5 ms·
This is cool, but the Oculus is not the optimal tool for the job right now. I'm in the FPV hobby for over half a year and fly quadrocopters and model airplanes
by olex 13y ago
This is cool, but the Oculus is not the optimal tool for the job right now.
I'm in the FPV hobby for over half a year and fly quadrocopters and model airplanes using video goggles. The Rift currently has one important problem that, until overcome, will prevent it from gaining traction in this area: latency. It doesn't have an analog video input, and having to digitalize and process the video for the Rift introduces a delay into the signal that makes controlling your model uncomfortable at best, impossible in many cases.
Because of this problem, pretty much everybody uses analog video for FPV these days. There are goggles on the market made specifically for the job: FatShark series, the Zeiss Cinemizer HD and others. Some of them are HD and 3D capable (Cinemizers), many are fitted with built-in motion trackers (e.g. FatShark Attidude SD) that are easily bound to servos on the model controlling camera movement (pan-tilt setups), and there are external motion tracker modules easily used with the goggles that don't come with them. With no delay, flying even very fast aircraft is actually much easier in FPV than using traditional line-of-sight control. The latency problem is worse than it might sound: e.g. the GoPro cameras introduce a very small delay on their analog outputs (<50ms), and even this is absolutely noticeable by an experienced pilot in FPV flight and influences the control the pilot has considerably; the best latency currently achieved with various FPV setups using the Oculus Rift is in the 200ms region.
Another advantage of using "traditional" motion trackers over the Oculus Rift is that they output PWM signal, ready to be fed into your R/C transmitter and then used on the model with servos to move the camera.
Now, I understand that HD and 3D is eventually the future of this hobby, and the Oculus Rift might very well at some point become a very viable goggles and motion tracker assembly. But until the latency issue is solved, it's not going to gain a wide audience.
- DigitalJack 13y agoI used to fly RC airplanes back when I was in high school. I've been out of the loop for 20 years now... are there good sites to re-engage the RC world and/or get into FPV?
- commandar 13y agoI recently got into the hobby and found that Youtube was honestly the best source of information. There's a channel called RC Model Reviews that's particularly good. It's run by a guy named Bruce Simpson that's a bit of a crazy old Kiwi but he has a ton of really solid explanations of nearly everything you need to know getting started out. One cool thing is that the past couple of years have seen some serious disruption in the field. Open source firmwares for controllers are a thing now, and it's had nearly the same effect on RC that the WRT54G had on the consumer router business - you can now do things with very cheap hardware that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some links for you: ER9X Firmware - https://code.google.com/p/er9x/ https://code.google.com/p/er9x/ FrSky, a company doing a lot of interesting things in terms of radio equipment - http://www.frsky-rc.com/ http://www.frsky-rc.com/ The aforementioned RC Model Reviews - http://www.youtube.com/user/RCModelReviews http://www.youtube.com/user/RCModelReviews
- niels 13y agohttp://fpvlab.com http://fpvlab.com is a good forum for all things FPV.
- yeahsure 13y agoThis is my favorite RC/FPV YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/flitetest?feature=watch http://www.youtube.com/user/flitetest?feature=watch
- primitur 13y agoRe-engage the RC world: http://rcgroups.com/ http://rcgroups.com/ http://flitetest.com/ http://flitetest.com/ RCGroups - contains endless gold for enthusiasts and hobbyists and mad scientists, alike. I suggest you get right into the forums in whatever subject interests you, and start looking for the build threads. This site, alone, contains enough information to get you seriously hooked on RC again. FliteTest - fun, easy to watch videos on getting into the hobby. Also, these guys produce easy to make planes that will give you all the basics - me and my 6 year old recently got the FT Basics kit (nutball, delta, flyer) along with an FT Spitfire 2-pack, and we're having the best time of our lives flying a nice variety of cheap, easy to build/repair, planes. We'll probably go FPV in a little while ..
- bane 13y agoThey acknowledge the latency of about 120ms. I can see this being a problem with smaller drones, but high latency hasn't stopped the military for remotely flying drones in Afghanistan from facilities in Nevada.
- miahi 13y agoThis is because the UAVs have a high degree of autonomy - the technology is probably closer to the Mars probes than to the RC drones.
- retrogradeorbit 13y agoIt hasn't stopped them, because nothing stops them. Dead children doesn't stop them so why would latency? The latency on the military drones is actually far greater due to the latency on the satellite connections. The military drones are controlled on take off and landing via radio, but switch to satellite control for the mission. The lag does indeed affect the control. US military drones crash all the time. [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/us-drones-dropping-flies http://www.zerohedge.com/news/us-drones-dropping-flies] None of this matters when you can just get the Fed to print more USD and buy US treasury bonds with them and you just use that money to buy more drones.
- olex 13y agoIf you use autopilot to assist you flying the model, a delay is not a big problem. However, most people fly models in full manual, with the FPV setup giving them an "in-cockpit" experience. Even for fairly slow multicopters, a latency of >100ms is really bad for anything except slow hovering over open terrain (which gets incredibly boring very quickly).
- angersock 13y agoThe stated latency for the Rift was ~16ms--the other 100ms or so came from the rest of the pipeline. If that could be brought down--say, by an FPGA or Paralella or something, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
- marcosscriven 13y agoIsn't a 'delay' inherent to digital encoding? I mean, even if the encoding could be done virtually instantly, I seem to recall most of these methods encode differences between frames, including some frames ahead of the current one. Since we can't look into the future, you necessarily have at least a few frames delay? Unless there are some efficient digital encoding algorithms that don't need this?