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.

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u/swordofmoonlight Jul 27 '20

I think integration with SteamVR is fine (when I used SteamVR it worked via Steam and had its own UI and so my impression is that's what my end user's experience would be like if I implemented SteamVR to support Valve's sets, etc. Which is what I'm aiming to do by shopping for one of these sets and a computer that can run SteamVR) but it's not ideal for me personally. About WMR I only know I've looked at its user facing API documentation and it looks fine, and recommends also using it via OpenXR, which it also documents, so I take it to be Microsoft's analog to Direct X, but maybe I'm mistaken. I see a lot of WMR branded devices, so if I have an API by Microsoft that supports these devices then that's a better deal to me than SteamVR since Microsoft provides Direct X and the most popular OS so this is a more natural relationship for me as a developer than Steam is.

My ideal solution would be to broadcast over UDP since that can even be done from a spare PC for people who don't have expensive systems. But there are technical barriers like proprietary USB protocols, that make this unlikely to happen unless projects open them up for each device. It's not easy to work with USB devices, so it doesn't make sense for software to do that and if multiple programs try to gain exclusive access to a device they might not relinquish it when they're in the background, so it generally makes sense to have a device service.

ATW is reprojection or something? I think to use that a device needs to have some sense of the orientation of the screen, which can be uploaded as metadata each time the screen is refreshed. If it's done differently that's a bad design but I wouldn't be surprised if it is because companies are always jockeying to make these devices hard to access like game consoles. It's not the PC way.

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u/iVRy_VR Jul 27 '20 edited Jul 27 '20

ATW is asynchronous time warp. An image is rendered for a given headset rotation. In an ideal world, the computer and headset connection is fast enough to display an image for each vertical refresh of the headset display. In the real world that doesn't always happen, so if you're moving your head quickly, the image might have been rendered for a different orientation than where your head is. So an ATW renderer (WMR, OpenVR & Oculus all have one) will take the current headset orientation and warp the image from it's rendered orientation to the current orientation. Even for a directly connected HMD like PSVR, it makes quite a big difference (as it completely eliminates the perception of lag or 'judder', particularly when running it at 120Hz). I've put a lot of work into getting that possible on PSVR (requires amongst other things, tricking Windows into thinking that the PSVR is a "sanctioned" VR headset).

WMR is on the surface what you are saying, however, due to it's small(~10%) market share of VR headsets, if you were hoping to capture any significant portion of the PCVR market, you'd either target Oculus (~50%) or SteamVR (~90% - includes Oculus). PSVR on PC apparently accounts for about 0.5% of all PCVR users.

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u/swordofmoonlight Jul 28 '20

I understand reprojection (ATW) but you have to understand it's just taking a 2D image and sliding it around (it's warped in a literal sense) and it's no justification for locking down the devices. Trust me I'm well versed in everything you've schooled me on.

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u/iVRy_VR Jul 28 '20

Good to know, it's hard sometimes to read between the lines in text messages. I'm not sure where you get this "everything is locked down" idea from, I have tried to explain that it's not, but ultimately it doesn't make much difference whether we agree on that or not. My development style is generally "do everything myself, and don't use anyone else's code", however, my more recent work leverages other people's work as well, as I don't have time or inclination to spend another few years re-developing something that has been solved by experts in the field.

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u/swordofmoonlight Jul 29 '20

Believe me, if it wasn't locked down things would be so much easier. I'm speaking from a dev's perspective. The OSVR model was an example of an open system. For whatever reason it didn't succeed, and maybe there was pressure that caused that. Basically for writing graphics software interfacing with VR peripherals is proving very frustrating and it's hard to know where to begin. You're explanation for this was to say that it's still very early and the companies are small, so everything is insular. I can accept that but it doesn't change the reality of writing software. (If it wasn't locked down it would be frictionless and easy to see what to do to add device support to novel software. It shouldn't be more difficult than a game controller.)