How to emulate head movement while developing a VR application?

tcrass

Hi there,

I just started experimenting with Godot's VR capabilities using the "Native mobile" interface and was immediately hit by the "GLES 3 not supported" problem. In order to be able to continue developing until Godot 3.1 gets released, I was wondering if there was a way to "emulate" head movements by programatically change the ARVRCamera's looking direction. All such attempts of mine, however, failed -- in accordance to the documentation, which says that "most of the camera properties are ignored as the HMD information overrides them".

So is there any way to move the camera around while running a VR application on the development system rather than on a device which does support head tracking?

Cheers --

Torsten

TwistedTwigleg

Maybe replace the ARVR_Camera with a normal Camera node while developing, and then swap it again when you are ready to test in VR? That is what I would do.

I think Camera and ARVR _amera are almost identical as far as basic functionality goes. As far as I know the only difference is that ARVR Camera renders two views (one for each eye) and has head tracking, while Camera just renders one view without any head tracking. They should be fairly easy to interchange.

Also, have you tried running a nightly build of Godot 3.1, or Godot 3.1 alpha? Obviously using a nightly/alpha build is not necessarily recommend for production (because of bugs), but depending on your project it may be a relatively safe way to start your project while you wait for Godot 3.1 to be released.

tcrass

TwistedTwigleg,

I already tried 3.1-alpha, but it seems it still tries to create an ES 3.0 context.

And yes, I guess I could temporarily replace the ARVRCamera with a normal camera. However, it would be really handy if one could temporarily prevent the ARVRCamera from being controlled via head tracking. Well, maybe I'll come up with a patch some day...

Cheers --

Torsten

tcrass

Seems I was wrong, 3.1-alpha does support GLES2 rendering (there's a dropdown in the top right corner of the editor window which allows you to select the rendering backend), but 3.1-alpha in general and 3.1-alpha VR support in particular seems to have so many issues (see, for instance, https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23487) that it is too early to evaluate if GLES2 would work on my Adreno 330 based phone (a Samsung Galaxy S5).

Cheers --

Torsten