Draxtor and I have just finished an interview with Widely Linden, a senior producer at Linden Lab who works on the Oculus Rift implementation.
Only yesterday Linden Lab announced that their Oculus Rift viewer was ready for Beta testing and today Oculus VR let know that their headsets are now officially out of stock.
So, plenty to talk about!
You can hear the interview tomorrow in the Drax files radio hour but I couldn’t wait to share some of what was talked about.
- Viewer has full integration.
“We support the entire Second Life experience and that includes building, chatting, every bit of UI (User Interface) is accessible when you’re in the Oculus Rift.” - There is no solution (yet) for not being able to see your keyboard, you may want to consider using voice chat more often or get better at typing blind.
There isn’t a virtual keyboard at the moment, I suggested this a while ago and hope that they are going to experiment with this option as not everybody is able to touch type. - The present SL UI has been projected “onto a 3 dimensional space that follows you and hovers in front of you and you can completely customize it “.
- It works in a similar manner to the huds inside the helmet of Tony Stark in the movie Ironman.
- Development started at the end of August and it worked pretty quickly in a very basic way but then they decided that the viewer would have to be able to offer everything the regular viewers offer as well.
“It became very clear to us that we have to make this work and we weren’t just going to slap dash something together and get it out there just to be first.
We wanted to do it right.” - “People who are familiar and comfortable with the Second Life UI and how Second Life works, will take to this no problem. There is not much of any kind of a new learning curve for them to get over. You’re in and running if you have a Rift.”
- The viewer supports a third person view, a first person view and mouselook mode.
Third person is as we’re used to having in the regular SL viewer.
In “mouselook HMD mode” (HMD = head mounted display), the mouse no longer affects your camera view, buttons still work, etc. Your head direction will steer your avatar.
First person mode has the camera where your head is, the UI is visible on demand and you have a cursor.
In this mode where you look will not change the direction your avatar is going.
It is like walking around in the real world. - People may still experience some nausea while using the Oculus in Second Life, but Widely Linden reminds us that a lot of people say that the next version of the Rift is already makes the ‘sea sickness’ a lot less and most people attribute it to the original developers kit.
- Beta viewer supports the Mac.
- A destination guide list has been created of places that look fantastic with the Oculus Rift.
- “Second Life is particularly well suited for the Rift.”
- “In a way Second Life was build with this hardware in mind, just the hardware didn’t exist yet.”
I’ll end with my own conclusion;
Second Life & Oculus Rift, meant to be together, a marriage made in heaven.
Please make sure you listen to the actual interview on the Drax files radio hour tomorrow.
The Oculus Rift Test area in 1920s Berlin
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
Quite honestly, if Epson decided to redesign its Moverio BT-100 to be an Oculus Rift competitor by ditching the crappy Android multimedia player and upping the resolution of its built-in projectors from qHD (960×540) to full HD (1920×1080), it would blow Oculus Rift out of the water, because (a) the design of the Moverio successfully addresses the vertigo problem, (b) it (hopefully) allows you to have some limited view of your keyboard. Although, really, there’s no substitute for touch typing.
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True but if you want immersion, you don’t want to see the keyboard.
I think there are inworld alternatives, such as, of course, using voice chat, but also a virtual keyboard, like we use on mobile devices and in SLGo.
If you want to type something, you make a gesture, look somewhere, touch some button, whatever, and your avatar will get a keyboard in front of them that you can then type on with your cursor in perhaps one day even by typing in the air while wearing gloves or using a leap motion type of device.
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Typing in the air, as well as “laser keyboards” (keyboards projected on the desk) is a piss-poor solution, because it offers zero sonic and tactile feedback to the typist. They’re really a non-starter and it’s no wonder they never caught on. FYI, at the office we use IBM Model M keyboards (the real, US-made ones), exactly for their precise, tactile feel and their durability.
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I don’t know, I think you can get used to anything.
But I hope to get my hands on the leap motion soon and I hope to try out something like typing with it, if that is possible.
Either way, I prefer to not see anything of RL while in SL.
I also think that voice chat will become a lot more common in SL when the rift comes.
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Voice chat will not become more common, because most people (myself included) think of it as a very obnoxious feature. Every time I’m at a venue where many people talk in voice, it’s just so annoying that I soon end up disabling voice. Plus, Vivox is riddled with security holes and there’s no way this company will ever be bothered to plug them. So, why would I open myself to all sort of security issues? Already, someone can stalk you by teleporting to where you teleported out of a region simply because you had voice enabled (SEC-1376). And LL can’t fix it, because it’s a Vivox exploit (and a very old one, at that – but Vivox has not bothered to resolve the issue). So, for voice… Thanks, but no thanks.
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True, voice chat will have to improve and change a lot first, but it does add a lot to the experience and makes chatting a lot easier.
Either way, a solution for chatting without keyboard has to be found for those of us who cant type blind.
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Any attempts to make voice chat more mainstream are potential drama generators (besides the fact that Vivox is one of the worst security sieves in the world, down there with Internet Explorer 5). Need I dig the reasons up from the memory hole?
