f-log

I haven't bought a lot on the Quest2 even though the Oculus store has a daily deal and I often check those.

I saw Kingspray Graffiti and it had so many great reviews. Not just your average "I hearts" and "Gr8", but long thoughtful descriptions of why the reviewers liked it.

So I bought it and it's very good for the price (and I got it at a discount, so double bargain).

I was not very good at it at first, but I had fun. I had seen what other people had done with it, so I went looking for tutorials and there are lots.

Had some fun with my new found knowledge and snapped a few pics in the game to show here and then ...


Just trying out the Van location and all the different can nozzles








I fell down the rabbit hole.

Firstly Kingspray Graffiti was originally available on the Oculus Rift and Steam stores. So lots of results of "How to download photos from Kingspray Graffiti" give you PC VR answers, that don't work. :(

One video referenced ADDING images (for reference) to the Quest2 and noted that you had to plug the Quest2 into a computer to see all the folders.

I had plugged it in before so I knew it would come up as a drive in Windows (after accepting the access in the headset).

The images were in
/Android/data

not Pictures, Download, DCIM, Oculus/Screenshots or any of the other much more likely named folders

and not in "files" on the Quest (new app from Oculus)

There were lots of folders, but I found them in data/com.infectiousape.kingspray/files/Photos. Out of the 6 images only one would open in Windows Photo and then I am like "why is it using photos app?"
But I couldn't open in GIMP there were no options. Easy, I will just copy the files over (the whole data folder). First I will check the size, don't want to be copying 10s of gigs of data.

Windows said 544mb, after a while. So I copied it and ... it said "calculating time required to copy files" and then took a really long time.

"6 hours remaining" Doh!

Took about 15mins and now I have a 2.3gb folder - hmmm

Then, I couldn't unmount the Quest device and Windows is "You have an application using this device" even though I had closed ALL apps.

The name in the unmount drive window for the Quest was MTP and I recognise that from a Sony walkman (digital), the Microsoft Zune and it was also the default for digital cameras interfacing with Linux many many years ago.

I wondered if it would show up on my Pixel 3 phone if I plugged it in ...
Nope, didn't show the access request in the Quest and didn't show anything on the phone.

and they all worked fine!

Nothing special, but I wanted to post something :D

P.S. I went snooping around the other files and there was nothing of interest :(

I wanted to try VR development for the Oculus Quest 2. Looking into various options I came across the fact that WEBVR was being depreciated!

The good news being that a new WEBXR platform was taking its place.

What is WEBXR and what was WEBVR? Using a standard web page with the right Javascript libraries loaded allows a VR system to have VR experiences.
You will note I mention systems. A couple of examples;

HTC Vive headset connected to a PC running SteamVR and opening a web browser. The Vive only acts as a display, the PC has to "run" the web page. The PC has to have the power/memory/CPU/GPU to push the pixels.

Oculus Quest 2 using WiFi to connect to a web server. The Quest loads the entire page internally and the web server only has to worry about serving files. Meaning it could be a Raspberry Pi or even something smaller.

There were a number of attempts to create handy WEBVR frameworks in the past and although some exist with updated WEBXR compatibility, I was looking for something different.

Enter Godot (pronounce G-Doh) an open source game development system in the vein of the proprietary Unity and Unreal. Luckily for me they had just included WEBXR support.

I followed this (slightly out of date) guide that was created by a developer as he worked on the WEBXR support.

To start small I decide to create an object in Blender with multiple materials and a texture.

I created a very simple hedgehog and after seeing the different materials working in Godot I add a texture and painted the eyes and nose. It is all very scrappy because I was just testing the concepts.

To get it working you have to run an HTTPS web service. Yes, you heard that right HTTPS. Any attempt to use HTTP is prohibited and there is no way around it.

In Ubuntu under WSL in windows I ran
sudo npm i -g browser-sync
and after changing into the directory with the build output from Godot
browser-sync start -s --https

I could now use the built-in web browser on the Quest to connect to my machine on port 3000

Because there is no HTTPS/SSL certificate the browser complains (the desktop browser also does this)



But clicking the "Advanced" button and then "Proceed" got me to the browser showing the entry point. This is also what you see on the desktop web browser.



Clicking the "Enter VR" button that I had wired up in Godot switched the Quest in to VR mode and I was standing in my game world with three hedgehogs and cubed hands :Doh

The cube hand is too close to the camera and so is clipping and you can see through it :)

I want to do some quality testing going forward seeing how far I can push the Quest 2.

P.S. Did you notice the dodgy shading on the hedgehogs? That was where Blenders Shade smooth hid the flat shading issues. Also something I need to look into.

So why run on the game on the desktop? Well the people at Mozilla Mixed Reality have created two browser plugins
Chrome
Firefox
That you can bring up the browsers relevant developer tools and then you can fake changing the state of the virtual headset and controllers. Create for quick look around or just testing the controller actions.

Last time I had a true missing month it was 2011!

Anyway, this post is just a placeholder to stop another plain text missing month page.

And stuff has happened I am just not in a great place to relate it yet.