Decided to finally get to know GitLab a bit more for the sake of backing up my project and hopefully setting things for version control if I work collaboratively in the future. Thing is, I hate git shell and command line stuff and vastly prefer the ease of GitHub. So I took some time to figure out the handshake between them. Here I’ll try to explain the setup process as simply as I can.
Archives for November 2019
Volume Viewer Pro
Going to make a post about this to better explain the situation.
Volume Viewer Pro is a plugin for Unity to view volumetric data such as MRI scans. I’ve been exploring it as part of a potential project. Initially things were rather promising. Volume Viewer essentially does the reverse of a scan. It takes the volumetric data and creates cameras around a box. These cameras then do raycasts based on the data and seems to calculate the intersections of the rays with the box in order to shave away at the shape’s normal map and create a complex volume rendered by the camera. Due to this setup, the ability to view these volumes in VR is actually possible, at least with the Rift S and our higher end PCs. We have already tested this prior using some data we were given that was a scan of a mouse brain.
VRTK Implementation Part 1 of ???
This will probably be the first of a few posts I do about the use of the VRTK plugin with interactive development within Unity. The Virtual Reality Tool Kit (VRTK) by Extend Reality Ltd. is a plugin used to basically unify the disparate control schemes of the various VR software development kits (SDKs). Due to various VR setups having different input methods, it can be hard to switch between the various setups within your code as you have to adjust all your inputs accordingly. VRTK takes the inputs from all VR solutions and creates it’s own input method from them. All that you theoretically need to do with VRTK is simply change the target device and SDK within VRTK before building out your project, rather than going in and changing the inputs for all your scripts. I say theoretically cause this plugin can be rather confusing and unruly at times. For example, when just switching from Oculus Rift S to Oculus Quest, two systems that actually HAVE the same controllers, I had some issues finding the proper setup after switching to Android publishing, with the answer I eventually found being oddly enough setting VRTK to the “GearVR” setting which is a far different remote than the one used by Quest.
That said, now that I have a better idea of the implementation and setup, things are going much smoother. So here’s what I’ve figured out so far while working on my interactive exploration of the WRXR rocket from a previous post.