Oculus Rift Exploratory Committee

Captain Dabaw is anxiously waiting for the troops to assemble. Vivian has been working on the treats and I’ve been putting together a kind of a program. Plus I have multiple demos ready for the riftrrs.

I have a game idea and I’m going to show the video below. We will also discuss our family of geeks podcast which will cover the rift and other related to geeks material.

The free unity now supports Oculus Rift with Beta 0.4.4. I just finished installing it and ran the Tuscany demo. Yayyy!

This video shows how to put a cube on a plane and view it and walk around it using the Unity keyboard and mouse controls the same as Tuscany. There really aren't many steps and I plan on doing this exact demo as my first development experience with the rift.

For navigating through 4 space I won't be able to use the walk around functions but the 3d head movement is already there. So I will probably do some 3d renders of 4d geometric objects first without 4d navigation to get my feet on the ground.

It's a big day for me and my rift. I can see a path in front of me toolwise and workflow wise.

Thanks,

We had demos and discussions centered around "A Chair In A Room" and "Beneath". Some of the ideas floated were:

Sarah wanted to visit actual places with the rift. So instead of an imagined setting you get to gawk at the Taj Mahal, etc.

Devin and I wanted to view educational programs about nature, space, etc. I had been trying to download "From Ashes" in time for the meeting. I think this would have given us a jumping off place for this discussion.

We also wanted less spooky and gut wrenching and more comforting environments. This could be because of our limited demo set at present but I do think the current library leans that way.

"A Chair In A Room" is kind of slow paced. Megan pointed out that horror/scary stuff is slow paced on purpose. She also said with regards to the point just above that dark shadowy horror setting are easier to code than bright colorful settings.

When I ran "Beneath" I got so absorbed that I felt the inertia on the tight turns even though I knew I was sitting in a chair. Sarah mentioned that the tight turns took her out of the action because she was just sitting in a chair when the cart leaned.

Besides the limited demo set I'm not sure that we have the head motion sensor working right yet. You can look around and everything but when we moved the system we lost the blue light and sometimes we get headset out of range messages. This really ruins the immersion.

Signing out,

Begin log of Oculus Rift Exploratory Committee meeting.

Hey, we had a meeting. We looked at the DK2 rift but it wasn't working yet. We discussed the navigation system for my 4d flying saucer. Kier and Megan had great gamers input on acceleration and we simplifed it to:

w - accelerate forward

release w - cruise at speed

s - accelerate backward/decelerate

release s - cruise at speed

spacebar - stop

Acceleration/deceleration is constant. Speed grows exponentially. This simplification over controlling rate of acceleration is acceptable and will make the saucer much easier to navigate.

Now I think I've got this right. Up arrow/down arrow rotates around the XW plane. Left arrow/right arrow rotates around the YW plane. A/D rotates around the ZW plane. Anyway, the keystrokes are great but I have to check the geometry and the pilots intuition.

So you can fly the saucer from the keyboard with your left hand on A,S,D,W and your right hand on the cursor keys.

Kier also pointed out that there are 3d and 4d aspects to the visualization.

4d - The flying saucer travels in 4d space projecting the current view onto the 3d viewscreen as viewed through the rift.

3d - When you turn your head you are changing the camera angle in the 3d rendered space as viewed through the rift.

We also brainstormed 3d geometric puzzle games and as brainstorming goes branched out into a lot of other cool game concepts/rewrites.

End captain's log

ELDERS REACT TO OCULUS RIFT