VorpX is a new, commercial 3D driver which promises to unlock the virtual reality potential in your existing games library. We talk to its creator, Ralf Ostertag, to find out more.

“On the personal level, I’m — of course — a nerd”

We’ve had our hands on the beta version of vorpX for a couple of weeks now and are busy putting the finishing touches to the first part of our in-depth preview, due to land later this week. In the mean time, we wanted to know a little bit more about the man behind the vorpX project, so we spoke to Ralf Ostertag and asked him to fill us in.

Road to VR: Tell us a little about yourself.

Ralf: Professionally I’m what can be best described as a self-employed technical 3d artist, which means I’m doing content creation as well as programming work. Usually nothing gaming related, mostly product vizualization, cars, machinery that kind of stuff. Programming wise projects are mostly related to this work, quite specialized plugins for renderers and 3d-applications.

On the personal level, I’m — of course — a nerd, like most people doing jobs similar to mine. From time to time though I need a little break from being nerdy. When that’s the case, I jog a few miles or go windsurfing (greatest sport in the world by the way, everybody should try it!). And when I’m in the mood, I occasionally torture a piano.

Road to VR: Would you call yourself a VR enthusiast? What made you begin developing for the Rift?

Ralf: My story in this regard is most likely pretty similar to many of the slightly older guys who are interested in the Rift: I was quite intrigued by the idea of VR in the early- to mid-ninetees, when first (quite horrible) attempts where made to create VR consumer products. Then I nearly forgot about it, until last year a now well known young Californian came up with a slick low cost design made of mobile phone tech to make history.

Road to VR: Are you a gamer yourself?

Ralf: I’m a gamer for a pretty long time. My first real gaming computer was an Amiga, before that I owned a pre-historic console that most people won’t know about today, a Phillips G7000 (Odyssey 2 in the U.S.). That must have been in the early bronze age or so. At least gaming wise. Fortunately games weren’t as good as they are today, which is why I also started doing something productive with the machine. So, I never was a hardcore gamer who played dozens of hours a week, but I always loved (and love) to play role playing games of all kinds. A little shooter from time to time can’t hurt either, of course. Todays Bethesda-style first person RPGs are pretty close to what we dreamed of back in the day by the way. If only they would spend a little more development time for things beyond fighting…

Road to VR: How did vorpX come to be?

Ralf: vorpX started as a small image duplication + warping shader project that I hacked together directly after backing the Rift-Kickstarter. No 3D, no headtracking, just something I did to play a few classic games I wanted to try on the DIY-Rift I had built. But since I’m seldomly perfectly satisfied with anything I do, I started to add more and more functionality until eventually I realized that I invested too much time into the project to give it away for free. Since then it is called vorpX.

Road to VR: How much will vorpX go on sale for? What does your money buy you?

Ralf: Let’s first start with [what] vorpX does not buy you. I said that in quite a few discussions half a year ago, and I think it’s important to stick to the truth in this regard: vorpX does not magically convert any existing game into the 100% perfect VR experience. No driver for older games will do that, it’s up to games designed with VR in mind to deliver that experience.

That being said, what vorpX does buy you is the opportunity to play games you already own on the Rift right now in the best possible way. And by that I don’t mean just making a game ’3D’. That’s important, but it’s not the most important thing when it comes to playing games beyond short tests. There is much more to consider. One example that I already talked about earlier: vorpX has a built in VR-menu, which let’s you map keyboard actions to a floating in-game menu that is operated by simply looking at ‘buttons’ you want to ‘press’. Think of it as a kind of augmented reality interface inside VR. That is not only pretty cool, it’s also a important thing for many games that use more (or more complex) keyboard shortcuts than just WASD.

There are quite a few features of this kind, dealing with UI problems, nausea inducing fixed cameras in cutscenes and so on.

So, all in all vorpX buys you a solid package that allows you to really play existing games on the Rift right now. About 80 DX9-DX11 games are supported in Stereo-3D, many more will just run without being officially supported. Only thing missing in unsupported games is Stereo-3D, but that works still pretty well.

As for the price: In the introduction period vorpX will be sold for 40$/35€, or roughly 50 cents for each supported game.

Road to VR: Are titles graded according to their compatibility and features?

Ralf: Yes, there is some kind of grading system, although I wouldn’t really call it this way. vorpX shows a short message on startup whenever it has something useful to say. This may be a compatibility hint, something a user should do to get the most out of the game or whatever else might make sense.

Road to VR: What overhead does vorpX add? Any significant performance penalties?

Ralf: That question is a bit hard to answer. vorpX’s standard Z-Buffer reconstruction only has a negligible performance penalty. There are a few optional features like autofocus with depth of field for example that increase this penalty slightly, but with standard settings it’s only 5-10%. So you will be able to play nearly all games at full and steady 60fps without the need for a high end gaming rig. It can’t be stressed enough how important that is on the Rift. Overall it’s clearly the most important thing. Everyone who got his/her Rift already will know this by now.

I realize though that there are a few 3D-enthusiasts with very high standards and beefy machines out there for whom Z-Buffer 3D might not be what they expect, so vorpX also has an additional mode that renders two distinctive views. As of now this is true for about half of the supported games. The performance penalty in this mode is the same as with all drivers that render two views: about 50%.

Road to VR: What are your future plans for developing vorpX?

Ralf: Besides adding more games, there are quite a few ideas. One for example is a built in community-module that will allow users to share settings, tips etc., which will further reduce the need for fiddling around with settings and give people even more time to actually play. Something that is one of the main goals of vorpX, by the way. Even now you have to setup next to nothing when starting a new game.

And of course there are even more ideas. But that’s nothing I can talk of right now (I-will-get-shot-if-I-tell-stuff, you know the drill).

Thanks to Ralf for taking the time to talk to us. We’ll be posting Part 1 of our extensive preview of vorpX early next week. In the mean time, read more about vorpX over at the official website here.

The post VorpX Oculus Rift Driver Creator Ralf Ostertag Speaks to Road To VR appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

We take an exclusive early look at VorpX, a new commercial 3D Driver from developer Ralf Ostertag which promises to graft Oculus Rift support onto existing games that were developed and released long before the Rift was even a twinkle in Palmer Luckey’s eye. How well can it work? Let’s find out.

Inject VR Into Your Old Games

The Oculus Rift Developer Kit is finally in people’s hands (including ours!)! in fact, according to Palmer Luckey, all Kickstarter Dev Kits will have shipped to their lucky recipients by the end of May. And despite both the original Kickstarter pitch and Oculus VR’s constant assertions since it’s spectacular $2.5M successful funding run that this is resolutely NOT ready for the regular gamer, not many listened. To be honest, there wasn’t much chance that the most exciting development in gaming for years wasn’t going to be snapped up by gamers looking to bring their 90s dreams of Virtual Reality to life.

So it’s day zero for VR then, which of course means that very few actual games exist with support for the Rift. So, what do Rift owners give their new gadget to feed in the mean time?

Bioshock using Geometry Mode

Take me straight to the games!

What is VorpX?

For a Virtual Reality HMD (Head Monuted Display) to deliver a compelling experience, you need to address a few issues that unsupported games suffer from:

1. There’s no Head Tracking support. Moving your head has no effect on your view of the game’s world.

2. There’s no image pre-warping. The Oculus Rift uses Aspheric lenses which distorts light passing through them to achieve it’s high Field of View. So, in order for games to ‘look’ right to the user, the image must be  warped (or undistoreted [sic] if you like) to correct this distortion and any aberrations.

