Viewing 3D stereo photos in an Oculus Rift
Just for fun I tried out viewing 3D photos in an Oculus Rift. For that I took some pictures with a DSLR and a Loreo 3D lens. The first problem here is that the Rift has a very wide field of view (which is great for virtual worlds and immersion) but the 3D lens has [...]
Using the Oculus Rift on Linux
While there is no official support from Oculus yet, the Rift can be used under Linux: Get the C API from the Oculus forum user ‘nsb’ (posting here), the latest version is 0.0.2 After plugin your Rift in, configure the screen (e.g. clone mode, whatever fits your needs), the Rift is just an external 1280*800 [...]
Second impression of the Oculus Rift
After a long wait since I first had the chance to test the Oculus Rift, my own device from the original Kickstarter arrived. So here are some notes after a few hours of testing: It’s more comfortable to wear than the initial prototype. Only downside: there is a spot where my nose supports some of [...]
A look at the Bayer Pattern
Have you ever wondered, how a ‘raw’ image file from a camera looks like? I have, so I tried to visualise one. Contrary to popular believe, you actually can do that quite easily… Most digital cameras can not only store the images as JPEGs, but also ‘raw’, in a format that normally has to be [...]
MacOS X OpenGL driver status (10.8.3)
Apples latest software patch for MacOS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion, 10.8.3) fixed some issues related to OpenGL. To recap, my currently known bugs and issues are these: Wrong values from uniform structs (bug id #10518401) - Fixed Wrong names for uniforms in uniform blocks (bug id #11335828) - Still exists (this bug was reported in april 2012) [...]
FPS vs msec/frame
When talking about the performance of graphics applications or algorithms you hear frames per second (FPS for short) as the unit of measurement. This however is wrong most of the time and here’s why: Why we use FPS There are two ways to measure how fast an application can render the virtual world: by giving [...]
Adding analog inputs to your graphics app
When prototyping graphics applications it doesn’t take long until you want to control some parameters during runtime. Using the keyboard is often the first candidate as getting keystrokes is very easy for most toolkits used in graphics like GLFW or GLUT. But it doesn’t take long until the number of keys it so large that [...]
OpenGL conditional rendering bug on MacOS X
At least on Intel HD4000 GPUs there seems to be a bug regarding conditional rendering in OpenGL on 10.8 Mountain Lion: After the conditional rendering the condition state (ignore draw calls or execute them) is ‘stuck’ until the next draw call gets issued – this can ignore glClear calls which shouldn’t get ignored. Here’s an [...]
GLSL Syntax Highlighting for TextWrangler & BBEdit
I hacked together a very simple codeless language module for TextWrangler (also compatible with BBEdit) for GLSL shaders. It is much simpler than the Kate/QTCreator highlighting and only highlights GLSL version 430 (core profile) but it’s better than nothing (In case you are writing shaders for OpenGL ES 3.0, or OpenGL 3.0 – 4.2 it [...]
GLSL Syntax Highlighting for QTCreator (and Kate)
The syntax highlighter in QTCreator for GLSL shaders is currently far from ideal: It’s basically stuck at OpenGL 2.1. If you write shaders for OpenGL 3 (and later) or OpenGL ES 3, you will see a lot of red marks indicating errors in your code simply because QTCreator doesn’t know the latest keywords. On the [...]