If you don\u2019t know what the Oculus Rift (OR) is, it is a virtual reality (VR) headset that covers your eyes blocking out\u00a0any sight other than what it\u2019s embedded screens show you. The OR tracks your head movements and where you are in\u00a0space which is mimicked on the screens in front of you.<\/p>\n
The OR hardware consists of two parts, the headset itself and an infrared camera that sits on top of your monitor just\u00a0like a traditional web cam. These are all linked together with cables and connected to a PC. The version of the OR that\u00a0I was testing was the DK2 which is a development version and not the final product that will be released to market.
\nThe PC requires a space HDMI output, two free USB sockets (one for the headset, one for the camera) and a standard\u00a03 pin power socket. These are all connected via cables, and generous length cables are included, especially to the\u00a0headset.<\/p>\n
The PC I was testing on was a high spec PC running Windows 10: i7 Extreme, 16GB DDR4 RAM, X99 board, 2x Nvidia 980GTX, Evo 850 SSD.\u00a0Connecting everything up was fairly simple, the guide provided by Nvidia was easy to follow.<\/p>\n
The software installation was also fairly simple, you download the latest SDK from Oculus which in my case was\u00a0version 0.8. This has a standard installer which installs the drivers and weighs in at around 45MB.
\nOnce installed, I anticipated being able to launch one of the demos and off it goes, but the orange \u2018standby\u2019 light was\u00a0on the headset and the light on the camera was unlit. I opened up the Oculus configuration tool which is installed with\u00a0the SDK (and resides in the system tray) to look at the logs and run the diagnostics, and with that open the OR came to life. It appears that the config tool needs to be open (not just running in the system tray) for the OR to work. The\u00a0headset light was now green and the light on the camera was lit up blue.<\/p>\n
Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you don\u2019t know what the Oculus Rift (OR) is, it is a virtual reality (VR) headset that covers your eyes blocking out\u00a0any sight other than what it\u2019s embedded screens show you. The OR tracks your head movements and where you are in\u00a0space which is mimicked on the screens in front of you. The OR … Continue reading “Oculus Rift: Analysis and potential use in Higher Education”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}