The SDK has always been relatively closed even before the Facebook acquisition. They've always touted it as being important for guaranteeing the quality of an experience which I don't necessarily disagree with but its also important for their goal of becoming the biggest VR software platform.
Yes, but this server application was only introduced with the DK2 and the 0.4.x SDK which was delivered after the facebook acquisition. Whether they would have hold back the source code without facebook - who the hell knows?
Huh, I didn't know that. I never really had a look at any SDK earlier than that. I just had a false memory that the DK2 came out before the fb acquisition. I do remember Oculus intimating that they couldn't open up the tracking code because it was some proprietary stuff they'd bought but that's almost certainly not the case now.
Oculus from the beginning was fairly big into locking down its ecosystem. I think its clear that it wants an Apple-like level of control where PC gaming turns into a console-like experience. This lock-in benefits them as their store would become the premier outlet for VR sales and Oculus would receive a juicy cut of every VR game sold. Also this would connect to Facebook's social VR ideals of a VR social network and all the privacy issues that come with that.
I completely disagree with this philosophy and don't think a simple peripheral should be a wedge into further lock-in in the PC gaming world. I just want to play games, not be a part of some weird Facebook 'trying to stay relevant' agenda or an Oculus 'trying to lock down VR' agenda.
Thankfully Valve has spoiled their plans by making a better VR system and an open-ish ecosystem. Valve doesn't pay for exclusives either.
Oculus appears to be behind in hardware (room scale), software (fewer real VR games), and shipping date.
I don't think they will disappear because VR is obviously part of the future. But I wonder when they will be able to turn a profit. Vive and Valve have the upper hand and it seems like exclusivity agreements would only hurt Oculus at this point.
What innovations could the Rift make that give it some edge over future versions of the Vive?
In case you don't watch, they assert that the Rift headset is much better than the Vive headset. They say a bunch of other things, too - but that's the most important comment they make.
Thanks, I saw that, but I don't think that's the most important takeaway from their review.
They said if they had to choose one device to use for the next 12 months it would be the Vive [1]. FYI there's a lot of discussion on r/vive about it [2].
From the reddit thread you posted (which it should be noted is on the vive subreddit)
> Comfort Advantage: Rift
Norm: Rift has almost no pressure Jeremy: Vive can't distribute weight as well Both mentioned this is the biggest difference between two Vive is better for huge massive noggins as the Oculus straps may not be long enough
> Norm: "Everytime I play a Vive game, 10 minutes in, I think to myself, boy I wish I could play this exact same with the tracked controllers wearing an Oculus Rift
Jeremy: "I can say the exact same sentence, in fact when yesterday I was playing on the Vive, I had to take it of and say, UGH, I really miss my Oculus Rift, because it is just so much more comfortable"
Jeremy: If Touch was out now, there would be a lot less favorability with the Vive
> You can add Touch controllers and a second camera to the Rift, but the Vive is never getting more comfortable or crisper.
Currently, you cannot add these things to the Rift. I think @croon put this best in another comment,
> The trade show Kinect displays were also immensely more functional than the released products. The Oculus Touch is not a real product (yet). Same goes for the roomscale tracking. There's no point in discussing the capabilities of a product before it's manufactured at scale, with all the cost-cutting that entails. Trade show demos really does not say anything unless the product on show has gone to production.
When Touch becomes available on the Rift, Vive could be ready with newer versions of their headset. There are many hypotheticals in the future. Perhaps in a year the Rift will have the edge. Today, people seem to prefer the Vive when balancing the pros and cons of each system.
People have already tested plugging a second camera in to achieve roomscale. It works.
> Today, people seem to prefer the Vive when balancing the pros and cons of each system
Yeah, unless they prefer playing seated games like Lucky's Tale, Chronos, Eve : Valkyrie, Project CARS.
You're welcome to personally prefer Vive, but you're incorrectly ignoring the fact that the Oculus Rift is better in several areas that are important enough to some people to change which system they prefer.
>Oculus appears to be behind in hardware (room scale)
Room scale works well in Rift. Notably, there was a 15×11 room-scale test by Palmer Luckey himself[1], and comments from several prominent game developers including Fantastic Contraption[12].
