App for Samsung XR headset?

harigeharry

dolphin7559 DeoVR uses AVPro btw

Interesting, I just see that indeed.

"Updated AVPro to 3.0.11 "
https://deovr.com/blog/113-ongoing-improvements-to-deovr

harigeharry

LOL just built and ran my very first Android XR app on the headset, worked! Probably still some work to do to get from 'hello world' to an SBS video player, LOL, but hey, it's something. Ran out of time, took already way longer than I had hoped. Going to find out soon if it's really as simple as Grok makes it look to build a basic SBS player 🙂

dolphin7559

harigeharry It's relatively simple, but it's not as simple as grok makes out, and it's way more complicated than a hello world app that doesn't do anything. Even with AI help you will be there for weeks or months (or longer if you don't know what you are doing) to build something that is actually useful.

harigeharry

dolphin7559 Nah. More difficult than Grok makes it look, I believe that for sure. You'll always run into some problem(s). But weeks/months makes no sense at all to me if there's a complete engine here ready to use. Writing the engine, now that would be an interesting challenge and that would take at least a few months, maybe even longer, although I think a (very basic) engine shouldnt also be more than a few months (full time) work, because even under the hood of the engine there will be several ready-made components to use like the video stream decoders. But using a ready made engine, really not sure where the complication could be?

Anyway I'm always low on free time but will be messing around with this whenever I have some spare time. If we still have nothing in a few weeks from others, who knows, maybe my v0.01 Frankenstein video player will be at least better than the samsung one LOL. Definitely a fun challenge either way.

harigeharry

LOL yeah it's indeed a bit more difficult than Grok made it look. The problem is that Grok's manual is oftentimes not correct, option names are different or dont exist anymore. And it just doesnt mention important stuff, so you'll run into setup problems. But they can all be figured out. Usually if you explain the problem Grok has an answer. After several hours of messing around I managed to play a SBS video and it worked. It already took quite a bit of banging against the wall, problem is of course if you've never done anything AT ALL in unity, it can be easy to overlook a super important setting, like including the right scene into your build, LOL, that one actually set me back over an hour and Grok wasnt very helpful neither.

But yeah, it works now, I'm playing a video in the headset with my 'own' player so that's a WIN 🙂 Downside is that I burned up way more time than I had available...

harigeharry

The more challenging part will be to be able to select a file to play from within the headset. For now I just used a small sample file that I included in the project (actually just the stereo file that was included with avpro). Anyway, happy that at least I managed to play something. More later on ...

harigeharry

LOL actually couldnt stop messing around with this of course and just had a major breakthrough 🙂 I was messing with a menu button to open a file picker so that I could choose which video to play but so far hasnt been really working, I managed to get a button visible, picker code and a hand to select, but couldnt get the pinching working..

But then i figured, let's just have it open the file picker menu once the app starts immediately. And it worked! I could select the SLR downloaded video I wanted to play from my headset and it plays them!!! Hallelujah!! Still some stuff not playing correctly, but damn, this is promising, already playing SLR downloaded porn with my own app 🙂

Damn this is more than I had hoped for with just 1 day of messing around with this...
Now need to display the video correctly (it only shows like 90 degrees correctly, must be some setting that's off) and of course would need to add playback settings and a lens switcher. Not sure how much work is all that but happy with today's progress.

Reeses

harigeharry keep on keeping on brother. We are all depending on you, no pressure, lol.

I don't know annnyyything about this type of stuff... with the tools you have, is it possible to modify the existing Samsung player to have adjustments?

harigeharry

Reeses Haha well actually I managed to iron out the little quirks. The only one that I still have is that I'm using a 360 sphere and behind the view it's a 'mess' of misprojections. But the 180 degrees in front of the viewer work perfectly now! They're the same now as with the samsung viewer, same quality it seems, although haven't really looked in detail yet.

So I now have a working app that shows a file picker menu upon startup, and then it plays the video the user selected. There's no menu after that whatsoever so also no pause, seeking etc, so it's quite limited of use I guess at this point. Not sure how difficult it is to add all that. Ah and of course the different lenses.

Anyway, no more time to program for me, I'm off for a few days to Miami. And when I'm back home, leaving shortly after that for 2 weeks holiday, so I guess not much development in the next period. BUT I guess it's good to know that if nobody else is coming up with a player, I hope to have something worth releasing in maybe a month?

EDIT wanted to post my current APK here but it's 150 mb, LOL. Either way I guess it's not very useful yet without at least a menu to SEEK through the file. Once I have that then I guess it starts to get interesting. Oh and there's still a 'watermark' in it because I'm using the free trial version of avpro, I think the license costs $250. If I feel that the app is worth that, I'll probably just buy that.

Reeses

harigeharry thats heartening to hear my man, there is hope for us yet. Im deafened by the silence from the deovr team. The slr team seems to be directing question traffic to the deo team

Reeses

This is what I got back on the deovr forum

Me-
hello Daria, has there been any movement on the deovr app for XR front?

