In this day and age, there are open source alternatives for all your computing needs. There’s even an open source platform like VR glasses. Let’s take a quick look at the OpenHMD project.

What is OpenHMD?

OpenHMD is a project to create open source apis and drivers for immersive technologies. Such technologies include head-mounted displays with built-in head-tracking.

It currently supports many systems, including Android, FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, MAC OS, and Windows. It supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, DreamWorld DreamGlass, Playstation Move and more. It also supports a variety of languages, including Go, Java,.NET, Perl, Python, and Rust.

The OpenHMD project is released under the Boost license.

More features and improvements in the new version

Recently, the OpenHMD project released version 0.3.0, codenamed Djungelvral (Djungelvral is the salted licorice from Sweden). It brought about a lot of changes.

This update adds support for the following devices:

  • 3Glasses D3
  • Oculus Rift CV1
  • HTC Vive and HTC Vive Pro
  • NOLO VR
  • Windows Mixed Reality HMD support
  • Deepoon E2
  • GearVR Gen1

OpenHMD adds a universal distortion shader. This new feature “makes it easy to set variables in the driver that give shaders information about lens size, chromatic aberration, position, and Quirks.”

They also announced plans to change the build system. OpenHMD has added support for Meson and will remove Autotools support in the next (0.4) release.

The team behind OpenHMD also had to remove some features because they wanted their system to work for everyone. Support for PlayStation VR has been disabled due to compatibility issues with HID headers in Windows and MAC OS. NOLO comes with a bunch of firmware versions, many with minor changes. OpenHMD cannot test all firmware versions, so some versions may not work properly. They recommend upgrading to the latest firmware version. Finally, several devices provide only limited support and are therefore not included in this release.

They expect to accelerate the OpenHMD release cycle in order to get updated features faster and provide users with more device support. Their priority was to “make devices currently disabled in the trunk branch available for trial use when the next patch is released, as well as position tracking support for supported head-mounted displays.”

The final summary

I don’t own VR equipment and have never used it. I believe they have a lot of potential, even beyond games. I am excited (but not surprised) that there is an open source implementation that supports many devices. I’m glad they’re focusing on a wide variety of devices rather than focusing on some off-brand VR effort.

I hope the OpenHMD team does a good job and they build a platform to make them VR projects.

Have you ever used or seen OpenHMD? Do you use VR for gaming and other purposes? If so, have you used any open source hardware or software? Let us know in the comments below.

via: itsfoss.com/openhmd/

By John Paul lujun9972

This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China