So the Oculus Rift arrived some time ago. What with conferences and illness, I didn’t really get to play with it until today. I followed all directions, and eventually got the damned thing wired to my 5 yr old Windows 7 machine.
I know, I know.
https://twitter.com/electricarchaeo/status/597783907220742145
I have dual monitors. Dual VGA monitors. My box does not have VGA ports. Or rather, it does but they don’t hook to anything (curse you pimplyfaced Best Buy salesman). So, five years ago, I had to hunt high and low for dvi and display port adaptors. At the time, dvi and dp monitors were more than I had coin for. I tell you this to explain part of this morning shennanigans; hooking the Rift up to the hdmi port upset the delicate balance that keeps my monitors working (seriously – there’s wire loose somewhere, which happened after I had to replace the power supply).
I know, I know.
Anyway, once everything was hooked up, the cool blue light of the Rift’s eyepieces beckoned me to put the thing on. Did I mention I have astigmatism in both eyes?
I know, I know.
Behold – my desktop upside down, and my two monitors no longer in position left and right. They inverted. So all alerts, buttons, windows etc were in the Rift view. I should mention that when I went to download the SDK & the runtime, my antivirus freaked right out about trojans (thank you, 360 total security). False alarm. But the auto-quarantine thing had the effect of buggering up the download, so I had to figure out what was going on there before I could get it all downloaded. Anyway, after much futzing, I got the desktop to display correctly in the Rift, even though it would no longer mirror to my monitors. ‘I can work with this’, I thought.
I know, I know.
When I tried the demo, I started getting all sorts of error messages. After more futzing and googling, I arrived at that point that all of us eventually get to:
…and I reinstalled the bloody sdk, and the runtime. And lo! the demo ran, appearing on my screen. The headtracker appeared to work as well, for on the screen as I moved the Rift around the ceiling of the tuscan villa would appear, then the walls, then the floor… except, not within the bloody Rift itself. No, the Rift was showing an orange ‘trouble’ light.
And then the viewer crashed, and the graphics all buggered up, and… and… I blame my graphics card & its software (whether rightly or wrongly, something’s gonna take the blame). It’s an AMD Radeon HD5570, but yeah, something’s up. And I’ve lost the better part of this morning futzing with this.
Why I’m doing this: I want to do something like what these folks are doing, immersive network viz & navigation.
Anyway, it’s probably time to replace my box and when I do, surely most (all?) of my issues will automagically disappear.
(Well, this issue here is probably the culprit and I need to run in extended desktop mode, but still).
Update: I switched it to extended desktop mode; nothing. Back to normal mode. Then hot damn, the thing works! So I am now fully oculus rift’d.
Let’s do something cool.
Electric Archaeology 