system requirements

hardware requirements

In order to get Firesim running on your environment you will need one or more PC (depending on your desired system size).

Any “standard” device will do the job. In order to get reasonable graphics performance a 3D accelerator card is required, the card has to provide support for the GLSL shader language (vertex and pixel shader, the geometry shader is not used at the moment).

If you are planning to run frame-sequential stereo output you would like to use a quad-buffer card (like nVidia Quadro). For 3D output using Oculus Rift, a quad-buffer is not required, as OVR uses a side-by-side signal.

output devices supported

  • any standard monitor
  • any devices which can handle side-by-side stereo
  • any devices which can handle frame-sequential stereo
  • CAVE setups (multi-display)

input devices supported

  • keyboard
  • mouse
  • joystick (minimum recommendation if no other input hardware is available)
  • Altium 3d mouse
  • Polhemus patriot and G4 position tracking
  • Oculus Rift SDK2 (tracking)
  • eMagin Z800 (tracking)
  • kinect 360 (PC) version
  • standard web cam via linuxtrack
  • Firesim stepping sensor (uses NI ZigBee evaluation board)
  • Firesim PTT controler (uses pololu wixel)
  • Firesim Nozzle controler (uses Vellemann K8055 board)

Any other device is possible, Firesim supports devices connected via a serial interface (own “driver” class has to be provided) as well as UDP (network) data sources (VRPN support is in discussion).

software requirements

Even it should be possible to compile the system on Windows, Linux is the primary target platform, therefore a recent Linux distribution is strongly recommended. Current developement platform is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit.

packages required

optional packages

Some of these packages are not open source!