3. Stereo 3D support is currently provided as either GPU specific implementations (i.e. nVidia 3D Vision) or 3rd party drivers (i.e. Tri-Def).

From the official website:

VorpX is a 3d-driver for DirectX9-11 games that is specifically geared towards VR-devices like the Oculus Rift. Additionally to ‘making games 3d’ it offers various features to tackle many of the issues that arise when playing games on the Rift that are not designed for it.

To explain further, VorpX hijacks the rendering and input IO pipeline when a game initiates 3D acceleration and maps head-tracking input data from the HMD to mouse commands within the game.  Along the way, VorpX also forces the rendering of two in-game ‘cameras’ so that distinct, shifted views (one for each eye) can be presented to the HMD’s screen. Finally, the views are ‘warped’ to accompany the Oculus Rift’s Aspheric lenses and presented to the HMD’s display ready for viewing.

The practical upshot of all this is that you can (in theory at least) play many games in your library using the Rift, with high-FOV, Stereo 3D and head tracking as if the game had been built with support from the beginning. In theory it’s a little more complicated than that (which we’ll come to later) but this is the core premise behind the product.

For all these reasons, you can understand why VorpX is one of the most hotly anticipated bits of software in the VR community. With that in mind, I spent a couple of weeks with a beta preview version recording my thoughts, observations, configuration tips and gameplay to give you the fullest possible picture on whether VorpX is for you.

Know Your Buffers: 3D Reconstruction Explained

As mentioned, VorpX forces the rendering of Stereoscopic 3D as part of it’s injection process – essentially shoehorning depth where none previously existed – hence ‘Reconstruction’.

VorpX supports 2 main methods of 3D Reconstruction, Geometry and Z-Buffer (or 2D + Depth) based rendering. It’s important to understand the differences between them as it helps illustrate the flexibility and power of VorpX whist highlighting some of the compromises that are needed to make it work effectively.

Z-Buffer Mode (aka 2D + Depth)

The default mode in VorpX (referred to as ‘normal’  in the menu), Z-Buffer reconstruction renders depth based on objects position on the Z-axis in a 3D rendered scene. I defer to this excellent article on 3D rendering at Gamasutra:

2D + depth rendering creates the 3D effect in games by sampling the geometry in the scene to obtain the depth-map, and then using it to generate a second point of view from the regular 2D color image. This technique renders the scene for the left eye, and then creates the image for the right eye using a per-pixel displacement based on the depth map — making the results geometrically accurate.

The key advantage to the 2D + depth technique is the low impact that its integration has on production. It requires that the game only render frames once, which has a low performance impact on the game.

Features: 

• Extremely fast.
• Effective at adding depth and scale to first person views.
• Requires few if any tweaks to game configurations to work.
• 3D / Parallax effect limited when compared to Geometry mode.

Geometry Mode

The traditional method of rendering 2 distinct views of the same scene, mimicking the way our eyes view the real world. Again from Gamasutra:

In comparison, dual rendering creates the strongest 3D effect, and is used for movies as well as in video games. For movies, to create stereoscopic 3D images using the effect of parallax, film makers need to capture two images shot from slightly different angles. This means 3D-compatible cameras are needed in order to record the two images simultaneously. This allows one image for each eye to be projected onto the same screen to create a 3D effect.

In the case of video games, to construct a three-dimensional virtual world, game makers need to position characters, buildings and other objects in a manner that simulates a miniature version of the real world. In doing this, they can position two cameras to capture slightly dissimilar images of the same scene, just as the right and left eyes would do.

Features:

• Strongest and most effective 3D / Parallax effect
• High rendering overhead. Up to 50% slower
• Lowest compatibility for existing games (shader / lighting and post processing effects can cause glitches)

These two methods with their drastically different approaches to 3D rendering clearly both have their strengths and weaknesses. So it’s refreshing to note that VorpX not only includes both options, but that you can swap them on-the-fly whilst the game is running, giving you the ability to decide which method suits which game suits which method best. There is one caveat here however, Geometry mode will only work with games which can run in DirectX 9 mode.

Anyway, with the science is out of the way, onto the important stuff .. Games!

The post VorpX Driver Preview: Skyrim, Fallout 3, BioShock, and More with the Oculus Rift — Unlock the VR in Your Games Library (videos) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

“Are you a gamer yourself? Was there a gem in particular that”
end of question missing.

“Let’s first start with vorpX does you not buy.”
-> “Let’s first start with what vorpX does not buy you.”
?

Wow – two howlers there – now fixed. Many thanks Alexander.

Mmm, no, the second line pointed out above still has a mistake.

“Let’s first start with vorpx does not buy you”
Should be
“Let’s first start with WHAT vorpx does not buy you”

Took me a while to wrap my brain around that line. Almost convinced me he wasn’t good at English.

Aside from that, I’m excited to see what Vorpx can do. If only my Rift would ship out…

Heh! Fixed (again). Not sure what I was doing when I wrote this one up, clearly my mind was elsewhere. :)

VorpX is a new, commercial 3D driver which promises to unlock the virtual reality potential in your existing games library. We talk to its creator, Ralf Ostertag, to find out more.

“On the personal level, I’m — of course — a nerd”

We’ve had our hands on the beta version of vorpX for a couple of weeks now and are busy putting the finishing touches to the first part of our in-depth preview, due to land later this week. In the mean time, we wanted to know a little bit more about the man behind the vorpX project, so we spoke to Ralf Ostertag and asked him to fill us in.

Road to VR: Tell us a little about yourself.

Ralf: Professionally I’m what can be best described as a self-employed technical 3d artist, which means I’m doing content creation as well as programming work. Usually nothing gaming related, mostly product vizualization, cars, machinery that kind of stuff. Programming wise projects are mostly related to this work, quite specialized plugins for renderers and 3d-applications.

On the personal level, I’m — of course — a nerd, like most people doing jobs similar to mine. From time to time though I need a little break from being nerdy. When that’s the case, I jog a few miles or go windsurfing (greatest sport in the world by the way, everybody should try it!). And when I’m in the mood, I occasionally torture a piano.

Road to VR: Would you call yourself a VR enthusiast? What made you begin developing for the Rift?

Ralf: My story in this regard is most likely pretty similar to many of the slightly older guys who are interested in the Rift: I was quite intrigued by the idea of VR in the early- to mid-ninetees, when first (quite horrible) attempts where made to create VR consumer products. Then I nearly forgot about it, until last year a now well known young Californian came up with a slick low cost design made of mobile phone tech to make history.

Road to VR: Are you a gamer yourself?

Ralf: I’m a gamer for a pretty long time. My first real gaming computer was an Amiga, before that I owned a pre-historic console that most people won’t know about today, a Phillips G7000 (Odyssey 2 in the U.S.). That must have been in the early bronze age or so. At least gaming wise. Fortunately games weren’t as good as they are today, which is why I also started doing something productive with the machine. So, I never was a hardcore gamer who played dozens of hours a week, but I always loved (and love) to play role playing games of all kinds. A little shooter from time to time can’t hurt either, of course. Todays Bethesda-style first person RPGs are pretty close to what we dreamed of back in the day by the way. If only they would spend a little more development time for things beyond fighting…

Road to VR: How did vorpX come to be?

Ralf: vorpX started as a small image duplication + warping shader project that I hacked together directly after backing the Rift-Kickstarter. No 3D, no headtracking, just something I did to play a few classic games I wanted to try on the DIY-Rift I had built. But since I’m seldomly perfectly satisfied with anything I do, I started to add more and more functionality until eventually I realized that I invested too much time into the project to give it away for free. Since then it is called vorpX.