>software (fewer real VR games)
If the launch lineup of 30 games[7] doesn't convince you, and you're not interested in Minecraft[9] or the full back catalogue of PSP[10] or Wii[8] games, you can play any existing game in VR either in a large cinema display[6] or with full immersion[5].
>and shipping date.
The Vive is not immune to shipping controversy and severe miscommunication[2]. Issues have included delays, queue drops, miscommunication, and corrupt/fraudulent shipping costs[11].
>I wonder when they will be able to turn a profit
The headset is being sold at cost. Facebook already turns a profit. Talking of Oculus as an isolated single business unit will become less possible as time passes, but it is already projected to reach profitability in 6 years' time.[3] HTC has recently experienced some financial difficulty.[14]
>Vive and Valve have the upper hand
This is far from as clear as you're making it out to be. There's an significant amount of fanboyism and internet-defense-force allegations in various rift and oculus discussion forums, it's important to not get caught up in rumor and allegations.
>What innovations could the Rift make that give it some edge over future versions of the Vive?
Already, reviews uniformly state that the Rift headset has superior comfort[4]; that Oculus has a simpler out-of-the-box experience; that the integrated headphones significantly decrease complexity and cabling; and that Oculus Touch offers more precise control than the Vive wands, with full support for gesture detection[13] via the Half Moon ring. Plus, the inclusion of ATW directly in the SDK significantly increases comfort.
Of course the Rift isn't perfect either, and VR has a long way to go. It will always be desirable to have higher resolution, better framerate, lighter profile and better optics. But we are very lucky to have multiple companies competing in this space with genuinely viable offerings.
4. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/the-ars-vr-headset-sho... "If there’s one area where the Rift unquestionably bests the Vive, it’s in the design of the physical headset. I was comfortable wearing the Rift for hours at a time without breaks and without any desire to take it off. With the Vive, on the other hand, I found myself needing to take frequent breaks and constantly fiddle with the fit to get comfortable."
> Room scale works well in Rift. Notably, there was a 15×11 room-scale test by Palmer Luckey himself[1], and comments from several prominent game developers including Fantastic Contraption[12].
From your own sources, it's quotes from the Oculus founder, as well as game devs saying it's "almost as good" as the Vive, meaning Oculus DOES lag behind.
> If the launch lineup of 30 games[7] doesn't convince you, and you're not interested in Minecraft[9] or the full back catalogue of PSP[10] or Wii[8] games, you can play any existing game in VR either in a large cinema display[6] or with full immersion[5].
He's saying he was not convinced by the games line-up, yes. What you're listing is three third-party mods, two of which of questionable legality (emulators), when factoring in the access to ROMs. And playing games in cinema mode is equally possible on both, so the original argument stands.
> This is far from as clear as you're making it out to be. There's an significant amount of fanboyism and internet-defense-force allegations in various rift and oculus discussion forums, it's important to not get caught up in rumor and allegations.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
> Already, reviews uniformly state that the Rift headset has superior comfort[4]; that Oculus has a simpler out-of-the-box experience; that the integrated headphones significantly decrease complexity and cabling; and that Oculus Touch offers more precise control than the Vive wands, with full support for gesture detection[13] via the Half Moon ring.
The comfort does favor Rift on average, but it's not uniformly, as the Vive supposedly is more comfortable with glasses (I don't have glasses).
No citation on the simpler experience and more precise control.
Everything I've read and watched has said that the Vive interface is a lot better.
And "more control" I'm assuming you are referring to the Rift controllers that are not even released yet.
Your sources are questionable opinion pieces at best. Or reported press releases. Internet-defense-force indeed.
This just goes to show the rift vs vive argument is very much a subjective matter. However, objectively, the vives tracking technology is superior in design (and elegance) to the rifts. Though they may effectively produce the same result in 90% of cases, the vive has way more potential (tracking multiple people and objects, as its passive). For this alone IMHO the vive wins.
But of course, as there are many subjective factors to consider, so its going to be different for everyone. Having variety and choice is great for consumers though!
