I’ve pre-ordered an Oculus Rift DK2 for some experimentation, and in the meantime have been looking into OpenFrameworks as a convenient way of creating things for use in VR. There’s a huge range of addons, including ofxOculusRift which looks like it will make things pretty easy.
While waiting for the headset to be shipped, I’ve been thinking about what input devices that I could use with it. A wacom tablet is an interesting candidate for VR because of its 1:1 mapping of movement in physical space to virtual space, which increases presence compared to something less direct like a game pad. I did some searching to see if any OF addons for tablet data already existed, with only a few traces and broken links to show for it. I’d added support for tablets before in Blender’s game engine many years ago, so I ended up having a go at putting something together myself.
It currently only supports OS X since that’s what I’m using. I only have an old Wacom Intuos 2 which doesn’t have any of the fancy newer touch strips to connect up, but basic stuff like pressure and tilt works pretty well, and it’s good enough to get a bare minimum of sensor data out to reconstruct a position and orientation in 3D space. While I have a bit of experience with tablets before, I’ve barely done much in OF or obj-c, so any contributions or fixes are very welcome.
Get the code here: https://github.com/mattebb/ofxTablet
Leave a Reply