Road to VR: How much will vorpX go on sale for? What does your money buy you?

Ralf: Let’s first start with [what] vorpX does not buy you. I said that in quite a few discussions half a year ago, and I think it’s important to stick to the truth in this regard: vorpX does not magically convert any existing game into the 100% perfect VR experience. No driver for older games will do that, it’s up to games designed with VR in mind to deliver that experience.

That being said, what vorpX does buy you is the opportunity to play games you already own on the Rift right now in the best possible way. And by that I don’t mean just making a game ’3D’. That’s important, but it’s not the most important thing when it comes to playing games beyond short tests. There is much more to consider. One example that I already talked about earlier: vorpX has a built in VR-menu, which let’s you map keyboard actions to a floating in-game menu that is operated by simply looking at ‘buttons’ you want to ‘press’. Think of it as a kind of augmented reality interface inside VR. That is not only pretty cool, it’s also a important thing for many games that use more (or more complex) keyboard shortcuts than just WASD.

There are quite a few features of this kind, dealing with UI problems, nausea inducing fixed cameras in cutscenes and so on.

So, all in all vorpX buys you a solid package that allows you to really play existing games on the Rift right now. About 80 DX9-DX11 games are supported in Stereo-3D, many more will just run without being officially supported. Only thing missing in unsupported games is Stereo-3D, but that works still pretty well.

As for the price: In the introduction period vorpX will be sold for 40$/35€, or roughly 50 cents for each supported game.

Road to VR: Are titles graded according to their compatibility and features?

Ralf: Yes, there is some kind of grading system, although I wouldn’t really call it this way. vorpX shows a short message on startup whenever it has something useful to say. This may be a compatibility hint, something a user should do to get the most out of the game or whatever else might make sense.

Road to VR: What overhead does vorpX add? Any significant performance penalties?

Ralf: That question is a bit hard to answer. vorpX’s standard Z-Buffer reconstruction only has a negligible performance penalty. There are a few optional features like autofocus with depth of field for example that increase this penalty slightly, but with standard settings it’s only 5-10%. So you will be able to play nearly all games at full and steady 60fps without the need for a high end gaming rig. It can’t be stressed enough how important that is on the Rift. Overall it’s clearly the most important thing. Everyone who got his/her Rift already will know this by now.

I realize though that there are a few 3D-enthusiasts with very high standards and beefy machines out there for whom Z-Buffer 3D might not be what they expect, so vorpX also has an additional mode that renders two distinctive views. As of now this is true for about half of the supported games. The performance penalty in this mode is the same as with all drivers that render two views: about 50%.

Road to VR: What are your future plans for developing vorpX?

Ralf: Besides adding more games, there are quite a few ideas. One for example is a built in community-module that will allow users to share settings, tips etc., which will further reduce the need for fiddling around with settings and give people even more time to actually play. Something that is one of the main goals of vorpX, by the way. Even now you have to setup next to nothing when starting a new game.

And of course there are even more ideas. But that’s nothing I can talk of right now (I-will-get-shot-if-I-tell-stuff, you know the drill).

Thanks to Ralf for taking the time to talk to us. We’ll be posting Part 1 of our extensive preview of vorpX early next week. In the mean time, read more about vorpX over at the official website here.

The post VorpX Oculus Rift Driver Creator Ralf Ostertag Speaks to Road To VR appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

We take an exclusive early look at VorpX, a new commercial 3D Driver from developer Ralf Ostertag which promises to graft Oculus Rift support onto existing games that were developed and released long before the Rift was even a twinkle in Palmer Luckey’s eye. How well can it work? Let’s find out.

Inject VR Into Your Old Games

The Oculus Rift Developer Kit is finally in people’s hands (including ours!)! in fact, according to Palmer Luckey, all Kickstarter Dev Kits will have shipped to their lucky recipients by the end of May. And despite both the original Kickstarter pitch and Oculus VR’s constant assertions since it’s spectacular $2.5M successful funding run that this is resolutely NOT ready for the regular gamer, not many listened. To be honest, there wasn’t much chance that the most exciting development in gaming for years wasn’t going to be snapped up by gamers looking to bring their 90s dreams of Virtual Reality to life.

So it’s day zero for VR then, which of course means that very few actual games exist with support for the Rift. So, what do Rift owners give their new gadget to feed in the mean time?

Bioshock using Geometry Mode

Take me straight to the games!

What is VorpX?

For a Virtual Reality HMD (Head Monuted Display) to deliver a compelling experience, you need to address a few issues that unsupported games suffer from:

1. There’s no Head Tracking support. Moving your head has no effect on your view of the game’s world.

2. There’s no image pre-warping. The Oculus Rift uses Aspheric lenses which distorts light passing through them to achieve it’s high Field of View. So, in order for games to ‘look’ right to the user, the image must be  warped (or undistoreted [sic] if you like) to correct this distortion and any aberrations.

3. Stereo 3D support is currently provided as either GPU specific implementations (i.e. nVidia 3D Vision) or 3rd party drivers (i.e. Tri-Def).

From the official website:

VorpX is a 3d-driver for DirectX9-11 games that is specifically geared towards VR-devices like the Oculus Rift. Additionally to ‘making games 3d’ it offers various features to tackle many of the issues that arise when playing games on the Rift that are not designed for it.

To explain further, VorpX hijacks the rendering and input IO pipeline when a game initiates 3D acceleration and maps head-tracking input data from the HMD to mouse commands within the game.  Along the way, VorpX also forces the rendering of two in-game ‘cameras’ so that distinct, shifted views (one for each eye) can be presented to the HMD’s screen. Finally, the views are ‘warped’ to accompany the Oculus Rift’s Aspheric lenses and presented to the HMD’s display ready for viewing.

The practical upshot of all this is that you can (in theory at least) play many games in your library using the Rift, with high-FOV, Stereo 3D and head tracking as if the game had been built with support from the beginning. In theory it’s a little more complicated than that (which we’ll come to later) but this is the core premise behind the product.

For all these reasons, you can understand why VorpX is one of the most hotly anticipated bits of software in the VR community. With that in mind, I spent a couple of weeks with a beta preview version recording my thoughts, observations, configuration tips and gameplay to give you the fullest possible picture on whether VorpX is for you.

Know Your Buffers: 3D Reconstruction Explained

As mentioned, VorpX forces the rendering of Stereoscopic 3D as part of it’s injection process – essentially shoehorning depth where none previously existed – hence ‘Reconstruction’.

VorpX supports 2 main methods of 3D Reconstruction, Geometry and Z-Buffer (or 2D + Depth) based rendering. It’s important to understand the differences between them as it helps illustrate the flexibility and power of VorpX whist highlighting some of the compromises that are needed to make it work effectively.

Z-Buffer Mode (aka 2D + Depth)

The default mode in VorpX (referred to as ‘normal’  in the menu), Z-Buffer reconstruction renders depth based on objects position on the Z-axis in a 3D rendered scene. I defer to this excellent article on 3D rendering at Gamasutra:

2D + depth rendering creates the 3D effect in games by sampling the geometry in the scene to obtain the depth-map, and then using it to generate a second point of view from the regular 2D color image. This technique renders the scene for the left eye, and then creates the image for the right eye using a per-pixel displacement based on the depth map — making the results geometrically accurate.

The key advantage to the 2D + depth technique is the low impact that its integration has on production. It requires that the game only render frames once, which has a low performance impact on the game.

Features: 

• Extremely fast.
• Effective at adding depth and scale to first person views.
• Requires few if any tweaks to game configurations to work.
• 3D / Parallax effect limited when compared to Geometry mode.

