Example code for using the Oculus Rift, written for the book Oculus Rift in Action

This example code is designed to use static linking throughout. This means static linking against the C/C++ runtimes on windows (to avoid issues with missing Visual Studio redistributables) and static linking against all of the included submodules. Dynamic linking is only used for system libraries (other than the C++ runtime on Windows) and for the resource DLL on windows. In order to avoid having each executable contain a distinct copy of the (currently 30MB) resource files, a single DLL is created to hold them, and the common library functionality has utility methods to load them.

git clone https://github.com/OculusRiftInAction/OculusRiftInAction.git --recursive

This command is likely to take a while. It's a big project with lots of submodules

cd OculusRiftInAction
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. [-G <your preferred toolset>]

CMake will create project files for a given toolset. What toolset you use depends on your platform, and there's usually a default. On a Windows machine, it defaults to Visual Studio, although if you have more than one version installed it may require you to specify which one you want. You can specify a specific platform using -G.

cmake -h

Will show you a list of supported generators on your platform.

Note that on OSX, if you fail to specify a generator it will probably produce a Makefile. If you wish you use XCode you may need to specify the generator explicitly.

Depends on your build tool. If you're using Visual Studio or XCode you can just say 'File, Open Project' or something to that effect and point it at the OculusRiftInAction/build directory.

The following generators have all been found to work

Suitable generators

• "Visual Studio 12"
• "Visual Studio 12 Win64"

Note that "Visual Studio 12" actually corresponds to Visual Studio 2013.

It's worthwhile to note that CMake may not show the Win64 options in the list of generators, even if they're supported. Win64 refers to the creation of projects that produce 64 bit binaries, NOT the version of Visual Studio itself.

The libraries needed to build the core examples are included and built as part of the project, but some examples will only be built if additional libraries are present, such as OpenCV. If you want to build these, it's important to make sure you match up the 32/64 bit nature of the project you create with the installed version of OpenCV, etc.

• "Xcode"

Suitable generators

• "Eclipse CDT4 - Unix Makefiles"
• "Eclipse CDT4 - Ninja"
• "Unix Makefiles"
• "Ninja"

Note that the CMake Eclipse generators will complain about a build directory that is a child of the source directory, but I have not experienced any issues with this.

I highly recommend using the Ninja builder instead of makefiles. It's dramatically faster. Note that the Ubuntu package for the ninja builder is ninja-build not ninja, which is an unrelated tool.

The examples should include all the required dependencies for making the basic examples. However, if you want to build the examples from Chapter 9, you will require Qt 5.4 or higher. For the Chapter 13 examples, you will required OpenCV 2.x. If you wish to use these you can set the Qt5_DIR and OpenCV_DIR values when running CMake in order to allow it to find them, although it will make an effort to find them independently.

However, if you are using either of these optional libraries, keep in mind CMake will not attempt to copy the binaries from the library.