The 2.83 release will be the first Blender version to include core VR support. This is just the first milestone named VR Scene Inspection, which aims to lay foundations for further, more feature rich use-cases.
Purpose of this thread is to gather user feedback on the VR Scene Inspection milestone.
See Also
Release Notes: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.83/Virtual_Reality
User Manual: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/getting_started/configuration/hardware.html#head-mounted-displays-virtual-reality
Milestone design task: https://developer.blender.org/T71347
Known Issues
Here are some known issues for the first milestone (order does not represent priority):
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Limited usefulness of VR Landmarks (VR Scene Inspection Add-on)
Due to unfortunate timing, it was not possible to get the VR landmarks polished to make them work well in all supposed use-cases. There are some issues with changing the active landmark remaining, and the creation of new ones needs more features (e.g. creating custom landmarks from current viewer position).
Status: New Add-on features are in development. Fixes can be backported to 2.83 but general improvements will have to go into 2.90. -
Base poses should probably be sent to OpenXR
Currently, Blender takes the position and rotation deltas of the eyes and applies them to its base pose (i.e. the active landmark). There appears to be a way to let OpenXR runtimes know about that so the base pose can be applied there. We werenāt able to get that to work. (See next point) -
Height positioning of base pose needs to be better
Ideally, when opening a VR view, the eye distance to the physical floor would match the virtual one. It doesnāt appear like OpenXR deals with this sufficiently. If the previous point is addressed this might be solved, but it is a big unknown.
Status: Help needed. Someone with experience with the OpenXR specification or other VR platforms is needed to find a solution. -
VR Camera feedback is performance hungry
The VR Camera feedback option allows drawing a camera-shaped gizmo in regular 3D views, indicating the current position and rotation of the VR viewer. That currently requires continuously redrawing the 3D Views it is in, because gizmos are drawn together with the viewport. A patch to address this was written, but rejected because of design concerns and conflicting design changes in master.
Status: This could be addressed soon as part of regular development. Itās not a high priority but doable without much work. -
VR mirror is performance hungry
The first milestone requires a fully interactive mirror of the VR view in a regular 3D View. The only way to do this without bigger changes is by re-rendering the entire viewport, effectively as a 3rd eye. Itās tricky to improve this, but there are some ideas.
Status: No concrete plans to address this. Add-on UI shows a warning now. -
VR mirror could share more settings with VR view
If a regular 3D View serves as VR mirror, it currently only shares shading settings with the VR view. It could share more settings, like the active View Layer or clipping distances.
Status: Can be improved as regular developemnt -
DirectX compatibility layer not working on some AMD cards.
The compatibility layer simply fails on some cards/drivers, which is indicated with a pink screen.
Status: Needs investigation - cause is unclear and no developer is available to investigate. Help welcome!