Just got a cool little update to Tuesday's post about installing and running Peter Kappler's VR version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life from Austin Tate: In response to my suggestion that the frame rate might be too low for this to be usable, Austin did some test runs and some tweaks.
"I tried the Drune IV area on the Second Life Ravine region you mentioned. One other user there (or maybe it was an NPC).
"On Ultra quality and 256m view distance it was a bit too low frame rate and was a bit choppy, but it worked fine at 'High' quality settings and 128m draw distance. On my rig I was getting 40 frames per second in VR mode. Images attached for
you." (See above.)
So those look like the settings for optimal results. To be sure, he got them thanks in great part to very good hardware (see his specs below), but the bottom line is this VR viewer is more or less WYSIWYG compared to the PC-based Firestorm:
"EXACTLY what you see in the Firestorm Windows viewer you see (doubled up for left and right eye viewpoints) in the HMD," as he puts it. "The way Peter has done this means there is not a separate type of display when in VR mode. Hence the importance of adjusting the graphics settings and draw distance to get the frame rate you want, then what you see in 2D will be what you get in VR. Different headsets have different resolutions of course but that is the only difference."
Austin says he's talking with Kappler about updating his viewer for a later version of Firestorm. Meantime, check out his blog for demos running VR for SL in a social setting, and visiting an oil rig demo created in OpenSim (see below):
Tate's specs running Firestorm VR:
- Dell Precision T5810 with Xeon CPU E5-1620 v3 @3.50GHz.
- 32GB Memory, SSD drives, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU.
- 100Mbps broadband connection.
- Oculus Rift DK2.
- Windows 10 Pro version 1903.
- Second Life – Ravine – homestead - region objects: 3725 (land impact: 3732)
Comments