OculusVR - aleslab/Psychtoolbox-3-aleslab-fork GitHub Wiki

OculusVR - How to setup Oculus VR head mounted displays.

Psychtoolbox supports Virtual Reality Head mounted displays,
(VR-HMDs)) from Oculus VR LLC. Currently the Oculus Rift DK1
and Oculus Rift DK2 are supported on the 64-Bit editions of
GNU/Linux, Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows-7 and later, both
under 64-Bit GNU/Octave (Linux and OSX) and 64-Bit Matlab (all
systems).

In order to use such a HMD you need to install the Oculus VR
runtime version 0.5.0.1 (-beta) for your operating system.
This will not work with earlier or later versions of the runtime!

https://developer.oculus.com/downloads

You must select "Platform: PC" and the version as "0.5.0.1-beta"
in the drop down menus. Then download the "Oculus Runtime for OSX",
"Oculus Runtime for Windows", or "Oculus SDK for Linux (experimental)"
and follow the installation and setup instructions contained in those
installers / SDKs.

Once installed according to instructions, and the HMD properly
connected via HDMI video and the USB ports for headset and tracking
camera (in case of Rift DK2), Psychtoolbox should detect the HMD and
make use of it.

On Windows this works with "Extended Desktop" mode. On Linux it
works on a regular dual display setup, but for best performance
and timing you should set up a separate X-Screen for the Rift display.
The Psychtoolbox/PsychHardware/LinuxX11ExampleXorgConfs subfolder
contains example xorg.conf files for setting up dual-X-screen setups
for Linux, with the GUI on X-Screen 0 and the Rift or other displays
on X-Screen 1. You'll need to adapt the example file to your specific
setup. Running without a desktop compositor or desktop compositor
disabled may give another performance boost on Linux with not so high
end cards.

Our current experience shows that the Rift DK2 works best for more
complex 3D VR scenes on Linux or Windows. Performance on OSX was much
lower. With low complexity scenes all systems should be ok.

If you want to write portable code that makes use of VR headsets, and
not only of the Oculus Rift, but also future headsets from Oculus or
from other vendors, then use only the functions of the PsychVRHMD()
driver. It is expected to work also on future HMDs and HMDs of other
vendors, once they become available. For use of Oculus Rift specific
features you may need to use the PsychOculusVR() driver directly, but
for most usage scenarios that should not be neccessary.

Before use of the HMD, please read the "Health and safety instructions"
carefully. They are included in the Psychtoolbox/PsychDocumentation/
folder as file Oculus_Health_and_Safety_Warnings.pdf. This file is
provided as part of the Oculus SDK runtime and included here for
your convenience.

The Oculus Rift runtime also comes with a setup tool named "RiftConfigUtil"
that allows to adapt the rendering of stimuli to the properties of your
subject, e.g. the interpupillary distance between both eyes.

VRHMDDemo - Shows how to use a HMD as a regular monoscopic display
monitor via VRHMDDemo1(0), or as a stereoscopic display
via VRHMDDemo1(1) or VRHMDDemo. As you can see, only one
line of code is needed to setup a single HMD properly.
Other than that, mono and stereo stimulus presentation is
done like in any other mono or stereo Psychtoolbox script.

Various PTB stereo demos demonstrate use of HMDs, e.g, ImagingStereoDemo(103)
for a random dot stereo display, ImagingStereoMoviePlayer(moviefile, 103) for
playback of stereoscopic movies.

The most interesting use is of course making use of the HMDs head tracking
to render complex 3D stimuli via OpenGL which can be navigated by the subjects
head movements: Enabling an existing 3D stereoscopic script to use the HMD
and make use of head tracking is a task that requires only a few more lines
of code and can be accomplished in less than 15 minutes. The following demos
demonstrate this use of the HMD: MorphDemo for rendering a morphing 3D object,
SuperShapeDemo for rendering a complex organic "SuperShape", VRHMDDemo1 for
rendering of the spinning Utah teapot in 3D, with head movement and mouse
control of observer location and looking direction. VRHMDDemo1 also shows
a few optimizations to get best performance for more complex scenes.

More such demos will follow in the future.

If you want to immerse your subjects in realistic 3D worlds, you can
do this by use of the Horde3DForPsychtoolbox toolbox which allows you
to use the Horde3D graphics engine with Psychtoolbox. That toolbox also
supports VR HMDs, as demonstrated in the demo named "HordeVRHMDDemo1",
which immerses you in a complex 3D VR scene and allows you to navigate
it via mouse movements and head movements.

You can get the Horde3DForPsychtoolbox addon toolkit from GitHub as
git checkout or as a downloadable zip file:

https://github.com/kleinerm/[Horde3DForPsychtoolbox](Horde3DForPsychtoolbox)

More such demos for full VR environments as part of Horde will follow
in the future.

Enjoy your immersion into new (virtual) worlds!