HowTo: Use RICOH THETA 360° camera with HTC Vive and SteamVR

[jcasman27]

Hey all,

 

I'm pointing out a guide for HTC Vive users looking to import 360° images into VR googles. The guide is housed on the theta360.guide site for RICOH THETA developers. It takes advantage of several cool Unity techniques after identifying the THETA 360° camera inside of Unity including using negative scale values to solve mirroring problems.

 

HowTo: Use RICOH THETA V 360° camera with HTC Vive and SteamVR

 

The guide provides a sample project and step-by-step instructions for using a RICOH THETA V 360° camera and HTC Vive with SteamVR for telepresence applications.

 

From the Overview section:

 

The THETA V model was released in late 2017. The “V” outputs a 4K equirectangular video stream with H264 compression 3840×1920/29.97fps as well as a 2K 1920x960/29.97 stream. You can easily use a Unity webcam texture to wrap the THETA V 4K video stream onto a sphere to provide a telepresence experience for industrial or experiential applications.

 

This test application illustrates the following techniques:

• Identify THETA V camera inside of Unity
• Assign THETA V to a texture
• Use flip normals on a Blender sphere to display the webcam texture to the inside of the Sphere. The Blender sphere is imported into Unity
• Use negative scale values to solve mirroring problem of objects in sphere appearing in reverse
• Display THETA V stream inside of a HTC Vive headset with SteamVR
• Track head movements and controller movements with SteamVR
• Use THETA V as a microphone and output audio to HTC Vive
• Initial configuration tests to orient the headset and the camera to simulate real-world telepresence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HowTo: Use RICOH THETA 360° camera with HTC Vive and SteamVR