There is a good article on FastCoLabs: What’s The Big Problem With Developing Oculus Rift VR?
It seems it is not that hard to integrate into a game. Team Fortress 2 has an Oculus Rift interface now. Valve, the owners and operators of Steam, helped create the interface.
Joe Ludwig, one of the Valve programmers behind the Rift implementation, said, “Figuring out how to combine mouse and keyboard input with head tracking was not very well explored territory, so we had to break some new ground there.”
When I was thinking about how quickly the Rift could be added to Second Life, those issues came up. What do we do with our keyboard controls and mouse? I use AWSD and the mouse in concert. I can see the Rift taking of the task of my ‘mouse steering.’ That could give me some advantage in SL combat games.
So, it seems that while integrating the Rift as a controller for a game is not overly difficult, understanding how to take advantage of the change is a problem. The possibilities for a game or virtual world change when a rift is available. The time consuming part is going to be in learning what can be done, then designing games and worlds to take advantage of that.
So, the Rift people when asked how long is integration going to take? They answer, integration is quick, but you are going to want more than simple integration and that is going to take some time.
Its the first thing i thought of when i heard Oculus support coming to SL. Its an opportunity for the lab to address not only how to get oculus to integrate, but also the basic control method of SL.
Oculus Rift could force LL to adopt more simpler intuitive ways to interact with SL and this might benefit basic SL users who dont build but rather explore and mess about and dont need the complex user interfacing used in content creation.
Then again this begs another question about how different an Oculus Rift interface needs for content creators could be from what a basic explorer might need.
Maybe LL could consider an entirely NEW viewer built exclusively for the Oculus Rift. Carefully constructed. Theyd probably have to take hire some people for that since they hardly have enough people to work on the current viewer.
Good points.
The company’s name is Valve, not Value.
I know that… my fingers don’t.