HoSpanky wrote on Aug 28, 2015, 10:20:
My primary concern with all of these VR headsets coming out isn't resolution/refresh rate. Those things will constantly improve over time. The first headsets need to be sure to NOT cause motion sickness, that's the absolute most important part. Make someone sick once, they'll never use it again and they'll warn their friends against it. So the resolution is lower than we'd want, because it has to work on less-than-stellar video cards to sell enough to gain traction.

But none of that is really news. What no one seems to be talking about is interoperability. With what...5 different headsets coming out, is there a standard for the interface? Or will SOME games work with the Valve headset, and a completely different set of games with with the Rift, and ANOTHER set only works with the Razer headset...

I see it like when 3D accelerators first came out. Sure, 3DFX cards were the king of the hill, but for a while there, SOME games had a 3DFX patch, and others had PowerVR patches, but very rarely did one game have both. There were other contenders as well, and it made for a splintered market. DirectX came along and solved all that, making it a godsend...it just required people to run their games in windows, not DOS. I didn't like the overhead windows added, but the benefits of directX could not be denied.

Currently, I sincerely doubt these headset makers are agreeing on a standard. They're all funding different projects so they can brag about having a must-have game ONLY in VR on THEIR headset. Because they're only interested in selling THEIR headset, NOT the sustainability of VR as a standard.

Does anyone recall seeing a single article about compatability? Not a rhetorical question, I'm seriously hoping I somehow have missed that happening.

The companies putting out the headsets aren't focusing on whether games developed for theirs will work on somebody elses. Valve/HTC, Oculus, and Morpheus are all focused on providing the best experience they can from their respective viewpoints. They are similar but competiting. The device that garners the most support, and performs the best in the marketplace, will drive the standard, in the same way that the playstation dual shock design essentially created standardization in the gamepad arena, amidst many competing designs.

However, there are other players with some skin in the game. Razer is releasing their open vr system, whose hardware is nothing to write home about, but the software aims to play nice with most headsets. The jury is out on how well this software will work with oculus or vive; but it is one pathway to interoperability.

Also, unlike in the early days of hardware acceleration, most games are created using industry standard engines. The VR support is handled by the engine rather than by developers directly, and industry standard engines will have support for the major players. This means that porting from one system to another will be a lot easier. We've already seen this with very interesting vr demos being ported between the existing oculus dev kits, the gearvr, and google glass. If devs want to make a little more money and it is worth porting, they will do so.

Finally, none of the content at the beginning of this is going to really be interesting enough to be sad you are missing out on it, when you have other cool things to try on whatever you go with. It's like how 90% of the games during a console launch are pretty looking trash that you get just so you have something to play on it.