We’ve missed a few months due to holidays, the Global Game Jam, and a bit of real-life interference. We have a lot to catch up on! (We’ll definitely switch away from the 4th Wed before next fall, but plan on the 4th Wed of every month through summer.) We’ve had a recent popularity surge, so please register early, and check-in on site.

If you’ve only been to our parent group IGDATC meetings or our upcoming social, MN VR and HCI is a different format: We aim for group discussions and lots of specific details, have smaller meetings in the well-lit Nerdery classroom (off of the cafeteria), a later start, no pizza, but lots of soda. Bring a bit of info to share! (see below.)

Oculus Latency Tester

Zach Wendt

Low latency and consistent framerates are key to keeping sim-sickness at bay. Measuring FPS and frame time is straight-forward and well understood, but measuring latency usually takes high-speed cameras or custom hardware. And outside of VR, latency has only been important to a niche set of gamers. So, video latency is has been frequently sacrificed for other features in TVs, Monitors, Video card benchmarks, and OS/GUI.

The Oculus Latency Tester makes measuring end to end “motion to photon” latency inside the Rift headset quick and foolproof. And, they open-sourced the design!

The talk will cover:

• Quick overview on latency vs framerate vs frame timing/pacing
• Sources of latency and commonly used ambiguous terminology
• Applications where latency matters
• Oculus Latency tester design and APIs
• Findings on a variety of laptops and desktops
• A few workflow and config tips

We’ll start at 6:30 and go for a fast and informal recap of important news, developments, and resources. If you have links to share (and even if you can’t attend), please add to this spreadsheet before or during the meeting. We can’t watch long videos, but we can preview them. Everything is fair game, like:

• News
• Kickstarters (we have multiple STEMs and at least one Omni coming to group members)
• Resources
• Events (IEEE VR 2014 is in MN! 3/29)
• Project updates
• Hardware trends
• Favorite demos
• Videos
• etc.

Finally, we’ll wrap up by watching Michael Abrash’s talk from Steam Dev Days. It’s only 30 min, but packed with usable info, and an inspiring roadmap of near-term future developments. Then, we’ll head to Joe Senser’s for beer fueled raving about the brave new future!

Agenda:

6:30 Social, Setup and Soda - Thanks to the Nerdery for hosting 7:00-ish Oculus Latency Tester - Zach Wendt 8:00 Abrash video

After, we’ll head to Joe Sensers in Bloomington .

About MN VR and HCI:

MN VR and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) welcomes developers and tinkerers working with all variety of VR, HCI, hardware hacking, creative coding and interactive art Members are working projects with light field displays, mocap, tiny computers, servos and sensors, interactive statues and a variety of VR, motion and computer vision games.