Watch: Virtual Reality Version of Second Life for Firestorm & Steam VR -- With Open Source Code!

OK this is pretty amazing: Someone named Peter Kappler quietly created code to run Second Life in VR via Firestorm and Steam VR, and then posted the source code online. "It's not a fully working Firestorm," he allows on his YouTube, "there is still a lot to do. The file I posted is a source file in C++ for coders that wish to maybe work on a VR version for Second Life."

There have been at least two other attempts to create a VR port for Second Life, but performance has not been impressive -- Linden Lab had an experimental client of its own, but discontinued supporting it due to lack of decent frame rate. The demo video above suggests Kappler has come up with a fairly decent port; better yet, by open sourcing his code, he's encouraging other developers to improve it further.

 

The specific demo above is running SL through the Windows Mixed Reality headset, but it should be possible to create clients that run with Oculus and Vive:

"It requires Steam VR to operate," metaverse evangelist Jim Reichert, who excitedly sent me this video, tells me. "There is a shunt that helps Steam VR with Windows MR (and all those headsets.) If it works with Steam VR natively, it should work with any headset supported by Steam VR. That's a big, big deal." 

Agreed! Jim is digging into the code now and I've reached out to Peter Kappler, so hopefully we'll know more about this project, and how much further it can be improved on, soon.

Comments

[daniel Mounsey]

Im very keen on knowing how this goes..
I had sl for vr a while back and loved it! I forget the name of the viewer even! Unfortunately with a dk2 sdk update it stopped working! it had terrible fps but i lived with it. It really surprises me it hasn't been a thing. Ive done Sansar, vrchat and numerous worlds and continue to do so but i MISS sl vr so much!Building is simply ..easier. Im not a coder..so all i can do is wait . id be happy to fund such a project!

[Ai Austin]

The (early) Firestorm based CtrlAltStudio viewer still works to use VR (Oculus Rift) in Second Life and OoenSim but does not incorporare recent uodated features in SL. See http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2016/07/18/testing-ctrlaltstudio-viewer-1-2-6-43412/

[Carla Laville]

I'd be really interested in this too. I got my Rift headset specifically for running Second Life and literally that week Linden Lab discontinued it.

[Adeon Writer]

Very interesting. My interest in SL dwindled starting when LL decided to drop support for Oculus DK2, and thus dropped support for VR in general. That was when I realized LL didn't want SL to go in the direction I wanted it to go. Looks like people are trying to do it anyway. Unfortunately, I think they missed the boat now. VR is only special when you can do it with *other* VR users.

[John Bottoms]

The code is very interesting. It would also be useful to have the .h header files, the terrain and buildings data. Thanks for the posting.

[Dalek]

It would good to add the stereoscopic 3D and Kinect 360 support that was in the CtrlAltStudio viewer as well.
The former worked really well until Bento killed it.

[Fauve]

Followup on this yet?