Oculus Rift

[J T]

I tried one on for just a few seconds at Comicon. It was an underwater scenario. You couldn't control anything other than where you looked. It was still really cool though. I think I've said it before, but the Oculus Rift is the only piece of new hardware I have had any real interest in since the PS2.

[Fragems]

My hopes are more set towards Sony now. Have heard some awesome things about their VR products in the past and with Project Morpheus on the PS4 maybe we will see some more stuff coming from them. Main issue is the pricing $300-400 would be the cap I could see myself paying for an entry level VR helm and most of the stuff Sony has out currently is pretty damn pricey . All they have said about Morpheus is it will be under $1000 .

Hopefully as more advancements are made and the market grows a bit more we will see prices start going down.

http://store.sony.com/WFS/SNYUS/en_US/- ... nal-Viewer

[Krejlooc]

So who of you have actually used the Rift?

I have, and I'm considering investing in any manufacturer who decides to manufacture the device.

It's not like Facebook will be the only company making these "things".

The device is pretty amazing, and once people remove their heads from their asses I see the rift being nothing but a profit making machine.

Or not. Time will tell.

I've used valve's proto

[Pulsar_t]

What's this API called? I know for example that TrackIR has its own DLL, which the game must support or else it's just useless.

I imagine VR would be best with situations where the player is either seated inside a vehicle or simply made stationary. There will be other accessories to add to the immersion, but I can't imagine VR replacing TV's for two more decades at least.

[Krejlooc]

What's this API called?

SteamVR

The other thing that makes all of this work is the Steamworks VR API. This is a new addition to the Steam platform that we have written to expand on the services provided by the Oculus SDK and other hardware-specific APIs. The Oculus SDK as it exists today is essentially a device driver. It allows one process to connect to a piece of hardware and provides all the services required to make that work. The Steamworks VR API expands on those capabilities by adding platform-level features that apply to all hardware device drivers.

We decided to build this API because we felt like we could help VR emerge more quickly by addressing a couple of issues. We aren’t shipping our own hardware, but providing software that is used by all of you is something that we have some experience with, so that is where we’ve put our energy. The first of those issues is making your continue to
work well in VR months or years from now. That includes both support for new hardware and software updates. The second issue we are addressing with the Steamworks VR API is that unlike every hardware-specific SDK we have encountered, it allows multiple apps to talk to a single piece of hardware at the same time.

I’ll start with future-proofing. If you don’t have a team providing ongoing support for your game, this is very important. You need support for new hardware, software updates, and more to keep your customers happy, and Steamworks can provide that.
Even if you do have a live team, using the Steamworks API lets your team focus on the game and not worry about ongoing VR support.

The biggest kind of future proofing that the VR API in Steamworks helps with is new hardware. These are some of the HMDs and tracking systems we’ve been able to run our games on over the past year and a half. At the moment none of these is consumer
ready, though the Oculus Rift is the closest. That is all going to change over the next year or two, though. A number of other VR displays have emerged in the last few months. If you use the Steamworks VR API you will get support for any of these devices that catch on without making any changes to your game. Of course it is likely that eventually new hardware will include features that aren’t in the API yet. When
that happens we will rev the API so new games can t ake advantage of the new features. However, older games will continue to work without modification like they do with other Steamworks features.

Even without new hardware, though, there are still reasons to write to Steamworks instead of directly to a hardware vendor’s API, and that is software up
dates. All sorts of features can be enabled or improved on a bit of hardware by upgrading its driver. Unfortunately moving to a new driver for the Rift currently means linking against a new version of a static lib. Even if the API were in a DLL, the interfaces aren’t versioned or backward compatible, so it wouldn’t be possible to swap out that DLL with a new one. When you use the Steamworks VR API we can update the implementation without requiring you to ship your game again.

There is also another, more immediate, reason to prefer the Steamworks API. It is often the case that multiple apps need access to the hardware at the same time. This is a common problem with hardware devices. For many devices like keyboards, mice, and
monitors the operating system provides standard APIs and abstracts away the hardware completely. For video cards it’s the job of OpenGL or DirectX to manage access to the device.

The Steamworks VR API fills the same niche for accessing the VR hardware that OpenGL does for video cards. And part of what it does is allow any number of VR apps to get display geometry and head tracking data from a single head-mounted display.
There’s nothing magical here, it’s just a little IPC communication, but asking every game or every hardware vendor to provide this service is not realistic. Thanks to the Steamworks VR API when you run Steam in VR mode and then launch a VR game the
game can actually connect to the hardware and doesn’t just fail to init the vendor-specific APIs.

It's accessible to developers right now.

[Pulsar_t]

Interesting info, thanks for posting.

[Krejlooc]

NP. Speaking of cross-platform VR development, a choice from Yoshida about Project Morpheus and the design process it's going through:

the PC shares enough similarities with the PlayStation 4 that a developer building a game with Oculus support for PC could likely bring it to PS4.

And vice versa, of course. This is all part of a larger interview: http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/10/560033 ... t-morpheus

the gist being that Sony is interested in building towards a semi-universal standard so that developers don't have to do a ton of work to bring games to their headsets vs competing headsets. In other words - morpheus' specs are a lot like Oculus', and for a reason.