Discrete Azimuth Rotation Aka "VR Comfort Mode"

I've never met a good idea that I didn't steal. :) The fine folks at Cloudhead Games added a tweak to explicit viewpoint rotation in first-person games in head-mounted displays by incrementing the azimuth angle in discrete steps whenever an analog stick is pushed to the left or right. Apparently, this reduces motion sickness in many users.

Due to Vrui's way of handling input, adding a variation of the basic idea was a snap (5 lines of code!). However, I decided to apply it to the canonical mouse look + WASD FPS navigation tool first, because combining snap rotations with the ability to still move and aim in arbitrary directions added an interesting wrinkle.

Here is the initial implementation, and my first test run.

In case you're wondering: this video was recorded in real-time while I was testing the new navigation method. I was wearing the Rift headset, and saw the stereoscopic and lens-corrected view -- otherwise, the test would have been meaningless. But I don't like those Rift videos that show the side-by-side, lens-corrected view, because they're too low-resolution, warped, and don't really show how the 3D environment looks like in the Rift. Instead, I record video off a secondary window that shows the same view, but in mono and without lens correction.

More information: http://doc-ok.org/?p=872

Original video explaining "VR comfort mode:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0eMN...

• Category

  • Science & Technology

• License

  • Standard YouTube License