We are proud to report back from the first dedicated international OpenHMD H(A)ckathon, which took place last week end in Heerlen, The Netherlands.

The H(A)ckathon was arranged by Joey (@JoeyFerwerda) and hosted in the Ackspace Hackerspace. Thanks for having us!

It was a perfect opportunity for the OpenHMD community to meet-up IRL, drink mate, beer and whiskey, eat stroopwafels and make plans for world domination, not necessarily in that order.

Apart from enjoying the dutch high summer with over 30°C and having Greek food at Nisos, we also had amazing conversations about libre VR and Kalman filters.

We were also able to get work done, had remarkable breakthroughs in our R&D and took care of maintenance tasks.

OpenHMD support in Godot

The Godot game engine got in touch with us to mention they had an initial implementation for OpenHMD integration! By attending the H(A)ckathon virtually they were able to collaborate with us on bug fixing, testing with multiple devices, and setting up hidapi correctly.

HTC Vive

ph5 (@pOH9) showed his recent Vive progress where he implemented lens distortion using the Vive’s config values in Vulkan and visualizes his positional calculations.

Lubosz (@spulaniraba) dug up his OSVR-Vive-Libre code and tested it with multiple Vive firmware versions and base station setups. It was really beneficial to have 3 Vive HMDs around for that. He implemented a real time plot of the Lighthouse base station view by adding Python bindings and plotting the data with matplotlib.

The plot shows the horizontal and vertical angles in ticks tracked by the HMD’s sensors, emitted by Lighthouse. He also toyed with OpenCV’s solvePnP implementation to receive 3D position by combining the light samples with the HMD sensor positions from the config.

Oculus Rift

DK2 and CV1 positional tracking made huge leaps forward.

Camera-LED sync was achieved and blob tracking has been implemented, which is the groundwork for positional tracking. We were very excited to see blob tracking working on a fairly large distance, as you can see in this video. We are very close to get functional positional tracking working. You can find the current draft implementation in noname’s OpenHMD-RiftPlayground repository.

The blob tracking will also be reusable for the Oculus Rift CV1 Touch controller, where pH5 was able to set up sync by improving his implementation, which can be found in ouvrt.

Special thanks to Refresher for letting us use his controllers!

PSVR

Our PSVR code also received a couple of updates. The method of getting the identifiers was rewritten and setting the modes is more stable now. There is still a bug on Windows, since it seems that writing the modes to the controller returns error states, which requires more investigation.

Wireshark dissectors

Work on Wireshark dissectors has been done, currently focused on the Oculus Rift. We will extend this for other devices, so it will be way easier reading packet dumps and reverse engineer new and existing devices. The dissectors can be found in bleijdfist’s branch of the OpenHMD-Tools repo.

OpenHMD Unity plugin

Additional testing was done on the Unity plugin, a new version will be released this week on the plugin’s download page.