Geometry Mode

The traditional method of rendering 2 distinct views of the same scene, mimicking the way our eyes view the real world. Again from Gamasutra:

In comparison, dual rendering creates the strongest 3D effect, and is used for movies as well as in video games. For movies, to create stereoscopic 3D images using the effect of parallax, film makers need to capture two images shot from slightly different angles. This means 3D-compatible cameras are needed in order to record the two images simultaneously. This allows one image for each eye to be projected onto the same screen to create a 3D effect.

In the case of video games, to construct a three-dimensional virtual world, game makers need to position characters, buildings and other objects in a manner that simulates a miniature version of the real world. In doing this, they can position two cameras to capture slightly dissimilar images of the same scene, just as the right and left eyes would do.

Features:

• Strongest and most effective 3D / Parallax effect
• High rendering overhead. Up to 50% slower
• Lowest compatibility for existing games (shader / lighting and post processing effects can cause glitches)

These two methods with their drastically different approaches to 3D rendering clearly both have their strengths and weaknesses. So it’s refreshing to note that VorpX not only includes both options, but that you can swap them on-the-fly whilst the game is running, giving you the ability to decide which method suits which game suits which method best. There is one caveat here however, Geometry mode will only work with games which can run in DirectX 9 mode.

Anyway, with the science is out of the way, onto the important stuff .. Games!

The post VorpX Driver Preview: Skyrim, Fallout 3, BioShock, and More with the Oculus Rift — Unlock the VR in Your Games Library (videos) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

A soon to be released beta version of vorpX will bring support for not only Battlefield 4 but also Call of Duty: Ghosts to the Oculus Rift. Watch us preview BF4 support in a new video.

Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty:Ghosts Now in the Oculus Rift

Just a quick heads-up and heads-in of Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts support in a new version of the vorpX Oculus Rift VR driver, with yours truly taking BF4 for a spin. Both games are supported in full stereoscopic 3D in Z-Buffer mode and run incredibly well. In comparison to the more CPU / GPU intensive Geometry mode (not yet supported in DX11 games) Z-Buffer offers a fast, if less accurate, 3D rendering method. However, the effect on large scale battlefields is striking—as you can see in the video above.

No word on exactly when the support will be released officially but we’re told it’ll definitely be ‘soon’. The update will of course be free to all owners of vorpX and will be delivered as an automatic update once released. We’ll keep you fully informed as to when that happens.

Buy vorpX Now

Full disclosure: Road to VR participated in testing the vorpX alpha/beta and has an affiliate agreement with vorpX on sales through our site.

The post Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty Ghosts Coming Soon to the Oculus Rift with New Version of VorpX VR Driver [video] appeared first on Road to Virtual Reality.

As promised recently, a new update to the VR Injection driver vorpX, which brings support for Battlefield 4 and CoD: Ghosts is now available for download.

vorpX Version 0.64

All current owners of vorpX can obtain the new update automatically by restarting vorpX upon which the update (around 10MB in size) will download and install. Full release notes below:

New/Changed:

- Experimental 64bit support
- Added NullTracker to disable tracking completely

Bugfixes:

- Various changes to avoid startup crashes with Steam/Origin/UPlay games on some systems
- Potential crash issues while loading Oculus profiles
- VR Keys mapping not working
- Gamepad mapping not working
- Default Eye Separation twice as high as intended in Geometry 3D
- Keyboard focus ‘ding issue’ with various games
- vorpX Control does not start in Windows Vista
- Disabling vorpX freezes screen in Geometry 3D
- Headtracking activates vorpX option freezes rendering under certain circumstances
- DX9 render time handling in Geometry 3D

Added Profiles:

- ARMA III (Z3D)
- Battlefield 4 (Z3D)
- Bioshock 2 (G3D, Z3D)
- Dead Space 2 (G3D, Z3D)
- Dead Space 3 (G3D, Z3D)
- Outlast (G3D, Z3D)
- Q.U.B.E (G3D, Z3D)
- Splinter Cell Blacklist (Z3D)

Profile changes/fixes:

- Battlefield 3: no 3D after ALT-TAB/Resize
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Support for the Director’s Cut added
- Elder Scrolls: Oblivion: nightsky/stars look weird with Geometry 3D
- Elder Scrolls: Skyrim: nightsky/stars look weird with Geometry 3D
- Fallout 3: nightsky/stars look weird with Geometry 3D
- Fallout NV: nightsky/stars look weird with Geometry 3D
- X3: Should now support X3: Albion Prelude in 3D (untested)

Buy vorpX Now

The post VorpX Version 0.64 Released—Brings Battlefield 4 and CoD: Ghosts Support to the Oculus Rift appeared first on Road to Virtual Reality.

There’s one genre that seems to be rushing to adopt the Oculus Rift – Racing Simulations. iRacing, LFS and Assetto Corsa all now support the Rift, we take a look.

Overtaking Other Genres

If there’s one group of gamers who demonstrate calm and quiet fanatacism it’s racing sim fans. The search for realism in an effort to replicate the thrill of tearing round a track at breakneck speeds can be a descent into the question for perfection. Pedals, Steering Wheels, Racing Seats and even Full Motion rigs are available for those dedicated enough but one surprisingly cost effective accessory seems to be catching the imaginations of both Racing Sim developers and Users alike.

Currently, every major racing sim title on the PC can be played in one form or another in VR with the Oculus Rift and most are actively developing native support. We summarise the current state of the Rift-Racer in this handy round up.

iRacing

The most successful Sim Racer, iRacing attracts paid subscribers in their thousands from around the world who race online with one another. Famed for its realism and the dedication of its fans, iRacing is the premier title for realistic Racing gaming. It’s also supported the Oculus Rift in steady increments for months. Only relatively recently however has the alpha version moved to beta in releases ‘normal’ iRacing subscribers can access.
iRacing development team have been used by Oculus VR recently to demonstrate their HD 1080p Prototype at various games shows around the world. It’s easy to see why as the Rift support is first rate. GUI is handled well, tracking head movement and moving menu elements into view as you glance to the extremes of your view. I’m told by a friend who’s also an iRacing nut with an Oculus Rift that resolution on the DK1 is still too low to consider the Rift as a competitive edge in racing, but that the overall experience whilst wearing the HMD is second to none.

You can sign up to iRacing here. Oculus Rift support is still in beta at this time but is considered as stable and extremely good.

Live For Speed (LFS)

Another stalwart of the Sim Racer’s canon, Live for Speed is highly regarded. Whilst its visuals are perhaps not as polished as some of its brethren, its driving model and physics engine is still regarded as excellent and it still has legions of fans around the world. Another title with a monthly subscription model, the highest level giving you access to 20 cars and 7 tracks. But, you can download the free demo (limited to 3 cars and a single track) – Oculus Rift support is available for the demo version too.

As of November 2013, early Oculus Rift support began to appear as patches announced on the LFS forums (starting with version 0.6E8). As of writing, the current version (0.6E11) offers full head tracking and selectable Oculus Rift mode from within the games UI. The support is considered good although I’ve only had limited time with the game as yet. I’d certainly recommend downloading the Demo and latest patch to give it a whirl.

Assetto Corsa

For those that like their racing simulations a tad more accessible and perhaps a little more glamorous, Assetto Corsa is probably for you.

Assetto Corsa, the in-development driving game from the Kunos Simulazioni team, probably sits somewhere between iRacing and PGR, think Gran Turismo with a proper physics engine. The game engine has evolved over several iterations with the guts of the apparently excellent physics engine primed from netKar and the Ferrari Racing Academy. Assetto Corsa (“Racing Setup” in Italian apparently). I tried out the Rift support recently, and found it was already shaping up well. Check the video out for my thoughts in motion above.