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I have an Oculus Rift, and can see my REAL keyboard by simply moving my eyes downward. The dev kit has mesh ventilation along the bottom and top and I can see through it with very little effort. The negative part is that it takes me out of the simulation.
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That is interesting, I don’t remember the mesh ventilation when I tried the Rift.
But that could be an option.
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Also,the Moverio has headphones on it. So, with a good redesign, it’d be a much, much better alternative to the Rift.
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The main reason the Oculus doesn’t have headphones is because they feel that games want to use their own as they have very specific tastes.
And they also would want a microphone and such.
I don’t mind not having headphones in the rift.
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You may not mind, but others could think of it as an unwelcome omission that would make an already bulky and unwieldy system even more of a pain.
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Very interesting stuff, Jo.
@Mona, did you see videos on the Avegant Glyph? I think it’s rather interesting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoO5AJ-Uuv-5-s2gScOaRfQ
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Just looked at these glasses you spoke of and quite honestly I don’t see how they could even be a comparitable competitor to the OR. The FOV is far to small to give any kind of perception of being there. The point of actual VR is to give a sense of presence, and that would not happen using a pair of glasses that you can see your keyboard with.
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From my point of view having walked, flown and sailed with a OR, a virtual keyboard is a bad idea. An OR already is a pain to use because of cabling, resolution and UI making lifting the OR frequently over a long period of time. Perhaps voice to text and gesture use will suffice for casual phrases.
After so many months using David’s viewer I am curious why he is not interviewed or quoted?
Still odd to me the busiest OR commenters pro or con don’t use the device.
I fear that the dev team at LL will get so device substitution oriented that they will lose sight of the goal which is immersion.
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Voice to chat would be ideal and a great alternative to a keyboard.
Especially if you could also use it to do stuff and as a building tool.
Something I would absolutely look into if I was on the team.
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I was just going to say something about voice to text, but you beat me to it 🙂 I have done fairly well at toggling modes so I can chat in between Rifting, but that gets old quickly. I, too, am one of those who only uses voice when absolutely necessary. Voice to text seems to be one of the more immediate options, but if it’s anything like my iPhone, there will always need editing if one doesn’t have a perfect software-recognizable voice.
What we need are some kind of finger sensors (using stickers, gloves, or UV nail polish?) which would allow for accurate, hopefully lag-free use of a virtual keyboard. Anything other than this, Wii controllers or other joysticks are great for movement, but no fun for typing.. like picking letters one at a time w/ a remote. Ugh.
As for the leap.. it’s pretty neat-o, but I have yet to figure how it could be efficient for typing- same as above thoughts. However, the Leap could be helpful for gesture shortcuts…
Just my thoughts for today. Now… I wait ever-so-impatiently for LL to tell me I’ve been accepted to play w/ the new beta viewer 🙂
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I think that the ideal VR situation, one where we will be heading towards eventually, is one where we need as few gadgets as possible.
So in stead of controllers, or suits or gloves or whatever, we will just wear something in front of our eyes and our entire body movement is scanned like with the Kinect or leap motion type of devices.
We don’t want VR rooms, contraptions, or other wearable stuff.
The less we need, the better.
And as we’re still at the very beginning of this VR revolution, I bet that in a few years we will look back at all the stuff we’re using now and laugh at how primitive it was.
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I use voice commands all the time with my iPhone, and would love to see voice commands get enabled in a VR platform. For people like Mona, who don’t want to use voice in world, there could be an option to turn off in-world voice for communication — just have it as way to access menus, etc… Or to create text messages. For example, right now, I can tell my iphone “Text mom I will call you later” and it will automatically generate the text message and send it off. You can do the same in world: “Local chat Hi my name is Maria”.
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Exactly, in SL where so many people for so many reasons sometimes don’t want to use their rl voice, this would be a fantastic option.
Not to mention that it could break barriers for those who have trouble typing or are even handicapped in such a way that they simply can’t.
Personally I don’t mind using voice in SL and will probably use it more often if I start using the Rift.
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The voice to text software apps, to my knowledge are there right now and trainable. Trainability takes care of any concern about dialects, accents and inflections. I wouldn’t be surprised if a package suitable for Second Life or OpenSim is available now.
Maria ??
(PS: Bri Hasp here– good to see you from our early years in OpenSim)
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I have seen the page LL did on Dragon I am clueless how current that is.. certainly Widely Linden would want the minor problems posted fixed.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Dragon
I’ll dig into Microsoft’s Ease of Access, and Windows Speech Recognition.
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There should be a virtual keyboard because the “voice only” option is bad for at least two reasons :
1) Impaired people. There are certainly deaf and/or dumb people among the residents, and there only way to communicate with others on Second Life is the keyboard.
2) The interest of Second Life is also to meet people from other countries, and keyboard allow that with the help of translator scripts. Without forgetting that english is the main language of Second Life, and that not everybody speaks it.
Not including a virtual keyboard in the Oculus Rift viewer would deprive these people, and perhaps other ones, of this immersive experience.
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I agree, the virtual keyboard should be an option, but not the only one.
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