Oculus Rift DK2 + gamepad controller

[rdkirkden]

I was unhappy that a slight feeling of nausea remained when using the gamepad to rotate the view, even after optimising the transport’s rotation settings in Vizconnect, so I tried updating my version of Vizard to 5.7 and my Oculus Rift SDK to 1.16. This made absolutely no difference. However, it did affect a couple of other things…

1) It greatly decreased the degree to which the avatar bounced off objects in the environment when colliding with them. This was only true when using the Vizard 5.5 version of the ‘view_collision’ script, not when using the Vizard 5.7 version. As with most things in Vizard, I have no understanding of this, but at any rate it was fortuitous.

2) The view that appeared on the desktop monitor became a stereo view, instead of the mono view that I had before. This was an unwanted change. I managed to get the mono view back by adapting some code that I found in another thread (http://forum.worldviz.com/showthread...ght=vizconnect). I added the following lines of code to my main Vizard program:

hmd = vizconnect.getRawDisplayDict()['main_display'].displayNode
hmd.setMonoMirror(True)

As regards the persistent problem of slight nausea when using the gamepad to rotate the view, I’ve found that this is particular to a certain kind of rotation. Nausea occurs when the game controller causes the avatar to turn on the spot (the sort of rotation you get with the WandMagicCarpet and Driving transports), but not when the controller causes the avatar to orbit around some other location in the environment (which happens with the Orientation and Orbit transports). The feeling of nausea seems to be associated with the way in which the view whirls past whilst the avatar is being turned (this can be reduced by slowing rotation speed and acceleration), and also with a bounce that occurs when the turning stops (the bounce can be changed to a gentle deceleration by decreasing rotation drag). I had exactly the same experience when I tried out the ‘VizConnect -> Inputs and Transports’ tutorial that has the avatar travelling inside a car, so it’s not something odd about my program. I should stress that there is absolutely no sensation of nausea when I turn my head, only when my view is being rotated by the game controller. I wonder if some degree of nausea is unavoidable for this kind of involuntary view rotation. Perhaps it’s normal to feel nauseous when the environment is whirling past, but not when performing a natural head turn, or orbiting a fixed point that one’s eyes are drawn to. I have no previous experience of VR environments, so this is new to me.

My ‘optimised’ settings for the WandMagicCarpet transport in Vizconnect were: ‘rotation acceleration’ = 30; ‘max rotation speed’ = 32; ‘rotation auto breaking drag coef’ = 0.05. I left the ‘rotation drag coef’ setting at its default value of 0.0001. Turning is admittedly quite slow.

As a side issue, I found a better way to hide the disembodied gloved hand:

right_hand = avatar.getAttachmentPoint('r_hand').getNode3d()
right_hand.remove()