62 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
62 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "My Convoluted VRChat Google Meet Setup"
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date: 2021-02-24
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tags:
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- oculusquest2
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- vr
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- vrchat
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---
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# My Convoluted VRChat Google Meet Setup
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Recently the place I work for sent us all VR headsets. I decided to see what it
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would take to use that headset to make my camera show a virtual avatar instead
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of my meat body face. This is the story of my journey through chaining things
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together to make work meetings a bit more fun by using a 3D avatar instead of
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myself in some of them.
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[This post uses SVG for diagrams to help explain what's going on here. You may
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need to use a browser with SVG support in order to get the best experience with
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this article. All the diagrams will be explained after the fact so that people
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using screen readers are not left out.](conversation://Mara/hacker)
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Working at <a href="https://twitter.com/Tailscale?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Tailscale</a> is great. They sent us all an Oculus Quest 2! <a href="https://t.co/dDhbwO9cFd">pic.twitter.com/dDhbwO9cFd</a></p>— Cadey A. Ratio (@theprincessxena) <a href="https://twitter.com/theprincessxena/status/1362871906597224456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 19, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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So, let's cover the basics from a high level. At a high level a webcam is just
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a video source that may or may not have a microphone attached to it. So in
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order to get my avatar to show up in a video call, I need some way to make some
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window on my computer act as a webcam. This will make the overall dependency
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list look like this (for those of you using screen readers I will describe
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this diagram below):
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VRChat renders to the Desktop which is picked up by OBS which has the ability
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to pretend to be a webcam, which is finally picked up by Google Meet.
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If the VR headset that I got from work was a tethered to the PC kind of VR
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headset like the Valve Index or HTC Vive, the next steps would involve full
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body tracking or something so that I could have my movements in real life
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transfer into movements that my avatar makes.
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However, the VR headset we got sent was an Oculus Quest 2. This is a
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_standalone_ VR headset that is basically an Android tablet that you strap
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to your face. This makes things a bit more technically challenging because
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now you need some way to get the video to the headset and the motion tracking
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data from the headset and to the computer at 90 times per second. This requires
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a bit more cleverness.
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The Oculus desktop software ships with a feature called Oculus Link that allows
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you to use a gaming PC to render the VR data to your headset by sending the
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video streams over USB. I had to dig around for a compatible cable (It needs to
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be a specific kind of USB-3 to USB-C-3 cable with at least 5 gigabits per
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second of transfer capacity) since the ones that
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[Oculus sells](https://www.oculus.com/accessories/oculus-link/) are both at
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least CAD$110 and out of stock anywhere I can find them in Canada. The 0.75
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meter long cable I had been using was good enough to get me through the first
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couple days of experimenting with VR, but it was clear that a better solution
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was needed.
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I did some digging and found a bit of software called
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[ALVR](https://github.com/alvr-org/alvr#readme) that claimed to let me do VR
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from my computer wirelessly.
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