ViveFocusInstantPreview

An experiment to create an instant preview feature for the Vive Focus device.

With this solution you will be able to hit Play on your Unity scene on your PC, while wearing the Vive Focus, to directly preview the content of the scene on your device, without deploying anything.

The solution is experimental, not finished and misses a lot of features, but it is a good start if you plan implementing it by yourself.

Getting Started

The solution is comprised of two parts: a standalone application that runs on the Vive Focus and lets you see the preview and a script to be attached to the WaveVR prefab of your Unity scene. The two elements will communicate so that the rototranslational data of the Focus will be sent to Unity, while the scene rendered by Unity will be sent to the device.

Use the preview app

If you don't plan to modify the standalone app, using it is pretty simple:

• Get the APK from the Bin folder of this project
• Connect your Vive Focus to the USB port of your PC
• Install the app on your Vive Focus device
• Launch it from your Vive Focus. You should now see a Unity scene with an arrow... this means that the app is ready and it is waiting for you to stream something for Unity
• Now on your PC Open your Vive Wave Unity project that you want to preview.
• Go to Edit -> Project Settings -> Editor
• Change the Unity Remote settings: Device -> Any Android Device; Compression -> PNG; Resolution: Downsize
• Open the Unity scene that you want to preview
• Copy the InstantPreviewWaveVR.cs script that you can find in the Assets\FocusInstantPreview\Scripts folder of this repository into your project
• Attach the InstantPreviewWaveVR to the WaveVR prefab of the scene
• Change the size of the Game preview window in Unity to one compatible to the Vive Focus resolution: for instance, 2880x1600 or 1440x800. You do this by using the menu on the upper-left corner of the Game window in Unity
• Hit Play: you should see the content being previewed in the Focus!

Build the preview app

If you want to build the preview app:

• Download the repo and open the project with Unity
• Import the Unity Remote 4 project from the Asset Store: link It has been deprecated on the Asset Store, so I've mirrored the package here
• If a pop-up asks you if you're ok with importing a complete project, be brave and say Yes
• Import the WaveVR Unity Plugin: you can download WaveVR SDK from this link. Inside the downloaded ZIP there is a folder dedicated to the Unity plugins: you have to import both the WaveVR plugin and the Samples package.
• If there is the need to update APIs, be brave and say Yes to that Unity dialog ("I made a backup, go ahead!")
• Open the Build Settings window and switch Unity platform to Android (File -> Build Settings -> tap on Android -> Switch Platform)
• If you see a pop up by Vive Wave asking you to set some settings, be lazy and select "Accept All"
• Always in the Build Settings window, change the Build System to Internal
• Open the file Assets\FocusInstantPreview\Scripts\UnityRemoteFilesModifications and apply the modifications specified there to the files of Unity Remote 4 project. I can't push the modified files in this repo because they're under Unity Asset Store license. You have just to substitute the code of two methods
• Set the scene Assets\FocusInstantPreview\Scenes\InstantPreviewApp as the only scene to be built inside the app (again you do this in the Build Settings of Unity)
• Open the Player Settings from the Build Settings Window: in Other Settings -> Identification -> Package Name, specify "com.ntw.FocusInstantPreview" (without the quotes)
• If you want, also set Assets\FocusInstantPreview\Textures\EyeIcon as the Default Icon
• Hit Build and Run to build the app and execute it into your Focus
• To test if the app work, you can also use the scene contained into Assets\FocusInstantPreview\Scenes\SampleUnityScene

Understanding the code

The project is split in various folders whose names are self-explanatory. Its code is widely commented.

The main scenes are: InstantPreviewApp, that is the scene of the preview app for the device and SampleUnityScene, that is a sample scene that you can test on Unity hitting Play to see the content being streamed to the device.

The app running on the device is the complicated part of this project. Inside the scene you can see that there are 5 objects:

• UnityRemote4Code: the code coming from Unity Remote 4, that lets the program connect to Unity to exchange data with the game engine
• InstantPreview: features the behaviours necessary to get the pose of the device from Vive Wave and to show on the screen the content sent by Unity
• [WaveVR]: useful to init the WaveVR platform
• Cameras: contains two cameras. One represents the left eye and the other one the right eye. Every camera will render the content shown in PreviewTextureQuads on a render texture and then these render textures will be shown on the screen of the device, one next to the other to fill the whole screen
• PreviewTexturesQuads: quads for the left and right eye: every quad will show the part of the preview sent by Unity relative to one of the two eyes. This content will be rendered by the cameras and then shown on the screen. Every quad will cover completely the view area of the related camera.

Prerequisites

If you want to use the project, you must have Unity editor installed. It has been tested with Unity 2017.3.1f1. To build the APK you should also have Android SDK installed and configured.

Known issues

This is really a pre-alpha project and has lots of problems:

• It doesn't work over Wi-fi, but only over USB
• The framerate is far from optimal... this app is a puking machine
• The images shown in the device are quite distorted
• The controller is currently not emulated (even if adding it is quite trivial, copying the code of the headset)
• The app requires you to resize the Game window and is tailored on the values of the Vive Focus device
• The app to build correctly requires you to import also the samples of the Vive Wave platform (don't know why)
• During the execution, there's an exception thrown every frame regarding a GL context

Authors

• Antony Vitillo (Skarredghost) - Blog

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

It's my first project published on GitHub, so I'm sorry if there are problems. In case you need help, just contact me. Have fun :)