Just arrived on Friday: an Oculus VR dev kit.

I spent a little while on Saturday unboxing and connecting everything, needed to download TF2 on a windows box to get the VR integration, then a few hours today messing around, firstly with the VR calibration and settings in TF2 and then with the SDK and sample projects.

I’m not a game developer, so I guess my interests are very different to the majority of the other kickstarter backers. I would love to use this for
1. Eye candy. Pull some audio-responsive video patches out into 3d
2. Data visualisation. After working with reams of JSON data, I was thinking of how to assemble into useful visualizations so you could see outliers or interesting stats at a glance. Or even moving through a graph of some kind — either JIRA task relationships or source code analysis.

Anyway, baby steps to get this useful.

First priorities are to put together some Quartz Composer plugins for the sensor input on user head direction,
Secondly another plugin to simplify the user config — Inter-pupillary distance being a big deal in getting the 3d effect to pop out at you. Ideally, use the figures the TF2 calibration gives you, since that seems to have the easiest process for calibrating.
Thirdly, rendering to the goggles. They present as a 1280x800display, one half for each eye. So your render dest is the same scene but with the POV moved by ~64mm and with some focal distortion applied.

I’m going to have to dust off my OpenGL textbook and my C++ skills!