Any update at all would be a welcome update, even if it's just "we're still thinking about id we want to." Or a "we have started, but it may be quite some time" anything at all would be welcome by all of us I think.

Thank you for your time!

DariaDeoVR replied to this.

Deovr-
Reeses We are planning to release the app, but we don't have the timeframe yet

harigeharry

Back from Miami and had a few hours to mess around with this and made some great progress again! I managed to implement hand tracking AND a sliding bar to seek through the video and I managed to hook that all up together and it frikking works, LOL. Wasn't super straight forward to get this going, problem is that Grok changes its mind literally every time you ask it something, LOL, I think i literally went through over 30 versions of the seeking script, but finally it all works!!

So I now am pretty much where the Samsung player is at. Next steps will be to see if i can implement fisheye lenses and a way to auto hide the seek bar.

harigeharry

BTW I'm thinking, instead of hiding the seek bar, maybe it's an idea to show the seek bar outside of the regular view, so like to the left of the viewer, instead of the front and have it there all the time? Not sure what would work the best, I'm afraid that with a method to hide/appear it will still do that when you don't want it. So not sure what the best way would be to do this ...

harigeharry

Ummm adding fisheye support actually is the challenging part, as avpro does not seem to have that. I understand from Grok that people use community shaders for that. I tried one (https://appletllc.wordpress.com/2021/08/17/fisheye180-shader-high_quality%E5%AF%BE%E5%BF%9C/comment-page-1/) but the result doesn't seem to be what i was hoping for and couldnt get it to work in 'high quality' mode neither ... Could be that i did something wrong though since the shader I found was from 2021 and needed to make several adjustments, maybe something went wrong there.. When I have more time I'll look into that.

EDIT LOL i tried Grok to write the shader for me but as I expected that wasn't going to work neither. Umm this actually might be a difficult one ...

harigeharry

BOOOOM got it working! Fisheye 190 plays fine now in high quality 🙂 Now only need to add a transform function to move the image around (so the viewer can adjust it for the right position) and it should be about ready for release 🙂

blaze466

harigeharry Damn dude. Killin it!

For the seek bar, what if you could move it out of the way and minimize it to a tiny icon, similar to an expansion arrow? Then when you want it back, you just click it to expand. Also, allow the user to set transparency when the pointer is not over it. For example, if I were to move it to the upper right corner of my screen and minimize it, once I move my pointer off of it, it goes to whatever transparency I set, which could be fully invisible or only slightly visible. If I know where it is, I can hover my pointer over it when I choose to bring it back to fully illuminated. If I pull it back off, it goes transparent. If I click it, it expands. Maybe the retract/expansion isn’t even necessary with the hover pointer feature.

harigeharry

Those are some interesting ideas @blaze466 I think I will try to make that.

The app is actually ready now in its most basic form, I think I managed to iron out all quirks. You can load a video that's stored on the headset and then play it, just like the samsung app. Differences are that the controls are at the very left corner of the viewer currently, so 'out of the way' and you can use fisheye190, which of course is what users on this website want 🙂 You can scroll through the video using the slider.

So my plan is to publish it via the play store, but it seems that process can take up to 30 days. I've scheduled a call for next week to learn more about that. But my idea is to charge a small fee, like $9.99 for the app to make back some of the $250 fee for avpro. Chances are that a player like deoVR gets released first and then I don't think my app will be that useful anymore, haha, but I'm ok with that. I guess that will motivate then to keep developing so that it becomes truely an alternative to the current players out there. It's actually been fun developing for the XR.

I'll keep you guys updated. Not much time though to develop the app right now but the idea is to keep adding features and make a grownup VR player

Reeses

harigeharry brother keep up the work, you're a true hero. Do you have rage against the machine playing while you work on you app by chance? I just picture a man, diligently working on an app, and "fk you I won't do what you told me!" Coming from the next room 🤣

dolphin7559

harigeharry Do you think people would be willing to pay $10 for a basic AI slop app? I think there are guidelines and a quality threshold that the app needs to meet to even be accepted on the store too.

harigeharry

dolphin7559 What are you even talking about? I myself would pay $100 easily for such app if there's no alternative but that damn Samsung app. And I just managed to implement streaming from a local jellyfin server, works perfectly! So I can now stream my whole local library that i've downloaded from SLR to my headset! That's also not even possible with the Samsung app, you can only play content stored on the headset itself, which is of course extremely limiting everything.

I think the most important feature that's still missing is rotation of the image, so to align it like the viewer wants. If that works it already does everything I need from a VR player app. Ah, passthrough would be another nice feature to have of course. I'll probably be working on both, alltough passthrough actually might be challenging, will need to look into that.

jommy

dolphin7559 harigeharry Do you think people would be willing to pay $10 for a basic AI slop app? I think there are guidelines and a quality threshold that the app needs to meet to even be accepted on the store too.

Uh, yeah. $10 is nothing these days, you pay more to eat a McDonalds

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