I am wondering how easy it would be to take the roll value of the headset, and apply it as a negative rotation transform to the video so that the horizon remains fixed when the player has their head tilted to the side a bit.
I hope this will be as simple as just taking the headset roll degree angle caused by players tilting their heads to the side, and applying the same degree offset to the video roll transform in the opposite direction, before the view cropping is applied.
I have found that several of my viewers get motion sick when watching VR footage, but they don't from watching regular flatscreen game footage, and the main difference I can think of is that a flatscreen game never rotates the camera on the roll axis. Additionally in the HL2 dev commentary for the airboat section they talk about needing to lock the horizon tilt to avoid playtester motion sickness from the airboat, so I really think removing this roll from vr game capture will help more people be able to watch VR streams.
Hopefully this is as simple as it sounds, though I know that often things end up much more complicated once you actually dive into the problem.
This would do weird things if the player looked up or down more than 90°, causing the view to instantly flip "upside down" as they would now have effectively a 180° roll due to looking behind themselves a bit, but this can perhaps be fixed by having limits (perhaps user customisable) where a roll value over a limit is not corrected, or even not applying roll correction if the headset is pointed too far up or down. But even without that I think the simple anti-roll would still be a good feature.
I am wondering how easy it would be to take the roll value of the headset, and apply it as a negative rotation transform to the video so that the horizon remains fixed when the player has their head tilted to the side a bit.
I hope this will be as simple as just taking the headset roll degree angle caused by players tilting their heads to the side, and applying the same degree offset to the video roll transform in the opposite direction, before the view cropping is applied.
I have found that several of my viewers get motion sick when watching VR footage, but they don't from watching regular flatscreen game footage, and the main difference I can think of is that a flatscreen game never rotates the camera on the roll axis. Additionally in the HL2 dev commentary for the airboat section they talk about needing to lock the horizon tilt to avoid playtester motion sickness from the airboat, so I really think removing this roll from vr game capture will help more people be able to watch VR streams.
Hopefully this is as simple as it sounds, though I know that often things end up much more complicated once you actually dive into the problem.
This would do weird things if the player looked up or down more than 90°, causing the view to instantly flip "upside down" as they would now have effectively a 180° roll due to looking behind themselves a bit, but this can perhaps be fixed by having limits (perhaps user customisable) where a roll value over a limit is not corrected, or even not applying roll correction if the headset is pointed too far up or down. But even without that I think the simple anti-roll would still be a good feature.