First off, I'm a huge fan of the lighthouse tracking system, and I'm looking forward to them opening it so I can use it in other projects. I do think it has some elegance to it.
That being said, it's not necessarily "superior in design". Because it uses a sweeping laser, it can't know where every tracking point is at the same time. It can't even measure each axis at the same time. The laser sweeps top to bottom and then side to side. For each tracking point, it records it's position in one axis at one point in time and the next axis at another point in time. If the tracking point has moved in between sweeps (which is likely), then you have two separate position measurements from two separate times that have to be combined with data from the IMUS to determine exact location. The Rift doesn't have this issue. The Rift records the location of all visible tracking points at the same time using an infrared camera.
It's important to keep in mind that Vive's lighthouse tracking system and Rift's constellation system only use the lasers and cameras to do drift correction. Most of the tracking is done by their IMUs (accelerators and gyroscopes), so the actual results you perceive will be very similar.
As you stated its not used for all tracking, but simply drift checking in pose estimation. So needing to update each axis simultaneously is not essential. The pose estimation is just updated with the latest values to correct for drift. At 60Hz this is sufficient, as the average movement speed of humans is likely not fast enough to produce noticeable problems.
The rift on the other hand has to do image processing. This requires significantly more processing power and is only as good as the resolution of the camera. The further you move from the camera, the less accurate it gets. The tracking device must also be tethered to the PC (via usb), limiting potential for adding multiple tracking cameras to improve accuracy. Also the more cameras you add, the more processing is required.
The vive does not have these issue - as long as the laser is in range, it will be as accurate as if you were right next to it. Adding more base units improves the accuracy at no extra processing cost. The design of the vive also allows pose estimation to be distributed. Ignoring occlusion issues in a small space, the lighthouse system could be used for tracking hundreds of devices.
What this essentially means, is that you can walk around a room with the vive and have a great experience [1]. While this might be possible with the rift, the experience is likely not going to be as good as the vive, and may be quite poor at times.
First off, I want to reiterate that I'm most excited about the lighthouse tracking system, it fits well with projects where I'd like to apply tracking, but my main objection is to your comment that it's an objectively superior design. All designs have pros and cons. Also, I realize I'm nit picking, but there's a couple inaccuracies in what you've said:
I'm not sure where you're getting the significantly more processing power; particularly if you're comparing to lighthouse. General image processing can add latency, but they've constrained the tracking problem, and it currently doesn't heavily utilize the CPU [1] . You can perform similar tracking cheaply with an ASIC like castAR does [2]. Lighthouse still has to perform sensor fusion with different time stamps for the tracker locations as I previously mentioned, which can also be processor intensive. I haven't done or seen any CPU usage comparisons between the two, but I believe they'd be comparable.
You are limited by the resolution of the camera, but you can still get subpixel accuracy when tracking. With lighthouse, you don't exactly get infinite resolution either, but I do think lighthouse takes the cake here. Once again though, it's the IMU that ultimately determines the accuracy.
Lighthouse being untethered is one of the more exciting things to me as it lends itself well to doing tracking in large event spaces.
The limiting factor for lighthouse isn't whether the laser is in range, but whether the LEDs are in range. In between each laser sweep, the IR LEDs flash, so that the tracking points know when to start timing [3]. I believe they've improved the distance of this flash in the consumer Vive, but they will still limit the distance.
Adding base stations does help improve accuracy, just as it does with constellation, but it won't improve precision. It only helps prevent issues with occlusion. However, adding more base stations won't improve the precision of the tracking device's location.
I believe the current lighthouse systems are still technically limited to two base stations, because of how they are time multiplexed. They're planning on frequency multiplexing which should allow this to grow without having to connect the base stations.
Also, lighthouse is susceptible to IR interference in ways that constellation isn't. They both utilize IR for their tracking, but since each tracker in the constellation system flashes a pattern, it's able to eliminate environmental IR. Lighthouse doesn't have a direct way to prevent IR interference that I'm aware of other than accounting for potential errors in their pose estimation.
