From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 01 2015 - 11:06:44 CDT

Hi,
  I'm making progress implementing the beginnings of
support for head-mounted displays in VMD on the Linux platform.

I hope that in the next couple weeks I'll have something that
others outside our lab can try out. The code I have now works
best with the Oculus DK2 headsets. The DK1 headset has
an unusual optical arrangement that require special handling in
the VMD graphics code, but the DK2 is close enough to the
standard behavior of VMD that what I have implemented so far
already works reasonably well.

At present, the implementation I've made enables the headset to be
used with the VMD interactive GPU ray tracing engine, because this
was the least invasive change to VMD. I implemented special Oculus Rift
lens distortion corrections directly into the ray tracing code
in a way that is much simpler than for OpenGL-based rendering.
The upshot of this is that at the moment, it can only be used
with NVIDIA GPUs (since it's only implemented for the GPU ray
tracer), but I expect to implement the same code for OpenGL over
the coming weeks.

If there are VMD users that have the Oculus DK2 headsets that
also have a machine that's able to run the interactive GPU
ray tracer (e.g. TachyonL-OptiX entries in the File|Render menu)
with a fast NVIDIA GPU, I would be happy to begin having people
try it out.

I will eventually correct the code so that the older DK1 headsets
are usable too, and also on platforms other than Linux,
but that'll take me a while longer to accomplish.

For now, if there are people that are interested in trying out
the new code, I'd ask that people go ahead and contact me and
let me know what hardware you've got and we can go from there.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

-- 
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/