CodeWeavers Experiments with Oculus Support for Mac and Linux

CodeWeavers CrossOver now has support for the Oculus Rift!

Well, our internal testing builds do, anyway. Here at CodeWeavers, we're excited about what virtual reality can bring to gaming and other computing applications. The Oculus Rift is currently the largest VR (Virtual Reality) headset available for purchase, so we've decided to integrate support for it into CrossOver.

Once we've released support in our public builds, playing Windows Oculus games with CrossOver on your Rift will be just as easy as with any native Mac OSX or Linux Oculus application. Integration between your Windows Oculus application and your hardware should be seamless. We've been "testing" ;) with a DK2 here in the office, and it's been an impressive experience.

Caveats? There's a couple. This is an experimental feature in CrossOver, and some games access the Rift hardware in a way that Wine doesn't yet support. We hope to have this repaired soon, but some particular applications may fail to detect the Rift hardware.

More worryingly, Oculus has decided to drop support for Linux and OSX. While our Oculus integration works for now, it does depend on your having a Linux or Mac OSX SDK, which is no longer supported by Oculus. Depending on changes to future Windows Oculus SDK versions, we could fail to support games built against those new SDKs.

But don't lose hope! It would be difficult, but we could build support for the Windows Oculus SDK in CrossOver. That's right: CrossOver could become the only way to use the Oculus Rift on Mac OSX and Linux. But this is all hypothetical. It depends on what Oculus decides to do for their Linux and Mac users.

If you've got a Rift and are interested in trying out our support, contact our Caron at caron@codeweavers.com and ask for a nightly build. If you want more information about our solution for Oculus, contact our sales team at sales@codeweavers.com. We'd love to have your support and feedback.

We're also interested in building support for other VR headsets. As soon as some other headsets come on the market, like Valve and HTC's Vive headset or Microsoft's HoloLens, we'll be thinking about adding support so you can have the freedom to use your Windows VR games and applications on Linux and OSX.

About Andrew Eikum
Andrew has been a Wine developer at CodeWeavers since 2009. He works on all parts of Wine, but specifically supports Wine's audio. He's also a developer on many of CodeWeavers's software ports.

 

About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers focuses on the development of Wine – the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company's goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster and more painless to port Windows software to Mac OS and Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held.

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

 

Oculus Rift to drop support for Mac and Linux but their is still CodeWeavers to fill the gap

Oculus announced today that they will be dropping support for their Virtual Reality Oculus Rift platform on Mac and Linux due to the need to focus solely on the Windows platform for the foreseeable future. Here is the post from the Oculus site giving hardware specifications and the demise of Mac and Linux support.

Powering the Rift

About Atman Binstock:

Atman is Chief Architect at Oculus and technical director of the Rift. Before joining, he was one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve’s VR project, creating the ‘VR Room’ demo that garnered so much excitement at Steam Dev Days. Prior to Valve, Atman led several projects at top companies in the industry including RAD, DICE, and Intel.

 Given the challenges around VR graphics performance, the Rift will have a recommended specification to ensure that developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience of comfortable sustained presence. The recommended PC specification is an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM. This configuration will be held for the lifetime of the Rift and should drop in price over time.


The Rift is specifically designed to deliver comfortable, sustained presence – a “conversion on contact” experience that can instantly transform the way people think about virtual reality. As a VR device, the Rift will be capable of delivering comfortable presence for nearly everyone. However, this requires the entire system working well.

Today, that system’s specification is largely driven by the requirements of VR graphics. To start with, VR lets you see graphics like never before. Good stereo VR with positional tracking directly drives your perceptual system in a way that a flat monitor can’t. As a consequence, rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR. Therefore, VR increases the value of GPU performance.

At the same time, there are three key VR graphics challenges to note: raw rendering costs, real-time performance, and latency.

On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.

