From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 22 2014 - 11:16:05 CST

Hi,
  I have a one of the Rift developer kits in my office
waiting for me to have time to work on it. I've played
around with it a little bit with VMD already. I need to
write a new Rift-specific stereo display mode for VMD that
adds the per-eye horizontal offset required to accomodate the
optics of the Rift, and then it would be somewhat usable in VMD
for display, but still no head tracking. I probably have time to
try and make that happen before VMD 1.9.2 is released, we'll see.
I'll have to see how invasive the Rift SDK is to the
VMD OpenGL engine, in order to to do a complete integration.
If the Rift SDK has too many gotchas, I may choose to support
the Rift via FreeVR or another scheme where I don't use the
normal VMD OpenGL pipeline. I had hoped to be further along
with implementing Rift support already, but I've been swamped
with other tasks, so it has had to wait. I'll send a note
to VMD-L when I have a prototype people can try, even if it's
still missing head tracking support, etc.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 10:40:21AM +0100, Mirco Wahab wrote:
> Does the team plan to support the Oculus Rift? Is
> there any effort underway where I could possibly
> participate?
>
> Afaik - there is no useable molecular visualization
> tool that supports the rift. The same question comes
> up sometimes in the Rift forum:
> https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=4232
>
> (I know, by using "stereo side by side", the Rift can
> be tricked into a passive 3D viewer.)
>
> Regards
>
> M.

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/