Lighthouse also has moving parts, so there's a chance for mechanical failure. The motors are manufactured by Nidec [4] who are one of the largest manufacturers of hard drive motors, so they should be very high quality, but it is a potential point of failure.
Lastly, your statement "while this might be possible with the rift, the experience is likely not going to be as good as the Vive, and may be quite poor at times," seems to be entirely speculation. There are several tests with both single and multiple cameras that have performed room scale tracking exceptionally well. [5] [6] [7]
These are both great technologies that have their own strengths and weaknesses. I don't think there's one objective winner here. That being said, I'm looking forward to the updates to lighthouse that they've been talking about to make lighthouse viable for large event spaces, and I could even see a day where other IOT objects utilize lighthouse for tracking in ways that wouldn't be possible with constellation.
The rift has more steps in the tracking process. It has to track the dots of the currently displayed pattern. Transpose that into 3D space. Then it can perform triangulation.
The vive needs to only convert the time information to position relative to the base station. Then using the base station position, it can localise in 3D via the same/similar triangulation approach as the rift.
Hence, the rift requires significantly more processing power than the vive. This will likely introduce some latency, though its probably negligible to human perception. Furthermore, as the rift shows different patterns, it is possible, if moving fast enough for the patterns to move between frames, warping the dot patterns of the headset. This is a similar problem to the vive's sweeping. The major problem I see with the rift, is that adding more objects to be tracked only increases latency and complexity for tracking from a 2D image (more flashing patterns).
The lighthouse does not need to handle different timestamps for tracking. At each instant in time when new sensor data is received, the pose model is updated with the new sensor info (similar to a kalman filter). The pose model can be designed to update a single axis at a time though. There is only ~17ms between each axis update. You would have to be moving very fast to cause issues with tracking.
So, objectively the vives tracking is a superior design. Its elegant and simple. The vive and rift may perform similarly within the restrictions of their respective domains of use, such that 90% of the time people can't tell the difference. However, I would argue the vives domain is conservative. Start to move outside of those domains, the lighthouse system has much more potential and very few limitations that cant be reasonably/practically mitigated.
Both technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. Both allow tracking multiple objects (you need to add either LEDs or photodiodes to those objects) and adding more trackers (lighthouse towers or Constellation trackers). In practise I think for more cases they will be good enough, especially when the Oculus Touch controllers start shipping (they come with a 2nd tracking camera).
I've experienced not-so-solid tracking on the Oculus Rift CV1 with a single Constellation tracker when facing away from the tracker.
On the other hand, Tested.com reported in their HMD comparison that they have seen better tracking performance by Oculus than the HTC Vive. They are one of the few people seeing it that way, however - most reports indicate that the Vive tracking is superb.
Whichever headset you buy, if you are aware that it is a first generation product and can live with the high price, you will not be disappointed.
> Both technologies have their advantages and disadvantages.
I keep seeing this, but no one ever lists the Rift's advantages. Even in your post, you hedge on everything that might give the Rift leverage. At best it seems it will reach parity with the Vive when (if?) the Touch controllers ship, but even then I do think the Vive's fundamental tech is better designed.
I have a rift and a vive on order, the rift isn't comfortable at all with my glasses, where the Vive pre I've used is fine. It's easier to setup, but it also lacks controllers and the second sensor right now so it's not really a fair comparison.
I too wear glasses. The Vive is easier to put on over my glasses, but ultimately I find it less comfortable than the Rift once it is on. I find making comfort comparisons more than fair, I'm not sure I totally understand you last point.
Re: glasses, I wish the various SDKs would include a control panel allowing input of glasses prescription numbers for an automatic final view adjustment.
I guess they don't implement something like this because it might be abused to cheat?
>it's "almost as good" as the Vive, meaning Oculus DOES lag behind.
OK, you're not taken by those arguments. Try this one[2] or this one[3]. The Vive is marketed heavily on this point and a game targeting Vive might be able to assume a roomscale play area. But there are clearly no issues precluding same-quality room scale on Oculus.
Chaperone might be more intuitive than calibrating room bounds.
>the Vive is better for people with glasses as the lenses can be adjusted.
