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Virtual Reality Tech and Openness

Posted by Soulskill on from the two-dimensional-hopes dept.

An anonymous reader writes: An article written by Kyle Orland looks at how the nascent virtual reality industry will handle openness — in terms of standards, platforms, source code, and development. "Whether any single VR platform is 'open' or not, though, may be moot if developers have to juggle countless slightly different development standards for countless slightly different VR platforms. In a way, making a PC game that only works on the Oculus Rift is as ridiculous as making a PC game that only works on Dell monitors." Right now, the major players in VR tech are using different approaches. Oculus is distributing a closed-license SDK. Valve is setting up a more open platform that lets multiple manufacturers build devices for it. The downside is that it doesn't seem to work as well, particular with Oculus hardware. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says standards are going to take time and cooperation. Of course, that tune may change when devices start hitting the market.

2 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Missing the point again... by houstonbofh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They want to lock down standards and own the market. But the market will go to the standard with the most support, and open standards have a way of doing that better. That is how the PC won, even if IBM didn't. I am betting Google or Steam may end up the dominant player.

    1. Re:Missing the point again... by hitchhacker · · Score: 2

      You completely left out the difficult parts of the Oculus SDK like corrections for lens distortion and chromatic aberration. Their SDK also does a ton of work when your app can't meet the 75 fps vsync target of the hmd and starts doing its "time warp" frame interpolation based on current head orientation. There's a hell of a lot more they are planning before the final release next year with things like layers for distant objects which shouldn't need to be rendered twice and their custom spatial input controllers.

      There's OSVR.. though it appears that they are doing the lens correction via shaders and I don't think they have a driver for the Oculus head tracking yet. I build against the Oculus SDK 0.4.4 on Linux because that's the _only_ thing available to me right now. If only I had the luxury of choice.