Test VR with Oculus Quest

[jadolfbr@…]

Jared reports that a 5000 atom structure 2J88 was choppy using VR with Oculus Quest and link cable with fast Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics. I (Tom G) found it smooth with Oculus Rift S on laptop with nvidia gtx 1070 maxq. Need to test Quest to see if there is some problem.

I don't have a Quest available so this probably won't happen anytime soon.

On Aug 18, 2020, at 11:58 AM, Jared Adolf-Bryfogle wrote:

I have tried my quest using the link cable and found it to be pretty unstable.

Perhaps I did not meet the requirements, but it was a new PC that I built, with a SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 5700 XT with AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 8-Core 3.6 GHz cpu and 16gb of RAM. Maybe AMD cards are not optimized for it?

I can play all games from Steam on high settings, so it's definitely something else.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 4:37 PM Tom Goddard wrote:
Hi Jared,

That graphics card has similar speed to an Nvidia RTX 2070 and is plenty fast. I'm not sure what you mean by "unstable", could mean ChimeraX VR crashes, does not render at all, or has slow framerate so it flickers badly. ChimeraX is not like a game where all the scenes have been optimized and suitably simplified to guarantee a minimum rendering rate. It is easy to load data like molecules or maps that are beyond the capabilities of any graphics card to handle in VR. But molecules less than 100,000 atoms and map surfaces less than maybe 10 million triangles (say less than 4003 in size but really depends entirely on threshold and noise) are usually ok. Also ambient shadow lighting ("soft" or "full" lighting) which is casting 64 shadows will easily cause VR stutter on the highest end graphics card on modest data, so stick to simple lighting.

In summary ChimeraX VR isn't going to automatically work smoothly on any science data set you throw at it and it doesn't have tricks to automatically simplify your data. So it is up to you to see when the complexity of your data makes rendering too slow for VR and then simplify the display (e.g. volume step 2).

Tom

From: Jared Adolf-Bryfogle
Subject: Re: [chimerax-users] Oculus quest for chimeraX?
Date: August 18, 2020 at 4:01:56 PM PDT
To: Tom Goddard <goddard@…>
Cc: ChimeraX Users Help <chimerax-users@…>

Hey Tom,

Thanks for the detailed reply as always. I tried loading 2J88 PDB and it was just really choppy. So much that my very strong VR legs couldn't handle it. It seemed like it should work - so I'm thinking that it was probably something with the quest + link vs anything else. Quest+Link is usually pretty good, but it definitely reduces framerates as the GPU has to stream in addition to handling the graphics. Most games are super-smooth, but it might be something with that. If you can get your hands on one, definitely give it a go. I just wanted to provide a word of caution as I was extremely excited to try it out. I'll probably be picking up a headset just for PC soon like the Rift S or upcoming HP headset and will definitely give it another go.

-Jared

[Tom Goddard]

Have been using ChimeraX VR with Quest 2 for a couple years now and with Quest Pro the past few weeks. It works fine with the usb link cable with Quest Link and also over wifi with Oculus Air Link. It still requires fast graphics on the Windows PC since all the rendering is done by ChimeraX on the PC. I'm working a standalone Quest viewer app that can show scenes exported from ChimeraX in GLTF format, details in ticket #8375.

​https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/trac/ChimeraX/ticket/8375