I agree i've seen more anecdotes pointing pro-vive than the reverse, but this really isn't clear-cut either[6]. Oculus have at least published exact specifications about what size glasses will fit in the headset[5], so depending on the size of your glasses, the Rift may be more comfortable.
The rift was originally going to bundle a larger faceplate for glasses wearers, but this seems to have been removed. Both HMDs have replacable faceplates so that larger designs can be accomodated in the future - and you could order a custom lens for either headset[4].
>No citation on the simpler experience
This comment was specifically in reference to the setup process. Citations are available, here's one from a CV1/Vive review[1].
>and more precise control. Because everything I've read and watched has said that the Vive interface is a lot better. And "more control" I'm assuming you are referring to the Rift controllers that are not even released yet.
That comment was about Oculus Touch, which despite not being publicly available for another 2-8 months (H2 2016 - inline with when you'd receive either HMD ordered today) is a real product that people have used. The information is based on trade show reviews.
>Internet-defense-force indeed.
It's a trend, not a personal attack. I think a lot of this stems from how most marketing is targeting the impressionable online-gamer demographic, and both Steam and Sony are heavily marketing their offerings. I am trying to cite sources as much as possible and only make/refute specific claims.
2. http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-room-scale-tracking-volu... "Oculus demonstrated to us at E3 2015 that their own tracking technology is capable of a similarly sized tracking area, and says that they aren’t emphasizing room-scale VR because of feasibility constraints, not technical ones."
I'm not saying I disagree about the points you are making, but links does not equate to sourceable facts. The trade show Kinect displays were also immensely more functional than the released products. The Oculus Touch is not a real product (yet). Same goes for the roomscale tracking. There's no point in discussing the capabilities of a product before it's manufactured at scale, with all the cost-cutting that entails. Trade show demos really does not say anything unless the product on show has gone to production.
Awesome response! I still hold the same opinion based on my research but love that you've backed up your argument with sources. I don't have the time or battery life on my phone to do the same at the moment.
My sources are media such as twitter, blogs, YouTube and r/oculus and r/vive, and my gauge is public sentiment rather than actual experience with any device myself. Also, I like the nature of the HTC and Valve combination. HTC is headquartered nearer where the product is manufactured, which I believe allows them to develop faster and more efficiently, and the deal with Valve gives them a great inroad to marketing in the US and Europe while giving them top of the line gaming software at the same time.
I hope both products succeed as that will make VR all the better in the future.
> If the launch lineup of 30 games[7] doesn't convince you, and you're not interested in Minecraft[9] or the full back catalogue of PSP[10] or Wii[8] games
At the very least, DolphinVR (Wii emulation) does not yet work on the consumer version of the Rift due to a lack of 1.3 SDK support. The dev has said he'll get around to it, but a lot of the early experiences for the dev kits are no longer compatible with consumer hardware.
>Room scale works well in Rift. Notably, there was a 15×11 room-scale test by Palmer Luckey himself[1],
One camera Oculus setups mean 180 degree roomscale, which is fairly limiting compared to the Vives native 360 degree support which is shipping right now. We have no idea what the Rift roomscale consumer product will look like as it literally isn't for sale. Comparing the Vive implementation to an idealized hypothetical is absolutely unfair here. Also Luckey isn't exactly a non-biased reviewer. I think there are going to be issues with the USB camera image processing approach especially when we start talking about 2 or 3 cameras at the same time.
See "Building 180 Degrees on the Rift/PSVR" from an Owlchemy dev:
Considering Owlchemy is making a 180 degree version of its game for the Rift and PSVR, I suspect the Rift motion, when it finally ships, won't be 360.
Heck, the Vive even has a front facing camera to make sure you don't bump into things during your roomscale playing. Sure it adds a little weigh, but I'd rather have a headset that's a mere 3oz heavier that can protect me from serious injury than losing 3oz.
Rift games play better on the Vive due to roomscale support and chaperone!
"In fact, Kuchera notes that the port of Dreamdeck (a VR demo sampler that shows off varying animation styles) is actually better on the Vive, as the headset's enhanced tracking functionality allows you to actually walk around the scenes. "The Vive's chaperone system, which shows you the limits of your play space, also works just fine on the Rift titles," writes Kuchera."
