OpenVR – 3 : Aftermath

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OpenVR – 0 : Story
OpenVR – 1 : Hardware
OpenVR – 2 : Software

For past 3 days, OpenVR received massive public attention. My hosting package couldn’t handle this and went down a few times.

I received a warning email from Hostgator;

Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time. As a result all of your sites have been cached in order to ensure continued performance stability of the server.

So I will be switching to a new hosting as soon as I can, to avoid such problems. I’m considering buying a VPS. I have been recommended to switch to digitalocean, but I haven’t made a final decision yet.

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So what caused all this?

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OpenVR – 2 : Software

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OpenVR – 0 : Story
OpenVR – 1 : Hardware

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So we have an OpenVR headset now. We will need some stereoscopic content to enjoy OpenVR. There isn’t much you can do without setting up some drivers and softwares.

You can watch 3d stereoscopic videos or movies but that will be nowhere near as immersive as a head-tracking enabled 3d game.

So we need “3d”, “head-tracking enabled” games.

Let’s see what options do we have for rendering games as side-by-side 3d;

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OpenVR – 1 : Hardware

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OpenVR – 0 : Story
OpenVR – 2 : Software

In an earlier post, I mentioned story of OpenVR project. I will guide you through building an OpenVR headset, in this post.

OpenVR hardware consists of several parts; electronics, case and lenses.

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Before we begin building an OpenVR, let’s make a list of requirements.

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OpenVR – 0 : Story

5 Replies

OpenVR – 1 : Hardware
OpenVR – 2 : Software

How I got interested in Oculus Rift?

I can’t say I’m a huge gamer. I do enjoy playing games though. But when it comes to innovative *HCI devices, I’m very enthusiastic. That’s how I got really curious about experience offered by Oculus Rift, a total new way to experience reality, in a virtual world.

Curiosity alone was not alone for me to buy a Rift though. So I postponed buying a Rift for some time.

I’m building and flying custom multicopters. I was using a monitor to display camera feed from my quadcopter. It is nowhere near as immersive as flying it with a video glass. So I realized I needed a video glass to fly it *FPV.

FPV glasses cost around 150-300 $ and the highest *FOV is only 40 degrees. Compare that with 110 degrees FOV of Oculus Rift and 300 $ price.

It would be plain stupid to invest in FPV glasses. So it was now clear that I needed a Rift. It could serve me as FPV glasses, Gaming Goggles and for all other cool things you can do with a Rift; like watching a 3D movie.

Maker’s Dilemma : Buy or Build?

As a maker, you’ve got two options to acquire a new gadget. You can just buy it, or you can build it from scratch!

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Why I have been blogging less and less?

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First of all, I have to admit that I feel my writing skills are slowly decaying. I am well aware of it and it is beyond obvious when you look at the increasing interval between my blog posts. That is an upsetting fact.

In recent years, I have gone through some radical characteristic changes. To go through radical changes, first you have to get to know yourself. I knew I had to make some fundamental changes on my vision and life goals to have a satisfying life. As I mentioned earlier, this required taking time for self-observation, introspection. Furthermore, introspection goes hand in hand with introversion.

Time spent for introspection beside the introversion caused by introspection is the perfect recipe for a blog to get more and more silent everyday.

Why introspection has to cause introversion? That is a whole another topic to talk about.

Setting up Kinect-Assisted Java project in Eclipse – Part 2

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In this second article on how to develop kinect assisted applications with java, we will be implementing OpenNI java wrapper into Eclipse and make a simple project for starters.

First add all libraries you use for graphics rendering. Lately I’m familiar with LibGDX for doing graphics in Java so i will be adding its jar files into my project then i will include them in Java Build Path -> Libraries. Anyway i will not go into detail in this part because everybody has their choice of graphics library.

Now, let’s show Eclipse where is our Kinect wrappers and native libraries.
In Eclipse:
1- Click Projects -> Java Build Path -> Libraries
2- Click Add External JARs add select org.OpenNI.jar which is located in “C:Program FilesOpenNISamplesBinRelease”
3- Click Arrow button near Jar file we have just added to expand menu.
4- Double-Click on Native library location and select Jar path which is “C:Program FilesOpenNISamplesBinRelease”

At this stage, we are done with implementing the wrapper. But we need some sample code to test it , right?

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Setting up Kinect-Assisted Java project on Windows – Part 1

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In this article, we are going to setup a java project for kinect assisted software development. Last summer, i worked on kinect and developed a couple of games, a framework and an eclipse plugin allows you to control debugger by moving your hands.

Most time consuming part of kinect-assisted development is just the beginning, where you
have to setup kinect libraries and java wrapper. The rest is plain simple, API is just great. You dont need to code a single line of computer vision stuff, all that is taken care of for you in the background. API features gesture & pose detection and access to 3D coordinate for each joint. API I am talking about is OpenNI, which i chose instead of OpenKinect, because it has a Java Wrapper. But if you are going to use another language i’d recommend OpenKinect. Because OpenKinect also supports motor control.

So let’s start by downloading required drivers & files.

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