Traditionally, PC 3D graphics has had soft real-time requirements, where maintaining 30-60 FPS has been adequate. VR turns graphics into more of a hard real-time problem, as each missed frame is visible. Continuously missing framerate is a jarring, uncomfortable experience. As a result, GPU headroom becomes critical in absorbing unexpected system or content performance potholes.

Finally, we know that minimizing motion-to-photon latency is key to a great VR experience. However, the last few decades of GPU advancements have been built around systems with deep pipelining to achieve maximum throughput at the cost of increased latency; not exactly what we want for VR. Today, minimizing latency comes at the cost of some GPU performance.

Taking all of this into account, our recommended hardware specification is designed to help developers tackle these challenges and ship great content to all Rift users. This is the hardware that we recommend for the full Rift experience:

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM

The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration by default. We believe this “it just works” experience will be fundamental to VR’s success, given that an underperforming system will fail to deliver comfortable presence.

The recommended spec will stay constant over the lifetime of the Rift. As the equivalent-performance hardware becomes less expensive, more users will have systems capable of the full Rift experience. Developers, in turn, can rely on Rift users having these modern machines, allowing them to optimize their game for a known target, simplifying development.

Apart from the recommended spec, the Rift will require:

• Windows 7 SP1 or newer
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture

The last bullet point is tricky: many discrete GPU laptops have their external video output connected to the integrated GPU and drive the external output via hardware and software mechanisms that can’t support the Rift. Since this isn’t something that can be determined by reading the specs of a laptop, we are working on how to identify the right systems. Note that almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance.

Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.

In the future, successful consumer VR will likely drive changes in GPUs, OSs, drivers, 3D engines, and apps, ultimately enabling much more efficient low-latency VR performance. It’s an exciting time for VR graphics, and I’m looking forward to seeing this evolution.

Last week I posted about CodeWeavers en-pending support for Oculus Rift on Mac and Linux see the original post here. So with this lasted announcement from Oculus it looks as tho CodeWeavers is going to be the only game in town to support Rift VR on Mac and Linux for the foreseeable future.
 

 Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

 

CodeWeavers to support Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in CrossOver Linux and Mac

I just seen a Tweet from CodeWeavers that they are working hard on Supporting the upcoming Oculus Rift VR headset in their flagship CrossOver offerings on Linux and Mac. Here is a post from SoftPedia about the Oculus Rift pending release.

After a long wait and plenty of speculation, Oculus has just revealed the highly anticipated consumer version of its Rift virtual reality headset, alongside a firm release period of the first quarter of 2016.
 

Oculus amazed millions of gamers with the first version of its Rift headset, which brought virtual reality in a pretty great package, and quickly racked up millions in terms of crowdfunding via Kickstarter.

After having unleashed not one but two different developer early versions of the headset, the startup was acquired by social media giant Facebook and started hiring even more experienced staff to help bring the long-awaited consumer version of the Rift to life.

The final Oculus Rift VR headset is coming in early 2016

Now, after we heard a few recent rumors, Oculus confirms on its website that the final version of the Rift has been nailed down in terms of design and will arrive in the first quarter of 2016.

The announcement also confirms that pre-orders for the highly anticipated devices are going to open up later this year so that fans can make sure they get it as soon as possible.

According to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, the Rift encompasses not only a device but a full virtual reality ecosystem that allows for an optimum experience even for newcomers or less technically skilled users.

What's more, this final version of the device builds on the Crescent Bay prototype by improving the head tracking to allow for seated and standing users, but also comes with a better design and a more natural fit, as you can see in the new render images below.

"The Rift delivers on the dream of consumer VR with compelling content, a full ecosystem, and a fully-integrated hardware/software tech stack designed specifically for virtual reality. The Oculus Rift builds on the presence, immersion, and comfort of the Crescent Bay prototype with an improved tracking system that supports both seated and standing experiences, as well as a highly refined industrial design, and updated ergonomics for a more natural fit," he says.

More details about the hardware, software, and games that will be made for VR using the Rift are set to appear in the near future. The full tech specifications are already scheduled to surface next week.

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.