I was pleasantly surprised as you’ll hear in the video  and in terms of offering an accessible and fun VR experience, despite the serious slant of the gameplay, Assetto Corsa gets it just right. Tearing down straights with your virtual head strapped to the bonnet of a car is a great experience and with the exception of the in-car view suffering from a scaling issue (everything is a little too small) it all works beautifully. There is however currently some issues with drift during gameplay – but given the rapid progress the team have made thus far, I suspect it won’t be too long before this ironed out.

You can get early access to the Assetto Corsa beta via Steam here.

rFactor

Developers Image Space Incorporated released the original rFactor way back in 2005 featuring for the time an advanced game engine culled from the team’s F1 Challenge 99-02 engine. rFactor 2, the current platform, was released in 2013. With a base price + online subscription model – price of entry is slightly higher than the other in the list – but rFactor 2 does offer demo version too.

rFactor 2 is the only title on this list with no official and integrated support for VR. Instead, rFactor fans and 3rd party drivers offer options to get your Rift on with the game. Here are the available known methods at the time of writing:

vorpX: vorpX offers full StereoScopic Geometry 3D and head tracking for rFactor 1 and 2. You can grab a copy of vorpX here.

Rf2Rift Plugin + TriDef Ignition Beta Drivers: This method is somewhat more complicated but does offer full head tracking and stereoscopic 3D support once you’re all setup. You will need the latest version of DDD’s TriDef Ignition Beta with Oculus Rift support. Once you have this, follow the instructions in this thread to get the game configured and working correctly. The video above demonstrates the results using this method.

Project Cars (pCars) – In Development Support

Native Oculus Rift support has been announced as ‘in development’ for Project Cars but as of now no public release offer this nor do we yet know when it might arrive. The best place to keep up to date on the current state of OR support for Project Cars is this forum thread on the pCars / WMD forum. We’ll of course yet you know if we learn anything.

The Racing Simulation community have always strived for ways to edge their in-game experiences close to reality. Virtual Reality offers the chance to take that desire for realism to its logical conclusion. With top flight support from the iRacing team and official and decimated support being built in for new titles such as Assetto Corsa, it’s fairly clear that developers are as keen to see this support as the users.

The post Round-up: Simulation Racers With Oculus Rift Support appeared first on Road to Virtual Reality.

It’s been a little while since VorpX, the 3D injection driver that allows you to use your Oculus Rift with many non-VR games, was released. VorpX was the first commercially available driver of its kind to be released to the public and allowed you to fire up Skyrim and wander the world in VR with head tracking and stereoscopic 3D. Now, VorpX developer Ralf Ostertag has announced that the next major release will add some cool new features, including support for the Oculus Rift DK2.

For those who’ve received their Oculus Rift DK2′s, the dawning realisation that, out of the box, compatible content that supports the device is a little thin on the ground. This is improving quickly as more and more developers covert their code to the new SDK, but it’s a waiting game right now. The good news is, the next major release of VorpX adds support for Oculus’ latest VR headset, the DK2. This of course now means playing your games in VR on the DK2′s glorious new 1080p OLED display with low persistence and incredible contrast. As anyone who has spent any time with the DK1 and played games using VorpX on that device, this addition alone would make you sit up and take notice. However, the forthcoming build adds the following tasty options too.

Oculus Rift DK2 Positional Tracking

Thus far limited to one title, The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim (2011), experimental support for one of the DK2′s new features optical positional tracking has been added. This means you can now lean, peer into, and dodge around the game’s epic fantasy world, adding even more immersion for Elder Scrolls fans. Check the video above for this new feature in action. More titles should follow Skyrim later with positional tracking support.

Full Geometry Based Stereoscopic 3D Support for DX11 Titles

VorpX was the first to offer stereoscopic 3D support for DirectX11 based titles such as Bioshock: Infinite (2013) using an alternative method of stereo 3D rendering known as Z-Buffer 3D. This alternative method provides a very quick way to add depth to a scene, in particular large open spaces. The new version of VorpX unlocks Geometry based 3D, a more authentic and accurate method to describe a 3D world, to DX11 games. We’ve had a chance to experience this for ourselves and it works very well indeed. A jaunt through Bioshock: Infinite was particularly impressive with expansive scenes and in particular close proximity objects rendered with more solidity, accuracy, and depth.

Apply Optimal Game Configs From VorpX

The whole point of VorpX is that you’re adding VR support to a game that currently has none. This often means, in order to get the optimal experience from the game in question, you’ll need to dive into config files to tweak settings such as FOV. The forthcoming version of VorpX contains a feature to apply the most common of these settings from the VorpX configuration utility. A good example is Mirror’s Edge (2008), which requires key bindings in order to switch the in-game FOV. Select the game profile within VorpX’s control panel, hit apply and those settings are automatically engaged for you with no requirements for digging around in your profile directories. This is great user experience enhancement and once that will hopefully save a lot of scratched heads and frustration. In addition to the above, the forthcoming version of VorpX adds the following headline features:

• 15 more games supported, more to follow soon
• Reduced head tracking lag in many DX9 games with VSync enabled
• Simplified setup (selecting the correct eye cups is enough in most cases)
• 75% Reduced watcher CPU usage
• 15% Faster pixel shader

Apart from that there are about 50 smaller additions and bugfixes included too, according to developer Ralf Ostertag. Other than that, Ostertag has worked hard to address one of the niggles users’ found fault with upon VorpX’s initial release; product registration, which was initially a manual process, has now been mostly automated. Ostertag tells Road to VR, “Usually this is a matter of minutes now. In some cases authorizations still have to be done manually, but 99% of all requests are automatically answered within minutes.” Existing VorpX owners will be able to upgrade to the latest version when it’s released.

Previous licenses are still valid, and will continue to work without any issues. Upgrades are issued automatically, similar to how the Steam update process works. VorpX checks for updates on startup. In case someone’s PC is behind a firewall that does forbid that, the original web installer that was downloaded after the purchase can be used for a manual update.

When we asked when to expect the new version of VorpX with Oculus Rift DK2 support, we get a one word answer: “Soon ;)”. Rest assured we’ll let you know the moment we know more. Meanwhile, we’ve got access to an early DK2 enabled version and are putting it through its paces to bring you some new videos and our impressions very soon. Meanwhile, if you’d like to grab a copy of VorpX ahead of the new version release, you can do that and support Road to VR by purchasing via our VorpX portal here. Full Disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with VorpX.

The post VorpX Update to Add Oculus Rift DK2 Support and More – Skyrim Positional Tracking Demo (video) appeared first on Road to Virtual Reality.

The new version of VorpX, the 3D driver that lets you play non-VR games on your Oculus Rift, has just been released and it adds early support for the DK2, Geometry 3D support for DirectX 11 games and positional tracking for Skyrim.

VorpX Adds Early Oculus Rift DK2 Support and Much More

Watching the dawn of the new VR revolution is never anything less than fascinating; the sheer level of creative output seen since the Oculus Rift DK1 launch last year has been staggering. But, until a commercial product is released, triple A gaming titles with virtual reality support are somewhat thin on the ground. VorpX allows you to play many of your favourite games in VR in full stereoscopic 3D with head tracking using your Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2.

The latest version of VorpX has just been released and it brings with it some exciting new features. One of the biggest feature additions, for Oculus Rift DK2 owners at least, is initial and early support for their shiny new VR headset, meaning you can now play games supported by the driver in 1080p and on that glorious OLED panel, a huge visual upgrade—especially for those jumping up from their old DK1.

