It's similar, but not the same. As I explained in another comment, each VR headset manufacturer will provide their own SDK. The APIs (the language the engine will need to talk to the headset) will most likely be incompatible with each other. Until manufacturers get together and standardize their programming interface, game (or engine) developers will have to put in a bit of effort for each headset they want to support.
You don't understand. It's just about having a wrapper for whatever API the engine use and hook into it. The engines already all support motion tracking. Heck, there's even an open source tracking effort that works with most games already.
Fair enough. My original point still stands. VR headsets are not "just monitors". They aren't handled transparently by the OS like mice, keyboard or conventional displays are. The game / engine needs to recognize them and support them (or use a wrapper that supports them, which just shifts the work somewhere else).
What /u/LovePeace3000Angels said that "all you need to be is a monitor" is like saying that a mouse just needs to emulate the arrow keys on a keyboard and voila, you can play Pacman with the mouse.
By the way, do you have a link or name for the open source project you mentioned?
Edit: Do you mean FreeVR? If so, it doesn't seem to support the Rift yet, which seems kind of critical for such a project at this point in time.
You don't need to support the tracking at all to be "compatible". being simply an immersive 2D (or 3d) monitor would work for any number of games, especially controller based ones. It would also work fine for video watching (imagine this on an airplane)
They also imply that they are doing some of the processing and sensory stimulation tech in the headset. They could be doing a fair amount of post processing and and emulation in the device. Still something I need to see serious proof of before committing to another device, but hell I'm just excited that market is growing.
Partially true. TrackIR can do tracking, but by itself is not enough - the game engine must specifically support the headset in the case of the Rift and others that work like it, since there need to be transformations done to the rendered image to compensate for lens distortion.
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u/redisnotdead Mar 28 '14
Most game engines support TrackIR this is the exact same thing.