#82: Oliver “Doc_Ok” Kreylos on VR input device speculation & sensor fusion combinations, developing a Linux SDK, VR video rending pipeline, & building a digital humanities VR research lab at UC Davis

Oliver “Doc_Ok” Kreylos is one of the most prolific VR hackers and very popular participant within the Oculus subreddit. He talks about his quest to roll his own Linux SDK for the Oculus Rift since there hasn’t been an official one released yet. In that process he’s been building support for different input devices for his Virtual Reality User Interface (Vrui) Toolkit.

doc-ok-kinectSince Oculus Connect, he’s had a number of epic follow-up posts on his blog (Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about this quest towards a Linux SDK. He also discusses some of his biggest takeaways about the VR video rendering pipeline as well as some possible limitations of the graphics API in the Windows operating system that came out of this process as well.

He also talks about some of his findings of hacking the Microsoft Kinect v2 depth sensor towards the end of using it as a VR telepresence tool. He talks a lot more about this in my first Voices of VR interview with Oliver back in May.

Oliver then talks about some of his reviews of the VR hardware and input devices from SVVRCon, and some of his WILD SPECULATION™ around what type of sensor fusion combinations may make the most sense within a VR input device.

Finally, he talks about moving from the hard sciences to the soft sciences in his VR research by moving to the UC Davis Technocultural Studies department in the process of creating a VR research lab as a part of the UC Davis ModLab.

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio