated accordingly, notably with strikethroughs on links which are no longer valid.

Update July 5th: Rai Fargis has raised a JIRA – BUG-20130 – where specific issues with this viewer can be recorded for the direct attention of l,inden Lab. Many thanks to Rai for doing so, and to Ai Austin for poking me with the JIRA number. please also refer to my follow-up article on his project viewer

Update July 3rd: Those with Oculus HMDs are reporting significant issues with this update to the viewer via Twitter, the SL forums and YouTube, with some of the problems also being added as comments to the end of this article. Any specific, reproducible issues (allowing for the apparent quantity of problems being encountered) should be reported to the Lab via the LL JIRA, if possible. 

On Friday, July 1st, 2016, Linden Lab released the much-anticipated update to the Oculus Rift project viewer.

Version 4.1.0.317313 of the viewer is a Windows only build, for a very specific reason, as all VR followers should be aware, and as explained in the headline comments in the release notes:

The SDK from Oculus Rift does not support anything but Windows, so the other platforms are not supported for use with an Oculus Rift.

This update means the project viewer should now support both the Oculus DK 2.0 and the new consumer version of the headset, the CV-1. Note, however, that it is not intended to support the HTC Vive as well (see below).

In addition, the update brings the viewer up-to-date with all viewer releases through to the Lab’s current release code base, and so includes the plethora of updates over the last two years, up to and including Avatar Complexity and graphics presets.

As with the previous version of the viewer, the Oculus Rift setting panel can be accessed via Preferences > Move & View. There is also an Advanced HMD menu option in the viewer’s Advanced menu, but I’ve no idea what this does (I don’t have an Oculus Rift of my own), and a toolbar button is available for those wishing to toggle in / out of the viewer’s “Rift mode”,  which can also be done by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-D (note that using either of these options will generate an on-screen error message if a Rift headset is not connected to your PC).

The release notes for the viewer contain a set of tips designed to help optimise the viewer’s performance (unchanged from the previous release of the viewer), as well as listing the core key controls:

• Enter HMD mode – CTRL + SHIFT + D
• Align to look – Q
• Center Mouse Pointer – Z
• Action key – X
• Camera Mode – M (Press multiple times to cycle through 3rd Person, HMD Mouse look, and 1st Person modes)
• Hide UI – CTRL+SHIFT+U

Performance

As has been repeatedly indicated by the Lab (e.g. the June 2016 Meet the Lindens chat with Ebbe Altberg), the nature of Second Life, where much of the in-world content (including avatars) has not been optimised for delivery at very high frame rates, the viewer is unlikely to deliver optimal Oculus Rift performance (e.g. 75 fps at all times for the DK-2 and 90 fps for the CV-1).  It should, however, offer a “comfortable” level of performance sufficient enough for people to enjoy the immersive experience presented by the headset reasonably well.

Future Intent and Vive Support

Going forward, the Lab plans to progress Oculus support through project and RC status and integrate it into the release viewer. There are no plans to offer a specific “Oculus Rift flavour” version of the viewer that will be maintained alongside a “non-Oculus Rift” version.

Speaking at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday July 1st, Oz Linden indicated that providing support for the HTC Vive in Second Life is something the Lab “would like to be able to do”, but it is not something on the horizon at present. If and / or when the Lab might offer Vive support in SL, and how far that support might go (e.g. will it include support for using the Vive’s room sensors with SL) is an open question at this point is time.

Related Links

• Second Life Alternate Viewers wiki page
• Oculus Rift version 4.1.0.317313 release notes