In this short article, I will present a small idea in the use of a virtual reality helmet.

For me, this approach has become a kind of "discovery", although the principle is simple and logical, so it is probably well known for a long time (let me know if so, I will hide the publication).

Prehistory

So. Having bought a helmet (oculus rift cv1), I was expected to encounter some deficiency of high-quality content for it. Although the store has a lot of games and videos - but, as always, there is a “but”:

1. All applications are paid, and not to say that cheap. Putting everything in and learning is a pity of time and money.
2. Absolutely everything in English.
3. I am not a gamer, and I bought a helmet to a greater degree for development, and experiments. Throughout my life, the games that I really liked can be counted on the fingers of one hand. To meet in the store something of this level is not enough chances.
4. Most developers tend to cram a player into “full 3D” (first-person), whereas, where I think it’s more interesting, something like strategies — you don’t need to run somewhere and agrees well with the prospect. Game characters, as it were, run on the plane of the table.

Reflecting on the above, I remembered the hours spent behind Warcraft 3. But if you try to run this great game in a helmet? .. About the result - under the cut.

Idea

Under rift or vive, you can use the Virtual Desktop utility that allows you to move a computer screen into a virtual space. The screen will of course remain flat (you can be curved in an arc), but a large viewing angle.

With the games this application works, no problems have arisen. So there is nothing to describe here - it's like playing on a large curved monitor (the result is shown in the first picture of the article).

It is worth adding that if the virtual screen is very large, then the picture in the helmet is larger than the visible area. And since the resolution of the helmet is slightly higher than FullHD, in order for the picture on the virtual screen to be clear - you need to render it with a resolution higher than FullHD. Accordingly, it turns out that we are playing in a helmet, but we need a monitor with ultra-high resolution for high-quality game.

Fortunately there is a way out. In the settings of AMD video cards (for NVidia - probably, too, I don’t know), it is possible to set a virtual super resolution. We put. Select it in the game settings, and accordingly the game renders the picture more than FullHD (if it can). On the monitor, we will see a reduced picture, but in the helmet - it will be clearly.

All this is good, but there is still no “strategy on the table” effect.

Second thought. After all, before the drivers were popular allowing any game to make three-dimensional. Even anaglyph people played some kind of shooters ... A quick googling showed two options: "Iz3d Driver" and "TriDef 3D". The first one was not installed on my win10, but the second one is completely.

In the settings for TriDef 3D, select Side by side, and in Virtual Desktop, select Half SBS, respectively ... and it works!)

Alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Warcraft 3 from which the article began - and did not start. TriDef 3D - works only with DirectX9-11, it was written in warcraft on 8. Iz3d Driver did not start for me, so I had to say goodbye for a while to watch the growing village of elves with glasses.

But on the computer was found Diablo3 - on which everything works just fine!



It is difficult to show the volume in the article, but the effect is really interesting. I enlarged the screen to 150 degrees, so its borders almost never come across to me. The effect is as if you are sticking out in a large semicircular curved window and there - the departing surface of Sanctuary.

By the way, you have to give Blizzard. The game is essentially not designed for 3D-monitors, and especially glasses - a stunning amount of literally everything! Especially for some reason, fascinating three-dimensional screensavers. After all, there is even a camera still. In fact - that prevented to write the picture in the movie and twist in a circle. But instead - the whole scenes are modeled, with a perspective, a lot of plans, effects ...



Well, in conclusion.

Not some games are interesting VR.
And why not try running other applications in this mode? Imagine, for example, sculpture in Zbrush in a helmet? ..

Alas, there is a big disappointment. Programs run, and even the viewport'a panel - doubles, everything is as it should. But the fact is that the applications viewport - not deployed in full screen. Each viewport is split by itself, and of course Virtual Desktop cannot “sew” them correctly.

The solution in the TriDef 3D settings is to choose not Side by side, but FPR (Line Interlaced) - then the image for the right and left eye will be rendered not in separate planes, but across the entire screen area, but in the even and odd lines respectively.

This picture is easy to decompose into two frames and send it to the helmet.



Alas. Virtual Desktop does not know how to work with the source in FPR.
Despite the abundance of input formats, this one is not supported.