4
tiMe to play
Shut off the server, and go ahead and fire up a game. Put
it in windowed mode, head back to the Trinus server app,
and set it to Game mode. Link up the server and your phone,
bring your game back into focus, and you should see it beamed
across—but you’ll notice a problem. It’s not stereoscopic
[image c]. There’s an easy way to fix this: Kill the server, head
over to the “Video” tab, and switch on “Fake3D.” This doubles
the image for each eye, and it’s the least processor-intensive
way of getting immersive gaming going, but it doesn’t do any
stereoscopic depth processing, and it can’t have escaped your
attention that it’s not scaled particularly well [image d]. Even
activating the lens distortion mode on the phone (which requires
the “Performance” setting to be on “quality”) doesn’t fix this—if
this is the mode for you, you need to adjust the resolution of your
game to as square an aspect ratio as it can possibly manage.5
do it better
OK, we’re here for proper 3D, and to get that, we need to
use either Steam VR or, for the many games that don’t
support it, ReShade. If you want to use the former, make sure
Steam is shut down, head to the “SteamVR” tab on the Trinus
server app, install its SteamVR driver, then relaunch Steam, load
SteamVR, and your headset should be detected.
>> Much more interesting, though, is converting otherwise flat
games to play in stereo 3D—this is a technique you can use with
any old headset, so if you’re dying to force depth into your Oculus
Rift on games like GTA V, you’re encouraged to follow along.
Start by installing ReShade—grab the installer from http://
reshade.me, and point it at the game you want to install. Don’t
worry about including any of the default shaders at this point, as
they’ll just clutter things up. Instead, head to http://github.com/
BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D to download the Super Depth 3DDshader pack, which includes everything you need. Point
ReShade to its contents, then fire up your game.6
GoinG deep
Hit Home to open the ReShade overlay, and
run through its tutorial screens. Switch on
SuperDepth3D, and you should see your game switch to a
stereoscopic view; this is derived from the game’s depth
buffer, which means it doesn’t work with everything
(and absolutely should never be used in multiplayer),
but also means each eye is delivered a subtly different
image—viewed together through Trinus in your headset,
you should see depth. There are various settings you
could tweak at this point; we found, testing in GTA V, that
switching Auto Balance on made for a convincing depth
effect, but it’s not flawless. First-person view in cars,
and the phone popping up, mess with the depth map, and
can temporarily ruin the effect.
>> Then layer on everything else. Polynomial Barrel
Distortion [image e] squashes the view into a lens-happy
rectangle, which means you won’t be dealing with a
stretched peripheral-filling mess, and NFAA is all but
essential if you don’t want to see too many jaggies. Oh,
and a virtual nose can help with the nausea—switch it
on, because you’ll probably need it.c EIf you’ve tried this sort of thing before, you might note a
couple of changes in the DIY VR landscape. Probably the most
major is the demise of TriDef, the company behind TriDef 3D
and TriDef VR. Both enabled you to quickly convert almost
any game into stereoscopic 3D or, in the case of certain OEM
monitors, shutter-goggle 3D. These were commercial apps,
and their requirement to phone home to TriDef’s servers
meant they died along with the company when it shut down.
With TriDef pushing up daisies, we’ve looked at using
ReShade and SteamVR to process the signal, but they’re not
the only middleware options. If you’re happy to shell out, it’s
worth looking at vorpX (www.vorpx.com), a $40 app aimed at
thrusting more games into Oculus and Vive headsets that’s
still under active development. There’s also Vireio Perception
(www.mtbs3d.com), which is open source but cludgy, and
looks like it hasn’t seen a new version in three years. One
thing that isn’t an option, at least without serious hacking,
is Nvidia’s 3D Vision—though you might consider swapping
Trinus for Gamestream, if head tracking isn’t important.3d alternatiVes
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