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Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by kreikins on Jul 26th, 2014 09:14 AM

Someone was able to "reverse engineer" the oculus rift's motion tracker and flashed it in to an STM32F3DISCOVERY board
http://yetifrisstlama.blogspot.com/2014 ... verse.html

Here's a video of how the tracker works (skip to 2:30)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffoFpm5pfEM

this might be a good addition to kainy/splashtop + oculus games setup. I hope with this, we can finally play oculus rift games with tracker.

Should you guys decide to give it a whirl, here's the link:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/STM32F3-DISCOVE ... 2591fb167a

I have ordered one a week ago and already on its way. I just hope its one-click flash procedure only as i have zero knowledge on coding. But for $16.80 and to be able play oculus games goodness it's worth a shot.

kreikins

Posts: 12

Joined: 31.12.2013

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by nils16 on Jul 26th, 2014 12:51 PM

Great

Please let us know if it works. I really want to play "War Thunder" and "Prepar3d" on my Phone with headtracking.

nils16

Posts: 29

Joined: 25.11.2013

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by kreikins on Jul 31st, 2014 09:28 AM

UPDATE: Just got the stm32f3 board and it's awesome!

I quickly downloaded several VR demos on Oculus website (dreadhalls, titans of space, alone in the rift, VR cinema to name a few) im happy to report that pitch, roll & yaw are finally working!

Some demos get occasional drifts some are just snappy from the get go.
But there are few games that still require the rift's head mounted display to be plugged in or VR mode wont start. Yeah, the stm32f3 board emulates oculus rift's head tracker but its HMD is another thing. Though converting an ordinary lcd to rift's can be done as well by overriding the EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) but it requires hardware tinkering like making an EDID spoofer from scratch and i don't think i can pull off a complex sorcery like that.

http://yetifrisstlama.blogspot.com/2014 ... -edid.html

I've made a 7 inch HMD instead of using the tracker with my smartphone. The streamed games and apps looks squashed on phone screen. Aand the lag makes me woozy.

It works but i still wouldn't recommend it for everyone as the head tracker's source code is still in beta hence, the presence of drifts in some games. There are also games that will not work due to absence of the oculus' HMD unless you want to expand your library of VR apps and games since PC has tons of them, then it's a must buy. (80% of the games i've downloaded didn't require oculus HMD anyway)

kreikins

Posts: 12

Joined: 31.12.2013

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by diresquirrel on Jul 31st, 2014 17:45 PM

That's awesome news Kreikins. I ordered my own board after seeing your initial post and it just got here yesterday. Waiting on some cables so I can set it up, but I can't wait. I'll post my experiences with it here, too. Maybe we can get a list going of games that work with just the tracker? I'm using an HTC One M8 with Kainy with Google Cardboard currently. I'm waiting to print an Opendive at my school.

diresquirrel

Posts: 11

Joined: 25.07.2014

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by nente002 on Aug 7th, 2014 11:39 AM

I just Ordered mine! Can't wait to try this out! Up to now I used FreePie with the mouse script but that doesn't work well.
For the rest I use TWOmonUsb, on 720P it seems smooth an 1080P I get frame drops but I think that is because TWOmonUSB is CPU/GPU intensive.

Did you guys flash the Tracking firmware with Linux or Windows?
If on windows what steps did you take?
I'll Ask the developer of TwomonUsb if he can make it so that you can Identify your phone as oculus, as twomonUSB emulates a real monitor, thus allowing you to set screen resolution and clone or extend your desktop like it was a real second monitor. I think this should be possible..I'll keep you updated!

nente002

Posts: 60

Joined: 16.04.2014

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by diresquirrel on Aug 8th, 2014 20:17 PM

Is TwoMon well supported and worth the money? Kainy really doesn't like it when I reverse tether my phone for some reason, and support is really spotty as the project seems all but abandoned. I'm trying to decide if I want to drop money on SplashtopTHD or Twomon.

I flashed mine using Windows. I wasn't familiar with how to use command lines at all, so it took a little bit of learning. If you're on Windows, make sure you're running cmd as administrator and use the "how to flash.txt" on the Foculus Git page as a guide. You have to navigate to where your openocd exe is and type in the correct file paths. Which should be obvious to people who know what they're doing, but it took me way longer to figure out than I'd like to admit. If you need more help feel free to shoot me a PM.

In other news, got my opendive printed and it's pretty sweet. Definitely a better experience google cardboard. I'm gonna grab headstraps and other stuff to assemble it today.

diresquirrel

Posts: 11

Joined: 25.07.2014

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by nente002 on Aug 8th, 2014 22:28 PM

I've tried both kainy and all versions of splashtop but because of my videocard(laptop with a 750m geforce) I could not get it to work full screen. Kainy did not work at all. But if I compair splashtop with twomon usb, twomon is the winner. I can play youtube at 1080p no framedrops it seems. But gaming I have to do at 720p otherwise it is very slow.(not lag on the phone side but performance on pc side, I have a i7 8gb laptop)
I think this has to do with gpu load I think Twomonusb is running mainly on gpu. So if you have a heavy duty videocard
I think you will not be disappointed with twomon.
The support what can I say, I've reviewd them in playstore and asked them if they could somehow make it so you can spoof the identity of the connected phone, so The phone id's as oculus rift. Within a few hours I got a response asking if I could email the question and that they will try to incorporate new features on request, so I mailed then this morning.
And I have the app for about a month or so and received one server side update. And I said it before but your pc will see the phone as a real monitor so you can extend your desktop. Looks nice to extend desktop onto phone, running metro ui on the phone and normal desktop on my laptop.
Thanks for the info on how to flash, The readme.txt says how to flash in linux but I guess it's the same for windows.
Thanks again.

nente002

Posts: 60

Joined: 16.04.2014

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by kreikins on Aug 9th, 2014 08:22 AM

Flashing the foculus code on windows 7/8 is easy peasy. Sorry for not sharing it with you guys sooner. Download the stm32 ST-Link utility and proceed as follows:

1. Install and run the ST-Link Utility
2. Connect the mini usb to USB ST-LINK hub
3. Click on the AC plug icon (a.k.a connect to the target icon)
4. Click on Full Chip Erase icon (to wipe any previously flashed code. less likely since the board is new but just to be sure)
5. Click on Program Verify icon
6. Choose foculus file (stm32f3_HID_for_real.hex) and flash away!
7. Click on Disconnect on Target icon
8. Unplug usb from ST-LINK and connect it to USB USER hub

DONE!

The stm32f3 should now be identified as "Tracker DK" on device manager

ST-Link Utility link:

http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/tools/PF258168#
(choose STSW-LINK004)

Foculus Tracker source code/firmware link:
https://github.com/yetifrisstlama/Focul ... 3DISCOVERY

kreikins

Posts: 12

Joined: 31.12.2013

Re: Alternative tracker for Oculus Rift

by nente002 on Aug 9th, 2014 11:46 AM

Thanks for sharing! ready to flash, still waiting for the board.
The Board has arrived Just flashed it and that little tool you posted works great!
NO MORE DRIFT!!! Finally! This is great!
Just walked around in the millennium falcon.
Thanks for pointing this little board out to us! I feel like I have a oculus rift now!