Oculus Rift Planetarium Project

This is a temporary page holding material related to our experimental project developing planetarium software for the Oculus Rift VR headset. This was an STFC funded "small public engagement award", running from September 2014 to April 2015. It was led by Alastair Bruce and Andy Lawrence, with contributions from various others, but most of the new software was written by Guillaume Chereau. The main goals were:

• Assess the current state of readiness of the hardware and existing planetarium software
• Achieve a comfortable/enjoyable single-user experience
• Determine how to further adapt software for a multi-user experience
• Achieve a stable multi-user experience with host/nodes connected via internet
• Make our findings/software available for others

All these goals were achieved and we now have a prototype system from which we can run internet star-gazing shows. To do that in the long term, with sufficient quality, will require more money, but in the short term we hope to do some beta-testing demonstrator shows.

Reports

During the project we summarised our findings as we went along on three reports. The last one is the best to read.

Report 1

Report 2

Report 3

Public exposure

We trialed the system at two public events. The first was spread over five days at the Edinburgh Science Festival, April 4-8 2015, as part of the Lost in Space multi-media event. As part of this, we collected feedback from 66 people who tried out the system. Responses are summarised here.

The second exposure was a talk given to staff at ROE on May 15th 2015, followed by running the system on a drop-in basis for the rest of the day. Again, useful comments and feedback were collected.