Virtual Reality Tech and Openness 25
An anonymous reader writes: An article written by Kyle Orland looks at how the nascent virtual reality industry will handle openness — in terms of standards, platforms, source code, and development. "Whether any single VR platform is 'open' or not, though, may be moot if developers have to juggle countless slightly different development standards for countless slightly different VR platforms. In a way, making a PC game that only works on the Oculus Rift is as ridiculous as making a PC game that only works on Dell monitors." Right now, the major players in VR tech are using different approaches. Oculus is distributing a closed-license SDK. Valve is setting up a more open platform that lets multiple manufacturers build devices for it. The downside is that it doesn't seem to work as well, particular with Oculus hardware. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says standards are going to take time and cooperation. Of course, that tune may change when devices start hitting the market.
Missing the point again... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...unless you're directly affiliated with one of Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and maybe Opera, you won't really be able to have any meaningful impact on the standard of these directions.
That's not "open" to me!
Of course they're open to you, in proportion to the value of your contributions. Let's say you invented something brilliant, like the <blink> tag. If you can't convince someone on the Chrome team it's a good idea, and you can't get Mozilla to adopt it, you can try asking at Microsoft. If they don't bite, perhaps Apple will. And if none of them think your idea is worth supporting, you can contact members of the standards committee directly (their names are public.) You can even attend a meeting of
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It is more likely that none of them will be dominant, because when you have 2-3 players that refuse to talk to each other to even establish common APIs to handle the basic tasks like tracking or renderer integration, many game studios will just say "Meh, screw it". And they will remain sitting on the fence instead of pouring money into a niche product that requires very significant technological and content investment. And with little reasonable content beyond bite-sized demos nobody will buy the HMDs neith
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See also Glide vs OpenGL.
Good analogy.
At the time Glide was still relevant, OpenGL was designed for expensive workstations and supported plenty of features like geometric transforms and lighting. Game oriented GPUs couldn't do this in hardware and software emulation was painfully slow. As for Direct3D, it was a massive PITA for developers and wasn't that efficient either.
This is the reason why 3Dfx made Glide. It was a thin layer that is sufficient for the developer to use all the hardware features without hassle but nothing more.
X3D ?? (Score:1)
there are a number of well established Web3D/VR standards.
The two that come to mind are X3D (successor to VRML) and WebGL:
www.web3d.org and www.khronos.org/webgl/
rgds Dave
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Shh, it sounds like you're ignoring the claim that this is a new industry and things are really just about to take off, just wait for it! Any day now! Really! Soon!
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None of which actually addresses any of the needs these companies have.
Even COBOL is standardized - and that is about as relevant as X3D or WebGL to supporting a Rift-like HMD or some sort of interaction device that isn't a keyboard/mouse.
Standards? We got a million of 'em! (Score:1)
Price. That is the standard. Most people won't look beyond it, and will gladly accept inferior tech.