Homebuilt ROVs Forum

So my idea,

Mounting 2 GoPro Hd (or similar) so they are a few cm apart. Not on pan and tilt but, and have them them provide the feed for an https://www.oculus.com/en-us/rift/.

With the added plus of using the head tracking to control the steering and pitch of the ROV.


What are people's thoughts

There are 3d systems out there for commercial ROV'S, however there is little benefit to it so it's hardly ever implemented.

Controlling the rov with feedback from the rift is either gonna be genius, or suck.

There are RC goggles with head tracking too that may be cheaper to implement (and wireless! )

Edit.......

I have actually used the Kongsberg Underwater 3d camera with a passive 3d monitor, it wasn't mounted on an ROV at the time, but i was able to fly my micro quadcopter with a slightly better degree of accuracy than a standard camera.

Bindo wrote:...

Controlling the rov with feedback from the rift is either gonna be genius, or suck.

<snip>

That's great stuff right there.

This is what it's like on the bleeding edge...

This sounds great in theory but, I fear, it would be quite challenging to implement practically. The main issue that jumps out at me, having played a fair bit with Oculus DK2 (and GearVr) stuff in Unity, would be massive motion sickness generated by having your head control the movement of the sub but with so much lag. I think just viewing a stereo feed through the Oculus would be fine as long as you're controlling the sub with a hand controller, or something. Of course this would still be quite a challenge just getting your 2 video feeds back and finding a way to render them to the Oculus in real-time.

As mentioned above you can get traditional FPV goggles with head tracking (I think my Fat Shark Attitudes have head tracking) but I don't think they accept a stereo input.

However the basic idea of enhancing your immersion buy piloting your sub through an fpv camera with goggles is a great idea and is how I plan to pilot mine!