Kitely Forums

Can we expect to have a viewer for Google Cardboard, or for other low-cost VR visor, anytime soon?

I doubt you'll see one that connects to an OpenSim backend anytime soon. Low cost VR visors must rely on mobile devices limited graphics capabilities to render objects and a good VR experience requires rendering at least 75 FPS to avoid creating nausea. This means that the rendered scene has to be very optimized and be rendered with a very efficient rendering engine. User generated content (such as that most often present in OpenSim) is hardly ever optimized enough and the SL viewer-derived OpenSim viewers are far from being optimized as well.

Thanks for your comprehensive response, I appreciate.

Some progress is being made: I just read Korolov: "Success! OpenSim on my phone! ... using [the smartphone] as an external monitor and input device. I still need to have a desktop PC running OpenSim itself." http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/0 ... -my-phone/

Hi Angel,

That solution is for rendering the scene on your computer and sending the output to a mobile phone. It still requires a powerful computer to get a sufficient frame rate to reduce nausea and the lack of positional tracking will result in a more nauseating solution than one based on Oculus and other solutions that include positional tracking.

The latest version of Lumiya now supports Google Cardboard under Android Marshmallow and later. So far I've only used it in a very prim-intensive world and I do experience a degree of drift on my low-end mobile phone. However, that can be readily cancelled by looking in the opposite direction. I don't know whether the standard draw settings affect the Cardboard display but there may be some optimisation in order there.

My headset and phone don't support the screen buttons (presumably for voice recording, button press and chat), a problem not limited to Lumiya. Chat displays as an overlay. Bear in mind that Lumiya doesn't replicate the entire experience you get with a desktop viewer.

While I'm not sure I'll spend a lot of time in Lumiya until I can figure out some inworld navigation, it certainly does provide a valuable perspective on some of the history builds I've been doing and tremendous kudos to the author Alina Lyvette for her Android skillz.

(updated with link to review https://modemworld.me/2016/11/25/lumiya ... d-support/)

I've been gone for a bit and missed this. This is exciting! I've seen quite a few VR demos and have always wondered what Opensim and SL worlds would look like with a VR viewer. Time to look around for a super cheap Android phone.

This video seems to show a pretty high frame rate, and ability to walk around, etc.
http://www.lumiyaviewer.com/index.php/screenshots/video