[vtkusers] General Question to VTK in VR

[Andras Lasso]

> Is there anybody who has displayed unsteady states with VTK in VR and if so what method was used and how was that done?

Yes! 3D Slicer has an awesome VR viewer. With a single click, the 3D scene appears in your headset and the application remains fully interactive – you can manipulate objects both on the desktop using keyboard and mouse, and using VR controllers in the VR view. You can also view dynamic content, such as 4D volumes even using volume rendering.

The source code is available here: https://github.com/KitwareMedical/SlicerVirtualReality. You should be able to find all the implementation details there.

To try it: Download a recent Slicer nightly version (https://download.slicer.org), install SlicerVirtualReality extension from Slicer’s extension manager. After you loaded your data you just need to click the VR headset button on the toolbar (“Show scene in virtual reality”).

Limitations: There is a bug in volume rendering that clips the volume at unexpected locations (Kitware is working on a fix, expected to be ready soon). Position of objects that are moved using VR controllers are not yet synchronization back to the scene displayed in the main window (this is the next focus of development).

Andras


From: vtkusers <vtkusers-bounces at vtk.org> On Behalf Of Jamil Goettlich
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 10:46 AM
To: vtk <vtkusers at vtk.org>
Subject: [vtkusers] General Question to VTK in VR

Hello VTK Users,

I have some general questions to the current state of VR in VTK. Please let me know if this is not the right place to ask questions about that. According to what I have read (among others "Enhancements to VTK enabling scientific visualization in immersive environments") there are two favourized ways of bringing VTK into VR:
- VR-Toolkit embedding --> Using VTK with the OpenVR API (HMDs)
- OpenGL context sharing (VTK Rendering External) --> Using existing contexts from other (VR-)Toolkits (Multiple devices)

Until now I have only seen single frames being displayed in VR (in VTK as well as in Paraview), not unsteady state (e.g. in ParaView 5.3, OpenVR version, I cannot press the play button and send the content to OpenVR, I can only see one frame on the HMD).
From what I have seen so far, the VR-Plugin of ParaView does not use any of the two methods. They are using the library VRPN for interacting but all the rest is done within ParaView.

My questions are the following:
- Is there anybody who has displayed unsteady states with VTK in VR and if so what method was used and how was that done?
- Is there any paper or detailled documentation to the OpenGL context sharing method? I did not find alot to that except from the testing example
"TestGLUTRenderWindow.cxx" which I was not able to build properly until now. Also, if anyone has experience using FreeVR with VTK OpenGL context sharing method, I would be very interested in that too.

I hope my questions are appropriate (and not too widespread) and I would be very happy to be pointed to some current sources, especially concerning unsteady state simulations with VTK in VR. I would be very happy for anyone to share their own experiences or some current papers to that topic.

Thanks alot,

Jamil

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