> Right now it looks like certain games won't work on every headset. This immediately tells consumers to wait for standardization. It's a fucking monitor. You don't get to have exclusives for your monitor.
Alright...I'm triggered, let's do this!
Here's what a VR consists of, which makes it substantially more complex than a monitor:
* Image warping. This is currently built into drivers, specific devices may require specific warping so that the images look correct after lens distortion.
* Latency reduction techniques - both the Rift and the Vive have different techniques for handling what happens if your FPS drops. I believe both of them take a rendered image that is out of date, and re-project it so its now up to date with your current head position. That is some complex math.
* Head position tracking. This is a combination of accelerometer/gyro and a lower latency but higher accuracy tracking solution like the lighthouse.
* Input devices. For example the Vive controllers communicate directly with the headset. The input devices also track physical position.
* Output - as well as sending position back to the computer, they may also send other information such as controller button presses, your IPD (because different IPDs require different graphical output).
In the future we will have some crazy optimizations going on to improve efficiency. Such as splitting each eye into four renders. Foveated rendering, which would mean the headset would contain a very low latency pupil tracker so that only the area you are looking at would be rendered with high detail, and so your eye direction can be known to the software.
All that said, yeah it's possible to create a standard wrapper around this stuff, but saying it's a monitor is not really true.
>As an aside, I like moving my focus with my mouse. It's incomparably more accurate than hoping my deviated septim is pointing exactly where I want to look. If you can't disable headtracking that's an immediate red flag for me.
Also talking about mouse input makes me feel like you haven't tried the Vive. It's not about giving you an advantage, the draw of these technologies is that they can make you feel like you are there. Think about the difference between playing angry birds on your phone, vs actually picking up a giant bird, putting it in a slingshot and destroying some houses.