Another big feature addition is brand new support for full Stereoscopic Geometry 3D with a collection of DirectX 11 based games—a feature previously restricted to DirectX 9 games. This means that the likes of Bioshock: Infinite, F1:2013, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution with more convincing 3D depth, much closer to that you might experience in a made-for-vr game in fact. More games with DX11 G3D will follow. The video above gives you a glimpse of what Bioshock: Infinite is like with DK2 and G3D support.

Oculus Rift DK2 Positional Tracking (Alpha)

And as we highlighted recently, the latest version of VorpX also adds DK2 positional tracking to the incredible Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim, meaning you can now lean in and out of the game just by moving your head. Peering around corners and more closely at signs and fine detail is especially cool, and adds a more natural sense of immersion to the experience. Currently this feature is in alpha and restricted to Skyrim, with the hope of more titles to be added soon.

Apply Optimal Game Configs From VorpX Control Panel

The whole point of VorpX is that you’re adding VR support to a game that currently has none. This often means, in order to get the optimal experience from the game in question, you’ll need to dive into config files to tweak settings such as FOV. The forthcoming version of VorpX contains a feature to apply the most common of these settings from the VorpX configuration utility. A good example is Mirror’s Edge (2008), which requires key bindings in order to switch the in-game FOV. Select the game profile within VorpX’s control panel, hit apply and those settings are automatically engaged for you with no requirements for digging around in your profile directories. This is great user experience enhancement and once that will hopefully save a lot of scratched heads and frustration.

All The New Features at a Glance

They’re the headline additions, but here’s the full list of features available in the latest edition of VorpX:

• Initial (Alpha) DK2 support
• Positional Tracking (Skyrim only for now, more to follow)
• G3D11 Geometry 3D (Bioshock: Infinite, F1:2013, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, more to follow)
• Game settings optimizer (supporting ~15 games for now, more to follow)
• More than 50 smaller bugfixes and enhancements, among them latency improvements, DK2 black smear fix, and easier setup
• 15 Additional games including: F1:2013 (G3D/Z3D), FEAR1+2 (G3D/Z3D), Gone Home (G3D), Thief [2014] (Z3D), Space Engineers (G3D/Z3D), The Stanley Parable (G3D/Z3D)

Where to Buy vorpX

You can buy VorpX through our affiliate portal.

Note For Existing Customers

If vorpX does not download the update when starting vorpX Control, it has to be updated manually. This can be done very easily by executing the web installer that was downloaded when vorpX was purchased. It will fetch the latest version that is available on the server.

Full Disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with VorpX.

The post VorpX Update Released – DK2 Support, Early Positional Tracking, DX11 G3D Support and More (video) appeared first on Road to Virtual Reality.

vorpX news has been thin on the ground just recently, but that’s because the team behind the project have been busy preparing one of the biggest releases yet. v0.8.0, released today, brings with it a raft of new features, including an innovative method to enhance traditional games via an enormous, virtual cinema screen.

vorpX, the app that lets you play games not designed for VR on your Oculus Rift, has come a long way since its initial release back in 2013. Since then it’s honed and tweaked its way through several releases, improving compatibility, adding DX11 support and even positional head tracking for the DK2 for some games.

Today, version 0.8.0 is released and brings with it another major feature addition which further enhances your ability to enjoy your favourite games – never intended for use in virtual reality – via your Oculus Rift.

Buy vorpX v0.8.0 Right Here

The feature is called Virtual Cinema Mode and allows you to play games thrown onto a huge screen, set inside a virtual living room. This means that games not traditionally well suited to playing in VR, titles such as Diablo III, Life Is Strange, Resident Evil Revelations 2, XCOM: Enemy Within. It gives you the illusion of playing on a decadent cinema screen – adding extra impact to the experience. It’s a great feature that has to be seen to be fully appreciated and something we think people will revisit older games with. What’s more, games displayed on the screen are in full stereoscopic 3D too!

Existing vorpX users should receive an automatically delivered update upon restarting their vorpX application.

Other important enhancements for vorpX 0.8.0 are:

• 38 new Stereo 3D profiles and 20 new Game Optimizer profiles, about 2/3 optimized for Virtual Cinema Mode (for games that otherwise don’t make much sense in VR).
• Up to 25% better Geometry 3D performance in CPU bound games, e.g. Skyrim. Up to 10% better performance in D3D11 Geometry 3D games with high shader count.
• Integrated, custom image sharpening filter with edge detection, highly optimized for speed and a pleasant sharpening effect that works very well in VR.
• All Compiled against Oculus SDK 0.5.0.1

Full Change Log / Bug Fix List

As stated, this is a huge release for the vorpX team, to illustrate that fact, here’s the full change log for v0.8.0:

New/Changed:

• Virtual Cinema mode for playing games that don’t work well in VR otherwise (3rd person, strategy, sports etc.)
• Geometry 3D performance increased up to 25% in CPU bound games (e.g. Skyrim)
• Improved EdgePeek mode based on the Virtual Cinema 3D rendering. (old 2D EdgePeek is still available as an option)
• Image sharpening filter added (display page of the ingame menu)
• vorpX now uses Oculus SDK version 0.5.0.1
• G3D shadow treatment now user selectable in some games
• D3D11 G3D efficiency improved, faster in games with huge amount of shaders
• Windows mouse acceleration can be disabled (per game setting, input page of the vorpX in-game menu), can improve head tracking in some games
• Positional tracking crouch/jump: triggered by velocity. Move slow = pos tracking, move fast = crouch/jump, has to be enabled per game in the vorpX in-game menu
• Better compatibility with downsampling display modes (DSR/VSR)
• Delayed input initialization for less intrusive game start behaviour
  (gets also rid of Rift init timeouts in some games).
• New transform modes for better control over individual elements/effects
• Some adjustments to the DK2 B-cups display parameters
• Adjustments to letterbox AR modes, making them more different
• Oculus Rift version is now auto detected in vorpControl
• Windows 8+ Modern UI Apps folder excluded from injection
• Config app: various usability enhancements
• Config app: Game Settings Optimizer now supports more settings types

Bugfixes:

• Head tracking pitch was accidentally disabled together with mouse y-axis in games that support this function
• Unwanted hotkey actions could be executed during FOV adjustment
• Keyboard input in gamepad/VR-Hotkey mapper had a few quirks
  Shift, Ctrl, Alt keys were not bindable to gamepad/hotkeys (post 0.7.5 regression)
• Secondary display behaviour wasn’t always optimal (Fallout NV,
  probably others)
• Some D3D11 G3D effect fixes were not initialized correctly (post 0.7.1 regression)
• D3D9 G3D stereo switching caused rendering errors (Stalker series, probably others)
• UI placement glitch after unsuccessful device creation (DX9)
• vorpX cursor was displayed at wrong position in G3D with HUD scaling active – Positional tracking message could not be closed with [ALT][SPACE] when game was minimized/maximized or rendering device was reset otherwise during message display
• Some 64bit vorpX desktop shortcuts still were not working
• Small memory leak in injection watcher fixed
• Switching 3D modes didn’t work in DX10 (post 0.6.4 regression)

