[vtkusers] General Question to VTK in VR

Sat Apr 7 15:45:23 EDT 2018

Hi Jamil,

The OpenGL context sharing mechanism as exercised by vtkRenderingExternal
module was used to produce a bunch of examples for rendering VTK in a CAVE
environment. The examples are available as part of VruiVTK
<https://github.com/vruivtk> project on GitHub.

While those examples used VRUI as the VR engine, you could just as easily
swap it out with FreeVR. The general logic used is that VRUI/FreeVR would
create the OpenGL context. In the first display call initialize
ExternalVTKWidget to share the existing context with VTK.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
Sankhesh

On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 6:12 AM Jamil Goettlich <jamil.goettlich at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That is all really great information, thank you so much!
>
> Jamil
>
> 2018-04-06 20:46 GMT+02:00 Sgouros, Thomas <thomas_sgouros at brown.edu>:
>
>> I'm sure the preceding answers to the question will be more than enough
>> to satisfy the OP, but there is yet another way, a project called MinVR
>> that is in alpha, but is meant to be a generic and relatively
>> straightforward way to convert any old 3D graphics program to VR, and that
>> is compatible with a wide range of displays, including head-mounted
>> displays like the Oculus and HTC, caves, desktop VR displays, and regular
>> laptop and desktop screens. I'm working on vtk examples now to illustrate
>> its use with vtk, not that I'm all that fluent in that dialect. This is a
>> joint project of people at UMinn and Brown University, and can be found at
>> github.com/MinVR.
>>
>>  -Tom
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:05 AM, Andras Lasso <lasso at queensu.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> > 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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>>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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>
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>
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-- 
Sankhesh Jhaveri *Sr. Research & Development Engineer* | Kitware
<http://www.kitware.com/> | (518) 881-4417

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