Wearing Oculus Rift during autonomous

[TimTheGreat]

Is it legal? It isn't used as a control, but we were thinking that it may be against the rules because it is part of the control system.

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

Is it legal? It isn't used as a control, but we were thinking that it may be against the rules because it is part of the control system.

If my understanding of the rules is correct, it is allowed to be worn if it is disconnected from the driver station prior to and during autonomous.
That said, it would probably be better to just leave it at the driver station and put it on quickly after auton since HDMI and USB connections tend to be somewhat temperamental.

Out of curiosity, what are you planning to use the Rift for?

[Jon K.]

I would ask a Q&A question on this as it blocks your true vision(from my understanding of the Rift) and it would therefore become a safety concern. Also remember that you must wear Safety Glasses at all times while on the field. My inclination based off the safety glasses aspect alone would be that this would be illegal.

Should the GDC rule otherwise, and you do use the Rift, be sure to bring a print out of the Q&A and bring it to the head referee's attention at every event during practice day so that they can inform the rest of the field crew.

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by Jon K.

I would ask a Q&A question on this as it blocks your true vision(from my understanding of the Rift) and it would therefore become a safety concern. Also remember that you must wear Safety Glasses at all times while on the field. My inclination based off the safety glasses aspect alone would be that this would be illegal.

As far as I can see, there's no rule that states members of the drive team must be able to see, or that their vision has to be unencumbered.

You can use a rift with glasses on, but it's annoying. Arguably having it on you counts as a eye protection though... hard to say whether the transition between safety glasses/rift would be allowable though.

But agree, this might be a good Q&A question.

[AlexanderTheOK]

I've done immersive telepresence before with the rift. I would not recommend it for competition,maybe once the Fms isnt as restrictive with bandwidth,but otherwise, getting a decent 3d view with the rift and 2 cameras. (I had em set up on a pan tilt.) takes a solid 28 or so mbps.

I would also not recommend the cameras on the rift. You're not going to have a fun time trying to make anything out through a grainy image and the screen door effect.

Furthermore, you need a very wide angle camera to get the right aspect ratio, otherwise it's like looking thru a tunnel.

Fantastic off season project for when you've got a clean line with lots of free bandwidth, but not fun when you throttle it down to 7mbps. (remember latency grows a lot when you get close to 7 too with TCP.)

There's just too much data throughput necessary to get anything useful over it.

My $0.02 of experience with the rift. Probably legal, but not at all practical.

[Jon K.]

Originally Posted by virtuald

As far as I can see, there's no rule that states members of the drive team must be able to see, or that their vision has to be unencumbered.

You can use a rift with glasses on, but it's annoying. Arguably having it on you counts as a eye protection though... hard to say whether the transition between safety glasses/rift would be allowable though.

But agree, this might be a good Q&A question.

For some reason it was removed from the game manual, but the safety glasses requirement is buried this year in the admin and safety manuals. See page 3-4 of the safety manual and 4.2.1 of the admin manual.

[alicen]

Didn't they ask people not to wear heavily tinted safety glasses?
If I remember correctly this is so that the refs can see drive team's eyes and make certain calls that are based on intent (ie: intentionally pinning, or oh crap, our chain fell off and we can't stop pinning)

However, that may not matter as much or at all this year with the segregated field

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Safety Manual, Page 3

Safety Glasses Requirements
Wear ANSI-approved, UL Listed, or CSA rated non-shaded safety glasses. Lightly tinted Yellow, Rose, Blue, and Amber tints are FIRST approved. Reflective lenses are prohibited, your eyes must be clearly visible to others. The use of anything other than ANSI-approved, UL-Listed, or CSA rated eye protection is prohibited.

This is why we didn't even consider the Oculus Rift this year.

[Bongle]

Another hit against "rift as safety glasses" is that although it has the plastic case, what is actually near your eyeballs is lots of glass in the form of the screen and the lenses. If it gets hit hard by a projectile, it might break the screen or lenses and send the fragments into your face.

Then there's the issue of, even with an on-rift camera, not really being fully aware of your surroundings. If a tote somehow gets chucked over the player station you might not notice and might not get your arms up to protect. Or if a robot rams the player station, the disorientation might make you fall over (search youtube for oculus pranks where people nudge oculus-wearers: it's not easy to stay upright when your vision thinks you're somewhere else).

[Bongle]

To be not entirely doom-and-gloom, I think one workable approach would be to design a more-open helmet/case that holds a smartphone in your field of vision without entirely blocking it. Kinda like the gear VR, but with better sightlines so you aren't entirely blind to the world around you while wearing it. Plus, then you wouldn't need to worry about an on-oculus camera since you'd have your normal eyes.

[Foster]

I'd Q&A it and see if wearing a full face shield over the Rift would be OK.

I think it's a cool idea if it works with the FMS network speeds.

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by Bongle

Then there's the issue of, even with an on-rift camera, not really being fully aware of your surroundings. If a tote somehow gets chucked over the player station you might not notice and might not get your arms up to protect.

I suspect most drive team members would not notice such a thing in the heat of competition, regardless of the Rift or not.

[virtuald]

For what it's worth, we did develop a pretty sweet Oculus Rift interface, and you can read the release announcement at this thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=136611

[TimTheGreat]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

Out of curiosity, what are you planning to use the Rift for?

We are going to use it for the driver. I will be wearing it and we have multiple cameras set up on the robot to change the view, that way we can align to totes and cans. To make sure we can see, we have also mounted a camera on the actual rift that way I get a normal 3rd person view of the robot

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by TimTheGreat

... we have also mounted a camera on the actual rift that way I get a normal 3rd person view of the robot

Would you mind posting a picture of that mounted camera on the Rift at some point? I've been interested in the practicality of doing something like this down the road (like in a year or two), but I was thinking of setting up more of a Picture-in-Picture configuration and using 2 cameras for 3D vision.

Also, what kind of laptop are you planning to use for this? It's obviously not the Classmate.