Added Stereo 3D Profiles:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (G3D/Z3D)
• Battlefield: Hardline (Z3D)
• Dragon Age: Inquisition (Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Diablo III (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• The Elder Scrolls Online (G3D/Z3D)
• Dark Souls (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Dark Souls II (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Life Is Strange (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (G3D/Z3D)
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Lost Alpha (G3D)
• Evolve (Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Resident Evil/Biohazard 4 (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Resident Evil/Biohazard Revelations (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Resident Evil/Biohazard Revelations 2 (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• The Long Dark (Z3D)
• Serious Sam 3: BFE (G3D)
• Need for Speed: Rivals (Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• rFactor 2 (Z3D only, G3D too buggy)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Darksiders (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Darksiders II (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Starship Troopers (G3D/Z3D)
• Woolfe – The Redhood Diaries (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Trine (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Trine 2 (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• The Ball (G3D/Z3D)
• The Darkness II (G3D)
• Might & Magic: Heroes IV (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• The Old City: Leviathan (G3D/Z3D)
• Planetside 2 (G3D)
• Deadfall Adventures (G3D/Z3D)
• Hard Reset (G3D/Z3D)
• Risen 3: Titan Lords (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Fable Anniversary (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Lego: Lord of the Rings (G3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Legend of Grimrock (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode
• Legend of Grimrock II (G3D/Z3D), optimized for Virtual Cinema mode

Stereo 3D Profile changes/fixes:

• Fallout 3: game specific G3D settings were not applied in all cases
• Elder Scrolls: Skyrim: G3D transformations weren’t always applied as intended
• Borderlands 1-3: HUD-scaling affected elements that should not have been scaled
• GTA IV: G3D HUD handling (minimap/phone doesn’t change position with HUD scale)
• Duke Nukem Forever: various G3D fixes, now actually enjoyable in G3D
• System Shock 2: Z3D base parameters were completely off
• Portal 2: Default G3D 3D-Strength raised
• Deus Ex: HR: D3D11 G3D: some models were displaced with tesselation enabled
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat: Geometry 3D added, pos tracking unlocked
• Battlefield 3: Geometry 3D added (has shadow issues)
• Crysis: minimap wasn’t displayed correctly whith scaled HUD in G3D
• Aliens: Colonial Marines: HUD-handling added, positional tracking unlocked
• Fallout 3/NV: G3D HUD/menu glitches fixed
• Risen: HUD handling added, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• Elder Scrolls: Oblivion: G3D HUD/menu glitches fixed
• Mass Effect 2: Geometry 3D was not working anymore + HUD and effect fixes, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• Mass Effect 3: HUD handling added, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• Dragon Age: Origins: Geometry 3D fixes, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• Drakensang: River of Time: G3D didn’t work, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• The Witcher: FX-fixes, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• The Witcher 2: HUD handling added, default mode now Virtual Cinema
• Various 3rd person games changed to Virtual Cinema as default display mode
• Game Settings Optimizer Profiles:
• Thief [2014]: resolution and latency settings were not applied correctly
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution: entry added
• Serious Sam 3: BFE [Steam]: entry added
• Thief Gold [Steam/GOG]: entry added
• Thief 2 [Steam/GOG]: entry added
• System Shock 2 [Steam/GOG]: entry added
• Portal 2 [Steam]: entry added
• The Stanley Parabel [Steam]: entry added
• Starship Troopers: entry added
• Crysis 3: entry added
• The Ball: entry added
• Legend of Grimrock: entry added
• Legend of Grimrock II: entry added
• Battlefield: Hardline: entry added
• Evolve [Steam]: entry added
• Deadfall Adventures: entry added
• Diablo III: entry added
• The Old City: Leviathan: entry added
• Dark Souls II: entry added
• Hard Reset: entry added
• Elder Scrolls Online: entry added

You can buy vorpX and support Road to VR by purchasing it at our affiliate page right here.

Full Disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with vorpX. 

The post VorpX’s New Virtual Cinema Lets You Play Non-VR Games on a Virtual Big Screen appeared first on Road to VR.

VorpX, the VR driver that adds Oculus Rift support to your old games has just added support for Rockstar’s GTA V just hours after the game’s PC release.

Pretty fast work I’m sure you’ll agree, but the team behind VorpX have just added a working profile for the much anticipated (and much delayed) PC version of GTA V, the gaming mega-franchise from Rockstar games.

Get VorpX for GTA V Here

Now you can don your Oculus Rift, fire up vorpX, load up GTA V, enable the PC enhanced first person mode and voila, you’re dropped into the shoes of your favourite gangster as he careers around the beautiful city of San Andreas being generally pretty unpleasant.

The full update notes are below, but note that GTA V does have 3D support in super-fast ‘Z3D’ mode.

New/Changed:

• EdgePeek now has ambience background per default, can be switched back to black
  if required (expert option)

Bugfixes:

• FSX black screen (post 0.7.5 regression)
• COW: AW black screen when game starts (post 0.7.5 regression)
• Max Payne 3 (DX11) loops forever at “Initializing”
• Grand Theft Auto V loops forever at “Initializing”

Added Stereo 3D Profiles:

• Grand Theft Auto V (for now Z3D only)

Stereo 3D Profile changes/fixes:

• FSX: G3D menu corruption fixed
• Crysis: Profile wasn’t loaded for 64bit version

Game Settings Optimizer Profiles:

• Crysis: Profile added
• Grand Theft Auto V: Profile added

Please note – if you already own vorpX you should receive the latest version automatically upon starting the control application.

Let us know what you think of the new update and what GTA V fees like in VR in the comments below.

Full disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with vorpX.

The post Play GTA V in Virtual Reality with the Latest VorpX Release, Out Now appeared first on Road to VR.

What do you get when you piece together a Virtuix Omni VR treadmill, a DK2, and (with help from vorpX) a AAA title like GTA V? Madness. Pure madness.

Stealing a car is wrong. Shooting innocent bystanders in the face, now that’s downright egregious. But in the beautifully realistic Grand Theft Auto V, a title that just released for PC last week, you can now get away with all the virtual crimes your evil little heart desires—and with the help of a VR treadmill and vorpX, a suite of 3D drivers for Oculus Rift that lets you play previously unsupported titles, you can do your dastardly deeds running around in VR.

Buy VorpX and Support Road to VR

The Virtuix Omni (the VR treadmill in the video) has yet to ship (although will do soon) , the company is giddy to show off the potential of the device for when the market gears up to support VR natively. They’ve also shown their VR treadmill working with Battlefield 4, Minecraft, and with the Gear VR version of Dreadhalls.

See Also: Play GTA V in Virtual Reality with the Latest VorpX Release, Out Now

Full disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with vorpX.

The post Running Amok in GTA V with an Oculus Rift, a Virtuix Omni and VorpX appeared first on Road to VR.

PC Game launches don’t come much bigger than Grand Theft Auto, and GTA V’s launch just last week has been no exception. Similarly, VorpX’s rapid addition of GTA V support to allow players to experience the game on the Oculus Rift has been phenomenal. But how do you get the best out of GTA V with VorpX? Here’s an official guide from the developer himself, Ralf Ostertag.

VorpX has grown to be an extremely comprehensive and effective way to play your old games on the Oculus Rift since its launch back in late 2013 However, it does offer a bewildering array of options and each game is of course very different.

Buy VorpX for GTA V Now

VorpX has pre-baked profiles for many of it’s supported games, but as you’re adding virtual reality support to a game title which wasn’t designed for it, you need to take some extra steps to make sure you get the best experience possible.

Happily, Ralf Ostertag, the developer behind VorpX, has produced a detailed optimisation guide for Grand Theft Auto V, which runs you through the options available and the recommended extra enhancements available. It’s printed here in full with Ralf’s permission.

The GTA V / VorpX Configuration Guide

Due to many cutscenes, non-perfect FOV, partially locked viewing angle in cars etc., Virtual Cinema Mode probably is the best display mode to play this game, even in first person.