The other things you mention are third-party hacks, which of course work on the Vive as well. There's nothing magical about the Rift here.
>The Vive is not immune to shipping controversy and severe miscommunication[2]
Every promised April order is set to ship in April. Some people thought it meant April 5th, which was incorrect. Comparing that to a multi-month delay from the Oculus people is asinine. The only real issue is that some banks rejected HTC's charge for whatever reason. That's a bank issue, not an HTC issue. HTC can't call your bank and say, "Hey guys, this near $1000 charge is totally legit." You need to.
>that Oculus has a simpler out-of-the-box experience;
When you ship a device that has no motion control, no roomscale, etc yeah of course its going to be simpler the same way a tricycle is simpler than a race car.
I think its pretty obvious that Oculus shipped an uncooked product and the Vive has leapfrogged ahead of them. People want motion control and roomscale. People want shipments on the month they were promised. I expect the 2017 Rift to be better, but right now, if you want to do real VR, there's no comparision.
Here's a video of a teen girl literally crying during the Brookhaven Experiment. This sense of presence is a Vive-only experience:
The Rift cannot do this, period. It cannot put an enemy behind you or sneak up on you and have you turn around to shoot it or dodge it. It may one day, but until that day comes, the VR crown goes to the Vive. Worse for Oculus, the Vive will always have a 6-9 month lead over the Rift. By the time the Rift does roomscale, the Vive will already be exploring next steps. I also believe that Valve is a better organization to have a leadership role in the future of VR from both a political and technical perspective. Facebook/Oculus has already made many questionable moves (exclusives, constant connection to FB servers after installing the Oculus software, promoting a closed ecosystem, hiding the component shortage issue until the last minute, lying about "ballpark" pricing, falling behind in terms of touch controllers and roomscale, etc).
>There's an significant amount of fanboyism and internet-defense-force allegations
Physician, heal thyself. The disigenious damage control you're doing for Oculus is a perfect example of that very thing you're criticizing. The Rift clearly hasn't caught up to the Vive. I don't see why this is so hard to accept.
> Every promised April order is set to ship in April. Some people thought it meant April 5th, which was incorrect. Comparing that to a multi-month delay from the Oculus people is asinine.
> Physician, heal thyself. The disigenious damage control you're doing for Oculus is a perfect example of that very thing you're criticizing.
I think it's silly to proclaim either platform as the "winner" when 1. the Oculus hasn't even been out for a full month yet and 2. the Vive isn't even done shipping it's first promised batch.
I'd probably buy a Vive now if I were to choose today, but I also think one month out, there's zero need to defend (or criticize the viability of) either platform. It's simply too new.
> I think it's silly to proclaim either platform as the "winner"
I do not see anyone saying either is the outright winner.
I said the Oculus is behind. The Tested review said about the same thing as you are, which is if you could choose just one right now to use for the next 12 months, use the Vive [1]
> one month out, there's zero need to defend (or criticize the viability of) either platform
Tons of consumers want reviews of each system so they can make a judgement of which one to buy. Reasonable people want to see both products succeed and provide competition to each other.
The oculus cv1 was so unimpressive after using the vive that I ebayed mine (to some dude in china for $1400) within 2 hours of recieving it (for free thank god).
The product has not evolved since the kickstarter project, all facebook has done is add a better screen, shitty headphones, a lot of extra wires, and a shitty positional tracking system.
The title is arguably inaccurate, as Oculus have repeatedly stated that these are Oculus Store exclusives, not Rift hardware exclusives, eg [1].
Since the Rift is the only PC headset currently supported by the Oculus Store, that's a bit of a technical distinction. But it does imply that they shouldn't have a big problem with this sort of compatibility layer existing, though they're unlikely to support it directly for obvious QA reasons. After all, you still have to buy the games from them!
According to github, it seems that the VR stuff is codesigned, so to use the compat layer, you have to patch out the verification of code signatures, meaning that it is indeed tied to specific hardware in the code of each application
Wish my Vive would ship. I backed the original Kickstarter for Oculus, and I got my free Rift a couple weeks ago. I ordered my Vive an hour or two after preorders started and it still hasn't shipped. And the only date I have for it to ship is "April".
