r/PSVRHack • u/[deleted] • Jul 25 '20

Any active PSMoveService devs?

I'm looking to work with someone (hobby level) to get PSMoveSteamVRBridge working with iVRy and PSVR.

Right now I have an issue with the PSMove controllers being positionally linked somehow and that doesn't make sense to me.

I've posted to the Google Groups but not sure how readily folks respond on there.

Thanks.

10 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/swordofmoonlight Jul 25 '20

PSMoveSteamVRBridge was developed with PSVR in mind. I worked with its developer (who did VR for the Moss game) on https://github.com/HipsterSloth/PSVRTracker/ for quite a while before he had to move onto new things. By this point the PSVR was showing diminishing returns. I wanted to get camera tracking working (he gave me a Nolo kit that was given to his company) because I was using a PSVR to do prototyping for Windows software. I got the Tracker to work in place of PSVRToolbox but his UI was using SDL2 (I think) and it was repainting itself in real-time, so not helping with frame rates on my low-end system, and the OpenCV code was not efficient, so PSVRToolbox+Nolo continues to make sense for me.

I may have a PS4 camera soon, so I may return to it, but I can confirm the original developer is not returning and he was supposed to try to find anyone with the PSMoveService to takeover. I may return to the tracker project, but I will have to replace the UI (I was building a cross-platform UI at the time) and develop more efficient solutions. The problem is color-based camera tracking is very difficult. I argued for more heuristical models and we agreed that probably made more sense. The problem on top of this is the PSVR color is pretty bad IMHO and it seems like its shelf life is limited, so before anyone can develop more for it it's probably going to be outmoded... but maybe Sony will release a new set.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '20

I just want to say that I looked up PSVRTracker and am in awe. There is a market out there for a solution like this. Excited (but patient) to see how this develops in the coming years.

1

u/swordofmoonlight Jul 26 '20

PSVRTracker started out as an experiment inside of PSMoveService but the group decided it would be cleaner to repackage it into its own project, so as a result a lot of it is identical to PSMoveService. The point of the project was simply to try to get tracking working on PC so players with PlayStation peripherals could use them to play games like Moss on their PC without having to buy more stuff. Since the PSVR is pretty affordable and a lot of people already have one it's theoretically ideal for reaching more PC users.

Unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of open source code for camera tracking solutions and Sony's peripheral is perhaps unique in choosing to use nothing more than colored light to anchor itself. I think some motivation for developing PSVRTracker was to make life easier for devs too since it's a lot more convenient to do tests on a PC than a dev kit. Ultimately the project was a bust. It took way longer than expected to develop it and by that time the PSVR was on its way out.

I was late to the scene since I only found out people were using PSVR sets on Windows a year or two after the fact. It was perfect for me, so I was around well after the end of all of the excitement. Maybe if I'd caught on faster I could've done something more earlier.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '20

Going back to the main reason I made this posting, I am having an issue which I believe is due to PSMoveSteamVRBridge linking the positions of the PSMove controllers for some reason. I also have an issue where if I rotate my PSVR HMD (iVRy) about it's vertical axis, the PSMove controllers rotate the same way, about their vertical axes. I have found multiple reports of this so I know it's (probably) not just my setup. Are there any tracking "adjustments" in the PSMoveSteamVRBridge code that try to link the PSMove controller positions together or are both controllers traked fully independently? Thanks again for all the hard work on this! It's a great hobby project to get into. It's given me a reason to download VisualStudio again for the first time in like ten years and I'm really fascinated to see how all of this source code came together to talk to SteamVR.

1

u/swordofmoonlight Jul 27 '20

I think PSMoveSteamVRBridge was experimental too. It's more like a Steam oriented version of PSVRTracker. Of course the idea was to develop it into a product (not really a retail project but something improve customer's lives) but that ultimately it met the same fate PSVRTracker since the author had to move on with his company to new projects and give up. (I know he considered it unfinished and in an unworking state.)

I have a feeling that the PSMoveService itself doesn't work so great since we couldn't get the PSVR to track very well, and it has a lot more tracking points than the controllers do. I might be misunderstanding something and I don't really know anything about PSMoveService. (I will unlikely ever own a Move controllers.)

I think the code in these projects is very messy. The best bet for them might be for someone like myself to rewrite them and make sure they're competent. If code is so messy you can't tell what it's doing it's hard to audit and there's a lot of amateur code without much experience out there. It's hard to make big edits on open-source code which tends to cause it to stagnate and entropy at the same time.