@datatitian The other day I noticed that this little library called Raylib is able to render VR and make us of the Oculus api. It's very easy to use and I can easily integrate some of my Go code with it. https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/issues/49

@datatitian By the way, it can be compiled as a native binary for your OS platform, or targetting the web (html+js+webgl) http://www.raylib.com/examples/web/core/loader.html?name=core_vr_simulator

@h for fast and easy it's tough to beat #aframevr, you can setup scenes with just a few lines of HTML, and it comes with a built-in visual editor
https://aframe.io/docs/0.6.0/introduction/

@h being based on vanilla JavaScript, it's easy to integrate with anything that you can normally connect to the Web. My first project, for example, was and integration of #rstats data visualization and #aframe
http://wmurphyrd.shinyapps.io/adit

@datatitian And regarding VR gear, what's your prefererence? Isn't Oculus a bit pricey? Or maybe the display quality and tracking performance are worth it?

@h the HTC Vive and Oculus are in a league of their own. They have "room scale" tracking which means each step you take in the real world translates 1-to-1 to the virtual world. There's one experience with the surface of Mars reconstructed from actual Rover photographs and you can literally walk around. It's indescribable. I personally have the Vive and love it. Never tried the Oculus, though. There are also a few more brands debuts expected this holiday, including Acer

@datatitian The details about tracking are more or less what I gleaned from Youtube reviews, but you know those can be paid sales pitches. It's useful to learn that the Vive is top of the line too. Hopefully Acer and others help to drive prices down. I'll keep an eye on the scene. Thank you Will.

@datatitian Just came across this. Theremay be some ideas toborrow from https://twitter.com/LeapMotion/status/872893254152409088

@h leap is pretty cool. Been dreaming of writing grants to develop VR physical assessment training for medical professionals using leap to validate precise hand motions

@datatitian You mean a sort of crowdsourced precision motion capture data pool?

@h I was thinking train a ML algorithm on some experts using leap and then run classification on students trying it to tell them if they are doing it right or not

@datatitian That's a promising idea. BTW you might be able to get some support from Leap in such a type of project. I've just noticed they support both Oculus and Vive.

@datatitian I'm wondering what precision would be required for that type of professional work. Consumer hand controllers are meant for a limited set of gestures, not as free and general purpose as datagloves yet. It's coming, but precision applications probably is still a few year in the future for mainstream consumer gear.

@h that leap thing you linked is full on finger tracking using a camera

@datatitian Yeah I mean, in things like surgery of humans you probably need submillimeter precision. I have no idea what Leap will deliver in the future, it's still very much work in progress.

@datatitian You can't say "oops sorry we saw it wrong. we cut the wrong vein". That's still years ahead.

@datatitian Turns out that Leap Motion already has submillimeter precision according to this 2013 report https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690061/

"When moving to discrete positions on a path, the standard deviation was below 0.7 mm per axis. It can be summarized that it was not possible to achieve the theoretical accuracy of 0.01 mm under real conditions but a high precision (an overall average accuracy of 0.7mm) with regard to gesture-based user interfaces. "

@datatitian This is the main problem with Leap Motion though https://central.leapmotion.com/agreements/SdkAgreement

Hopefully we'll see free software for it sometime soon.

@datatitian This UI is pretty neat and supports Leap Motion. Main drawback: It's Unity3d-based https://github.com/aestheticinteractive/Hover-UI-Kit