While the Oculus Rift continues to grow in popularity and more and more game developers are taking steps to adopt it, a successful future will likely include all kinds of VR products with all kinds of head mounted displays and novel ways for getting immersive experiences to your mind’s eye and body. Until the operating system makers develop standardized APIs, game developers have to customize their output for one VR device at a time. It’s not a big deal if there are only one or two head mounted displays, but what happens when there are multiple products on the market?
Available through Github, OpenHMD is an effort to have a free and open source SDK for the Oculus Rift and devices like it. It’s intended support includes Windows, Linux and OS X. The gentleman making this happen credits himself under the name “noname22”, though he has been mistaken for “Anonymous” once or twice. ;=)
In all seriousness though, with a little organization and some programming prowess, solutions like this could give game developers the means to support a dozen solutions rather than just one at a time.
Your thoughts?