Tag: AR

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Having an action webcam strapped with bow ribbons to my XR glasses grinning mad into the smartphone cam. A bunch of wires are also strapped to the glasses.
Video: How to get 6DOF with older 3DOF XR glasses using Breezy and OpenTrack

Breezy can now turn a 3DOF (degree of freedom) device into a 6DOF device by augmenting the missing positional data from a webcam. Spoiler! It is not the cam strapped to my face – this is just for the demo you can watch here, on PeerTube or YouTube.

The cam, that I used for this task, is sitting on my monitor. How this works? Well not with magic! This requires a somewhat decent webcam – really anything from the last decade should suffice – and OpenTrack, of course.

OpenTrack is a head-tracking application with multiple tracker plugins. One of it’s plugins is the Neuralnet Tracker, an AI powered extension that comes with a bunch of different head pose models to choose from. With a webcam connected this can now locally run the detection model with very low latency – so it’s usually blazing fast on most systems!

This alone is already 6DOF and is used a lot for gaming already – so what does Breezy do with this? Simple! It reads the forwarded data via an UDP listener, a very quick way to transmit data on a local network or system [and complements it’s own rotational data with the missing positional data].

With this a Breezy user still gets the rotational data from the XR’s very sensitive IMU, that is short for Inertial Measurement Unit btw, and the not so important positional data sent from OpenTrack.

This works of course only while the webcam can still see the user. So sadly no walking around while using this.

And the best thing? It can also send the data back! This means that the very same combined values can be forwarded – e.g. to a computer game – benefiting from the best available data sources for rotation and position.

That’s not the main use case, of course, and only of importance for some nerds like myself. This is mostly relevant for the productivity features of Breezy, because sometimes a text may be too small to read with the glasses on. We do no longer have to increase the font size – we can now simply lean in! That is a feature that is usually only available with glasses, that come with little cameras of their own, so they can have native 6DOF support. And when I say native I mean that such glasses usually also outsource exactly this calculation to the connected computer. It’s my understanding that this seems to require a lot of computation power, which is something many XR users with the more modern devices complain about.

Well not so much with OpenTrack and the Neuralnet tracker, that utilizes the ONNX runtime under the hood. That’s a high-performance, cross-platform engine to power exactly such models locally. The runtime automatically makes use of the best available hardware acceleration, if there is any.

Overall I’m rather hyped about this feature – especially because I’m using the OpenTrack output option of Breezy for quite some time now, to get a VR like experience with stereoscopic 3D rendering in Side-By-Side mode. I can now keep using my older XR glasses and still enjoy this more modern 6DOF feature. This is rather expensive hardware after all.

And all that on Linux PC!

Breezy xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop by https://www.youtube.com/@WayneHeaney

Official Announcement XR desktop with 6DoF + multiple displays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFLmjpjF-rA

Music “Life’s Worth Dying For” CC BY-SA 3.0 “LostDrone”. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Verify at https://soundcloud.com/lostdrone/rock-lostdrone-lifes-worth-dying-for-free-download-and-creative-commons-license

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Remember my proof concept to read IMU data of my glasses to ?

hodasemi wrote a connector based on the idea that works without : https://github.com/hodasemi/xr_to_opentrack_rs – comes with a systemd service file so it can run in the background.

Once installed the only step left to do is fire up OpenTrack 🤘😄🤘

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So I was asked if my head tracking approach of reading the IMU data from my Viture Pro to OpenTrack and SBS (side-by-side) mode with ReShade would also work with StarCitizen.

Guess it does 🤷

Pick your poison to watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWUC2Y3TRh4 / https://makertube.net/w/8L7gVN8NnLvjhQCPGNmd6W

I start Star Citizen via Lutris (and not with Steam), which requires slightly different settings once ReShade is installed:

Enable Gamescope: ON
Output Resolution: "3840x1080"
Game Resolution: "3840x2160" (set this also ingame!)
Custom Settings: "--scaler stretch"

Can this get you banned? Who knows 🤷 Jury is still out on this. Do I care? Nope. I won’t miss my puny starter pack.

YMMV.

The proof of concept code to read the IMU data can be found at https://github.com/bekopharm/xr_to_opentrack (pending changes).

It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.

There is an unlisted SBS version of this video linked in the description. You will need XR glasses that do FULL SBS though to watch it!

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Until now I used OpenTrack with my DIY IR tracker or the Neuralnet tracker. I knew that my XR glasses feature IMU data though and the xr_driver of the Breezy Desktop project allows to access the data via IPC on Linux PC. So I did what Linux user do: I wrote a script to access the IMU data and forwarded it via UDP to OpenTrack:

Pick your poison to watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njuumLUvqrM / https://makertube.net/w/2bNyxJhdyydTeFq17onikv

This reminded me that I also wrote a proof of concept to implement the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC ( https://makertube.net/w/7VtfAjW7EiAUS5aiPwG7if ) so I gave it a spin to test the data bridge. That was smooth sailing!

The mod is Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, still awesome today: http://diaspora.hard-light.net/ (Warning: This may fuel a desire to re-watch the BSG series again 😀).

The bridge code can be found at https://github.com/bekopharm/xr_to_opentrack (pending changes).

It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.

Update: hodasemi wrote a Rust connector based on the idea that works without Breezy: https://github.com/hodasemi/xr_to_opentrack_rs – comes with a systemd service file so it can run in the background. Once installed the only step left to do is fire up OpenTrack 🤘

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So bear with me if I mix something up, this is all news to me and I’m still flabbergasted. I got myself some XR glasses mostly for watching movies and perhaps some gaming on the Steam Deck a while ago.

Now I learned about “SBS” (Side-By-Side) mode like ~3 days ago, that the glasses support. I tried this with the game Elite Dangerous first, since this has an SBS mode built in too, and was mind blown. My current favourite time stink is Ace Combat though so I started digging.

Turns out there is this Reshade tool that would forcefully enable such a mode for basically any game with the right shader. Several exist but the first I found, “SuperDepth3D.fx”, seems to do the trick. Enabling it split the 1920×1024 in half with two slightly different view ports, one for each eye. There are many options to fine tune this and I’m still fiddling with this to find the perfect settings but results look great already.

My glasses do Full SBS though and have a resolution of 3840×1024. I read somewhere that wide-screen is possible with more DLL shenanigans with Ace Combat 7 too but I run the game on a Linux PC anyway, where we utilise a tool named “gamescope”. This allows basically to configure a virtual display for each game and override the game resolution in various ways. It also has a stretch option, which is exactly what I needed to get the “compressed” SBS view from 1920 to 3840, where the aspect ratio would fit again. BTW: This also has FSR built in so any upscaling looks good enough too. I’m not entirely sure but I think there’s a similar tool on Windows called “Virtual Deskop”?

Anyway, I already managed to get my head tracker working by mapping the output to a virtual gamepad on the look-around axes before. I also found a mod that enables a wider FOV. Imagine my stupid grinning when everything fell into place: Full SBS with head tracking, a more sane FOV and yes, I jumped all the hoops to get my HOTAS and rudder pedal of my old ViperPit working (which is a different story because my devices are so old that I had to upgrade em to USB before, which involved some Arduinos, programming and soldering). I guess that makes me a member of multiple niches at once 🤓

And since I’m aware that nobody can “see” what I’m talking about, without having XR glasses or a VR headset (or a DIY VR Box for smart phones) on their own, have also an Anaglyph 3D render. This requires just some old school two coloured (red and cyan) glasses often made of paper, that many people still have around somewhere, to get an idea.

The colour of the sky? It’s perfect. A deep dark blue.

Update: There is now video footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NckLvP1HBGw

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