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How to use Oculus on motion platform

mechamania
Honored Guest
Hi

I would like to use the Oculus Rift inside a flight simulator. The flight simulator is based on a 6 DOF motion platform. We need to use the relative positon of the Oculus to the cabine. Not relative to the outside world. This because the cabin may make some movements that are not reflected in the 3D world. So we can not use the acceleration meters and gyroscope. But the new Oculus has a camera for position tracking and that seems perfect. But when the camera information is combined with the acceleration sensor and gyroscope, it will not work. The camera works relative to the cabin while the acceleration sensor and gyroscope will work relative to the world.

So the question is: Can I only use the position tracking bassed on the camera and ignore the other sensors? Will that work? Will that be accurate enough and will the motion range be ok? What for instance when looking 90 degrees left or right? Does the camera track this? Can I use multiple cameras to increase the range?
12 REPLIES 12

Graffin
Honored Guest
I think that you can use some kind of software correction to compensate the data from the accelerometer.
Something like dynamic initial state of of the glasses.
If the platform is tilted 10° to the east, you just compensate that rotating the view in the oculus 10° to the opposite side.

Sorry for my English, I don't know if you are going to understand what I'm trying to explain. 😕

owenwp
Expert Protege
Doing this robustly would probably require you to modify the SDK, and requires you to know in software exactly how the platform is moving.

Assuming the camera is on the platform you would apply the inverse rotation of the platform to the accelerometer data, and compute the angular velocity of the platform to subtract from the gyro data. This way all sensors will report data in a consistent tracking space, relative to the platform instead of the horizon.

From there you can do whatever you want to the head rotation. If you want to imitate acceleration by tilting the player then leave the rotation as is, so that the player thinks they are on a level surface. Or you could apply the rotation of the platform to the head to restore the player's real orientation.

FultonX
Explorer
Of course it would be awesome if the position/rotation reported were always relative to the camera. Then you can just mount the camera on the motion platform and all information will be relative and correct.

I hope developers of flight sims and space sims realize this needs to be standard so that motion platforms don't require any extra sensors to decouple the rotation reported by the Oculus from Earth's gravity.

It seems like a safer approach to allow disabling of the auto-leveling of the head based on magnetometer readings (at least during operation, such that the "auto-level" feature is only applied when a "recenter" action is initiated by the user/developer) via the Oculus Config Tool. This way no one has to rely on developers incorporating the feature, making it easier and more accessible for everyone. Lobby!