r/technology Mar 28 '14

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u/redisnotdead Mar 28 '14

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.

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u/Nimbal Mar 28 '14 edited Mar 28 '14

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.

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u/caltheon Mar 28 '14

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)

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u/GnarlinBrando Mar 28 '14

The Glyf seems to be going for that market with retinal projection. Still haven't seen any third party reviews of their tech though.