Blender + Oculus hands on workshop

Photo Credit: Maurizio Pesce − CC-BY 2.0

Blender + Oculus hands on workshop

Blender-Brussels is pleased to invite Olivier Meunier (Olm-e) to give a workshop at iMAL on how to install and play around with the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset in Blender.

The Blender-Brussels is a series of monthly free and open workshops dedicated to Python creative coding using Blender. Started by François Zajéga and Julien Deswaef in 2012, these have become a regular meeting point for anyone interested in experimenting with code in a full featured 3D creation application. These workshops are not organized as a regular class room but as a space where the sharing of knowledge and communal exchange of ideas is the way to learn. As a result of this practices, all exercises and documentation produced during the workshop are shared online under an open source license.

For this workshop, Blender-Brussels is pleased to invite Olivier Meunier (Olm-e) to share his experience with the Oculus Rift and Blender. Olivier is a new media artist and experienced Blender user. He has recently used the Oculus VR headset for interior architecture visualization and will guide us through the installation and configuration process on a Gnu/Linux machine. We will have 4 Oculus (DK1 & DK2) available and 4 desktop Linux machines for the tests.

And for the first time, iMAL is opening up its well known workshop space to host this event.

Program of the day

The workshops starts at 10:00 and finishes at 18:00.

  1. Intallation of the necessary components to get an Oculus running and coupled with Blender.
  2. Documenting the process, working around the pitfalls and bug reporting if necessary.
  3. Playing around with the Oculus, scripting basic Blender scenes to be viewed with it.

You are encouraged to bring with you ideas, scripts, Blender scenes and projects that you would like to try out with the Oculus. For those who don’t have anything, no worries, there is enough examples and scripts done during the previous workshops to modify and play around with. Please note that the Blender-Brussels workshop have a policy of publishing under an open source license anything produced during the event. So don’t bring things that you don’t want other participants to put their hands on.

Registering

Participants should have a basic knowledge of 3D and programming. Although we will be providing some machines running Gnu/Linux to test the Oculus, you are invited to bring your own laptop with whatever system you are using. Just be sure to have the latest version of Blender (2.72) already installed, as this will save us some precious time.

Since we expect a lot of participants and since the space and material is limited, we exceptionally ask that you register for this workshop with the following information:

  1. Briefly describe yourself, your activities and abilities.
  2. Tell us a little bit why you want to attend this workshop.
  3. Do you already own an Oculus?

And send all this by email to juego [at] requiem4tv [dot] com

We will carefully review your application and keep you informed.

Report

A great number of people applied, with so many different backgrounds and approaches. Thanks all for coming and making this a great day.

Olivier Meunier leading the crowd

Notes from the day can be found on the dedicated piratepad.
Files used and improved during the day are available on the dedicated repository. You will find there an updated OSC script, a basic blend file to start interacting with the Oculus, plus a backup copy of the pad. It’s all there for you to keep on improving.

Olivier Meunier leading the crowd

More photos from the workshop are available in this gallery.

Sponsors

We could not have organized this workshop without their support.

The Oculus are graciously provided by:

Fishing Cactus
F/LAT
Botkamp
Immersio

This event is hosted at:

iMAL

iMAL − 30 Quai des Charbonnages − 1080 Brussel on Saturday 22nd November 2014, starting at 10:00 and finishing at 18:00.

Blender-Brussels is funded by:

FWB

Digital Arts Commission of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation since mars 2013.