Elite Dangerous & Pimax - request for collaboration

Pimax 8K Series
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As I’m eagerly awaiting my 8K and getting into ED, I noticed over at the Frontier forums that many 5K+ users are having problems with parallel projection. I don’t understand what it is but from what I gather, Frontier needs to change something in their code to get around PP.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/478166-Parallel-projection-pimax-5k

@PimaxUSA @anon74848233 @Matthew.Xu - someone on that forum suggested that Pimax send Frontier a headset or two to help them achieve this. Seeing as ED is one of the premier games in VR, it would do Pimax a huge boost in marketing and give them an upper hand if they and Frontier worked together to solve this.

What a great PR piece you could show by doing this and thereby up Pimax’s game, and also up VR in general!

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Add Laminar Research to that list for X-Plane 11.

Is there any documentation out there explaining what’s needed from the developers to render to the headset without having to enable parallel projection in Pitool?

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Yes please, this should certainly be fixed!

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What kind of problems? I have been playing ED with Pimax from the day I received it and have not noticed any.

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They should just take into account that there are headsets with canted displays. They don’t even need a headset for that, they should just support relevant APIs.

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Can you link the relevant APIs?

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Isn’t it a matter of using latest OpenVR SDK?

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@RiftFlyer @fennec

There is no particularly “new” API.

There is a function IVRSystem::GetEyeToHeadTransform · ValveSoftware/openvr Wiki · GitHub which returns transform matrix for each eye. Frontier must somehow work with it already (because this matrix also defines the IPD), but for some reason they chose to ignore the rotation part.

I would assume that it is because their engine somehow does not rely only on view transformations and has some “hardcoded” stuff for some effects which cannot be translated easily into non-coplanar views.

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In the case of Beat Saber, every effect in the game which utilizes GetStereoProjectionMatrix (the Unity version of GetEyeToHeadTransform, which I’m assuming calls GetEyeToHeadTransform for OVR based headsets) is displayed incorrectly without parallel projections.

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Can you output that matrix from Unity, to see, if it is the engine or the game who breaks it?

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https://community.openmr.ai/t/beat-saber-issue/13651/37

I’m not really sure how to interpret this matrix data, so I’m not really sure who is to blame.

I did get some positive results from modifying the transformation matrix, so it’s possible that the transformation matrix is to blame (there are pics demonstrating what I mean in the post I linked).

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Are you sure you are getting the transformation matrix? If I read right your right eye values and align them into the matrix (assuming you dumped them line by line) I get:

In [9]: np.matrix('0.64759 0.00000 0.12824 0.00000; 0.00000 0.78750 0.00000 0.00000; 0.00000 0.00000 -1.00020
   ...:  -0.20002; 0.00000 0.00000 -1.00000 0.00000')
Out[9]:
matrix([[ 0.64759,  0.     ,  0.12824,  0.     ],
        [ 0.     ,  0.7875 ,  0.     ,  0.     ],
        [ 0.     ,  0.     , -1.0002 , -0.20002],
        [ 0.     ,  0.     , -1.     ,  0.     ]])

Which does not seem to be a transformation matrix (at least in 3D space).

EDIT: I now realized I just took the numbers from the message preview in this thread and did not check the original thread you linked. Now I see what are the matrices, but still, they do not look like transformation matrices to me :frowning:

I was looking at Unity doc Unity - Scripting API: Camera.GetStereoProjectionMatrix, but it does not really help much either.

Do you know from which space/coordinates to which space/coordinates is this supposed to work? For me the strange is non-zero fourth line and the obvious “non-symmetric” property. Usually the transformation matrices look symmetric (in 3x3 submatrix and apart for the signs) and have the last row zeroes. For example the matrix OpenVR uses does not even define the 4th row (as it is zeroes anyway) and looks like this for the right eye:

[[ 0.9848078 , -0.        , -0.17364816,  0.03486158],
 [ 0.        ,  1.        , -0.        ,  0.        ],
 [ 0.17364816,  0.        ,  0.9848078 ,  0.        ]]

This is the matrix which transforms the coordinates from the eye view to the head view. This is a bit counter intuitive, because for the rendering one needs its inversion (i.e. from head view to the eye view), but I guess they had some reasons to define it this way.

EDIT2: Now I realized that you are talking about a projection matrix and not a transformation matrix. Well then in that case, I guess it does not say much about the underlying views.

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@Pimax-Support
Just want to add that it’s likely the number of players per day for this game might relatively low, also the sales per day.
But the accumulated hours in total will easily surpass most other VR title if not all of them and Elite Dangerous is here to stay for many more years.
It’s just that Frontier dev don’t show much love to their VR users. They need someone to trigger them I’m afraid…

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Hi all, been lurking for a while but my first post here. I haven’t received my 5k+ yet but I am primarily an Elite Dangerous player. I recently met some of the devs and specifically asked their community manager Will about VR and Pimax - he hadn’t heard of them - but he has now :wink:

He was however really interested in the idea of promoting Elite VR further, and we talked about the idea that they could run an Elite VR livestream. However I pointed out that it’s probably more fun for the people taking part than the people watching hehe…

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A live stream about one actually using a Pimax5k+ would not be my thing. I’d rather have a live stream with a dev and game designer chatting about Pimax experiences, the possible add ons and answering questions from the VR community…

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Yes agreed, and if they thought there was enough audience interest to watch they may go for it. Certainly it wouldn’t be favouring or highlighting any particular headset

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Heck, Frontier is practically a Chinese company now, too, after Tencent gobbled up quite a bit of its stock. :stuck_out_tongue:

(EDIT: As for screenspace effects (on top of the matter of just swivelling the cameras out a bit); There are quite a bit of those, which became painfully obvious after the recent major update, which added new interface models, with exploration-oriented HUD overlays; Did nobody at the company try the game at least once in VR, prior to that launch??? :|)

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I think there would be significant interest in an ED VR livestream. If they actually mention Pimax at some point, it would likely lead to at least a few headset sales.

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Did nobody at the company try the game at least once in VR, prior to that launch???

I remember on a previous livestream that one of their design leads was asked about VR and he confirmed he tests new gameplay in VR, but didn’t go into detail. I hope they have a dedicated VR QA team, but agreed, they definitely messed up on launching the new exploration scanners :slight_smile: At least it all works now.

I think there would be significant interest in an ED VR livestream. If they actually mention Pimax at some point, it would likely lead to at least a few headset sales.

And even if they won’t directly refer to specific brands, there’s nothing to stop the audience discussing their favourite Elite headsets right? :wink:

My meeting with them was a one-off so it’s not something I can immediately chase up on, but there are group events being scheduled for this year. If I get a chance to go then for sure I’ll keep the pressure on :+1:

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Yes - Adam did pull off a rather nice save there, after his initial long few seconds of (to use a fairly recent colloquialism, around where I live) making a really good impression of a bird house [façade]. :stuck_out_tongue:

I wouldn’t say all the new bugs have been addressed – not even the non-VR specific ones (not yet scanned planets displaying an already fully highlighted grid, anyone?), but at least the most sucking-one’s-eyeballs-out-of-their-sockets-y of the stereoscopic incongruities have been taken care of. :7

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