Playing in Virtual Cinema Mod

For a fully immersive experience in this display mode, I’d like to recommend the following tweaks:

1. Switch from the lounge scene to either the ambience or the no background scene, depending on what you like better.
2. Move the screen a little bit closer to you (“Screen Distance Offset”).
3. Adjust the head tracking sensitivity to your liking. 1:1 head tracking is not desirable in Virtual Cinema Mode as it is added to the head tracking in the virtual environment (hope that makes sense).

Enjoy the ride.

The game is fully playable in third and first person this way and many of the inherent issues mentioned above are mitigated quite nicely. Not 100% full VR, yet still a highly immersive experience.

Playing in full VR

If you want to play in full VR instead of using the Virtual Cinema Mode, the most important thing is to raise the field of view (FOV) above what the game allows, otherwise the image will look zoomed in and looking around may make you sick if you are sensitive to VR sickness.

An FOV hack is available in this reddit thread.

Another option would be Flawless Widescreen. This one also works with many other games and is easier to use.

The exact FOV value you have to use depends on the aspect ratio mode used in vorpX. For the one that fills the entire view (“Pixel 1:1″) you need ~120° horizontal (89° vertical).

Please keep in mind that such hacks tend to break and require an update when a game is patched. Memory hacks in general may also trigger anti-cheat systems. Although that’s unlikely in single player.

if you can’t or don’t want to use an FOV hack, you can also use a combination of “Letterbox 2″ Aspect Ratio Mode and an Image Scale of ~0.75 in the vorpX ingame menu. That compensates for the low FOV (but creates black bars around the image).

To switch to full VR mode in vorpX, simply disable “Virtual Cinema Mode”. Important: cutscenes are quite unpleasent in this mode since you can’t move your head. When a cutscenes starts, click the middle mouse button to switch to Virtual Cinema Mode for the duration of the cutscene. Another MMB click after the cutscene brings you back to full VR mode.

Head Tracking Latency

To reduce head tracking latency, please change the mouse input mode in the game’s options menu to “Windows”. Contrary to what one would expect this seems to have considerably lower latency than the default “Raw Input”.

nVidia users may also consider to set the vsync mode to “Adaptive Vsync” in the nVidia control panel. This helps a lot in low framerate situations. Disadvantage is that it causes screen tearing for framerates below 75fps.

No 3D Glitch

From time to time the depth buffer data that is required for the stereo 3d effect doesn’t seem to be available after the program starts. This is being looked into. Workaround: if you experience that, [ALT][TAB] to the desktop and then back into the game should reliably solve the issue.

Full disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with vorpX.

The post How to Configure VorpX to Play GTA V on the Oculus Rift appeared first on Road to VR.

vorpX, the VR injection driver that lets you to play non VR games in VR, has announced that the latest version will be out this month and will include some major updates including reworked DX11 3D Geometry support and Oculus Runtime 0.7 with ‘Direct Driver Mode’.

vorpX has come a long way since its initial release nearly 2 years ago and for its 2nd birthday, developer Ralf Ostertag has cooked up a feature packed update celebration for release by the end of the month.

Buy vorpX Here

The biggest highlights are likely to be vorpX’s new “reworked” DX11 3D Geometry renderer and the addition of Oculus Runtime v0.7 support.

The reworked DX11 G3D renderer provides stereoscopic support for newer games built on that platform and for most gives the most realistic 3D ‘feel’. This will also means a “few more” DX11 titles will be added to the supported list.

The inclusion of Oculus Runtime v0.7 support brings with it the support of the new ‘Direct Driver Mode’, whose low latency benefits were described by Oculus as thus:

Rather than inserting VR functionality between the OS and the graphics driver, headset awareness is added directly to the driver. As a result, Direct Driver Mode avoids many of the latency challenges of Extended Mode and also significantly reduces the number of conflicts between the Oculus SDK and third party applications.

That’s not all though, for vorpX version 0.9, you can also expect the following additional features and enhancements:

Support for arbitrary resolutions: This allows you to launch games at any resolution you want – you are not bound to resolutions that are supported by the headset anymore. Can be used to enhance image quality and, more importantly, in many cases can mitigate FOV issues by choosing 4:3/5:4 resolutions. Works with every game, even unsupported ones.

Internal Resolution Scaling: Similar to the above feature, vorpX 0.9 let’s you scale the internal resolution of some games like native apps do. Those mostly use higher resolutions internally to make up for the lens distortion. This will be DX9 only and restricted to a handful of games for now. More to come.

Super smooth Virtual Cinema Mode: Virtual Cinema Mode and EdgePeek are now fully decoupled from the game rendering for the best possible performance and next to unnoticable latency.

HUD-Scaling now also available in Z-Buffer 3D: For games that have HUD scaling in Geometry 3D, you will now be able to also use it if you switch to Z3D, which wasn’t possible before.

Better gamepad handling: The vorpX gamepad emulation has been largely rewritten and now supports hot plugging, multiple controllers, selective override of specific axes and more configuration options.

If you already own a vorpX license, you should expect an automatic update upon release, if you don’t and would like to play your old games in VR, buy it through Road to VR and help support us.

Full Disclosure: Road to VR has an affiliate agreement with vorpX. 

The post VorpX v0.9 to Bring ‘Direct Driver Mode’ and Enhanced DX11 3D Support appeared first on Road to VR.

VorpX is an application that lets you play your favourite games in virtual reality and is about to release its most “feature packed update ever”. The new release will drop on October 23rd and brings with it a host of tech updates including Oculus Runtime 0.7 support, Async Timewarp, ‘Crystal Image’ mode and a mode that allows you to browse the web, all inside your Oculus Rift VR headset.

We took a look at the forthcoming features teased by VorpX creator Ralf Ostertag a little while ago, but we now have a date for its release and a firm list of features to expect when the update launched on October 23rd.

Buy VorpX Now

The new release has been rebuilt for Oculus’ new runtime 0.7, a major API overhaul which brings with it Direct Driver Mode, a feature which lowers rendering latency by tapping directly into your GPU’s driver. This means VorpX 0.9 can leverage advantages such as Asynchronous Timewarp. “vorpX got its own frame timing mechanism, totally disregarding the system vsync options,” Ostertag says in his latest blog post, the new feature “offers several direct to hmd thread sync modes and let’s you optionally cap your game framerate at exactly half of the headset refresh rate so that every second frame is done by timewarping. A great way to get a smooth experience even in demanding games.”

Another new feature promises to improve the image quality of titles displayed using the injection driver, which traditionally suffers from poorer image quality in comparison with native VR titles. “Crystal Image provides you with the sharpest and clearest image you have ever seen in injected VR, which traditionally suffered from being more blurred than most native VR applications. Costs about 10-20% GPU performance but is easily worth every one of it if you can afford it.”

Another intriguing feature, new to 0.9, is Windows 8/10 vorpX Desktop App which allows Windows 8 and 10 users to watch YouTube videos, surf the web and launch VorpX compatible titles from within VR, whilst wearing their Oculus Rift headset.

Dedicated Video Player Mode will be a boon to fans of stereoscopic movies, vorpX now lets you launch stereo side by side or over/under videos, taking advantage of Async Timewarp along the way.

The update will also bring Basic Open GL support and Full Mirror Window, along with a handful of new games supported.

Existing users should receive the new update automatically, and if you’re interested in grabbing a copy, head over to our affiliate page for VorpX where you can grab the software and support Road to VR all at the same time!

The post VorpX 0.9 is Out October 23rd, Brings Async Timewarp, Video Player Mode and Much More appeared first on Road to VR.