Does rviz run properly on a virtual machine? I followed all instructions but the display is just a blank screen.

asked 2012-05-29 06:49:28 -0600

periphery
21 ●5 ●5 ●8

updated 2012-05-29 22:47:39 -0600

6468 ●28 ●57 ●93 http://www.informatik....

Can anyone verify whether rviz absolutely doesn't work on a virtual machine or not? I am using ROS Diamondback and a Kinect camera (whose drivers have been installed properly. Thanks.

EDIT Hi, I am using VMware Player, and my local machine is Windows 7 (64 bit).

I will put some more details about how I am trying to hook up Kinect. I am following instructions from this link: http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni_camera

To be specific, I am having issues with Step 4 in the link above. For example, for this command:

roslaunch openni_camera openni_node.launch

The terminal window notifies that is looking for a device, and when I plug in my Kinect, it detects it. So I can assume that this is working?

I then do: rosrun rviz rviz And the rviz GUI opens up. I set up and PointCloud 2 display and change all the parameters as mentioned, even changing the background to grey, but then the screen just shows grey colour, and no video feed from the Kinect camera. And the status is "Warning". And the .Global Status is "OK".

Sorry for a very long and confusing post. But I am really new to ROS and I have had a lot of trouble trying to configure SLAM in it.

Thanks for reading.

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What is the warning that shows up in the PointCloud2 Display?

dgossow ( 2013-08-05 13:03:38 -0600 )edit

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answered 2012-05-29 08:38:22 -0600

Dan Lazewatsky
9115 ●79 ●103 ●160 http://dan.lazewatsky.com/

I've been able to run rviz on a VM using parallels. Could you be a little more specific about what virtualization software you're using, and if rviz is outputting any errors or messages?

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In general rviz does not run well inside of VMs as it tries to take advantage of accelerated video.

tfoote ( 2012-08-03 11:50:33 -0600 )edit

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WMWare allows you to turn of 3D acceleration for a VM. When I did this the blank screen issue seems to have gone away ...for now.

rnunziata ( 2013-08-06 09:19:27 -0600 )edit

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answered 2013-08-06 18:35:44 -0600

Jeremy Zoss

4976 ●48 ●48 ●73 http://rosindustrial.org/

I have also had success running rviz inside of a VM. In my case, the VM is VirtualBox running under a Windows 7 x64 host. I had issues getting the HW-accelerated video to run smoothly, so ended up forcing software-rendering as described here. This has worked great for coding jobs with relatively modest visualization needs. I would worry somewhat if you ended up showing a lot of rviz data (as might be the case with PointCloud2 data).

However, my setup did not work well with the Kinect. I didn't dig too deeply, but I don't think the USB data was properly passed from the Windows environment into the VM. It may be worth using lower-level tools (rostopic hz /camera/points, rosrun image_view ..., etc.) to see if your issues are related to rviz or the openni nodes.