It's... slightly complicated. In theory OpenVR is "open" in the same sense as OpenGL in that it is an open API that anyone can implement (but which doesn't have a standardized open-source implementation). However right now that aspect of it is just theoretical since the only runtime implementation of OpenVR is the SteamVR runtime (which is only distributed through Steam) and Valve are solely responsible for defining the API (there's no equivalent to the Khronos Group for OpenVR).
I see. So Vive is de facto tied to Steam at present, but if another implementation will show up, it would be usable outside of it. Not a pretty situation, when hardware is tied to a distributor. Oculus situation doesn't look any better.
There is nothing stopping other stores from selling games for the HTC Vive.
As for OpenVR (or SteamVR, Valve's implementation of it), I'm not sure it makes sense to ask whether the Vive is tied to it. Is your graphics card "tied" to your graphics driver or its OpenGL implementation?
The current situation, as MrRadar said, is that games can support OpenVR and headsets can adopt OpenVR without seeking anyone's permission. Compare that to the situation with the other leading VR headset and make of it what you will.
> There is nothing stopping other stores from selling games for the HTC Vive.
How can developers do that, if there is no actual open implementation of OpenVR? Do they need to implement that runtime every time from scratch? Valve's repo only providers headers for the API, but actual runtime is distributed with Steam only.
Or you are saying that OpenVR isn't needed for using Vive, and some alternative SDK / framework exists that everyone can use?
> Is your graphics card "tied" to your graphics driver or its OpenGL implementation?
If the only OpenGL implementation that exists is tied to some distributor, it means that hardware is tied to it as well (at least until some other implementation will show up). Do you expect developers implementing APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan from scratch every time they make games? Same thing here. It's wrong to expect developers to implement OpenVR if they don't want to be tied to some store.
That's the situation, I think. Someone, perhaps OSVR since they have Valve's cooperation or maybe Valve themselves, will eventually take the next step.
But the point is that OpenVR has no ties to Steam, only Steam's implementation of it does. The fact that SteamVR is currently the only implementation is not a minor detail, but unlike the situation with the Oculus SDK there is a viable path forward for open source VR with OpenVR.
It's sort of like OpenGL if Mesa didn't exist yet: you wouldn't say the situation is no better than with DirectX.
The user will have to have steam running and steamvr installed.
The developers only link to the libopenvr_api library found on github and can distribute their game including this library on whatever store they like.
It's certainly not a good situation that the user still needs steam, but the games themselves can really be sold and distributed anywhere.
> It's certainly not a good situation that the user still needs steam, but the games themselves can really be sold and distributed anywhere.
Well, I don't think requiring user to have Steam equals not being tied to it. I.e. you can't release the game let's say on GOG, and require users to have Steam client to play it.
I suspect Oculus Rift is gunning the high end much like the Apple strategy, so quality and exclusivity is going to be important value proposition. From the company point of view, this is the logical decision, since the Gear VR or Google Cardboard strategy probably won't give them much revenue.
The code released today is an early alpha, yet people say that the quality of the experience when playing the Oculus Store game on the Vive is excellent. That pretty much invalidates that argument.
> quality and exclusivity is going to be important value proposition. From the company point of view, this is the logical decision
Debatable. Developers and customers are becoming more mindful of the value of open systems. If the best developers are not exclusively working on Rift-only games, then Rift gains little by investing in that idea. Exclusivity only works when you have the best people working on your product.
sure, guaranteed, like all the stories before this one, it might take 10 years to play out and by the time it happens we'll be laughing at the low capability of these devices, happy days.
I'm happy to see an element of fanboy argument here. To me, it indicates that there is real competition and that early adopters are passionate and highly invested - both bode well for the future of the medium.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter much - The Vive will likely soon get Linux support, but all the Oculus games will remain exclusive to Windows, because that's the only operating system Oculus supports - even though most of the popular game engines used for VR do have a Linux version.
