Can the oculus rift just be used as a display?

It wouldn't have the resolution necessary for doing anything. If you cropped a 16 x 9 section in the middle of each eye display, you probably only get 400 pixels tall usable area.
I've heard that if you don't have head tracking, where the display follows your head, it makes you sick. On the other hand, if you have zoom and pan control, you could use it and read small font text, but it doesn't sound very useful.

Short answer: NO.

Long answer: Not yet.

Tridef is quite cheap if you have an amd gpu, as for Vireio, wasnt is supposed to be released this month? Hope so :mrgreen:

You might want to try Deskope (free) to see if it fits your needs...

Not before the rift hits the 4K mark.

even when it hits the 4k mark it will not be usable like he wants, if I get him right he wants to just use it as another monitor if I can explain to him the rift is a single small screen which is halved by a plastic barrier, To focus on this screen as it is about 4-6 centimeters of your eyes a pair of strong magnifying lenses are needed these give the effect of looking through bubbles but with software it can be modified to look right, The 3d effect is done by swapping eyes so the right screen sees left image etc. So you see it is not just a matter of plug and play.

If you have a rift (?) you can see what it will look like. Sit there and hit PrtScn.
Go to image handler and click new from clipboard. Save as "screenshot_l", copy, new from clipboard, save as "screenshot_r"
Open StereoPhotoViewer folder, open Images folder, open any sub folder, copy each of the screenshot images L & R and paste there.
Start SPV and open sub folder, view your screenshot image. How does it feel? Without any enhancements, that's what you'll get using the OR as a monitor.

"3dheadcrab" wrote:
even when it hits the 4k mark it will not be usable like he wants, if I get him right he wants to just use it as another monitor if I can explain to him the rift is a single small screen which is halved by a plastic barrier, To focus on this screen as it is about 4-6 centimeters of your eyes a pair of strong magnifying lenses are needed these give the effect of looking through bubbles but with software it can be modified to look right, The 3d effect is done by swapping eyes so the right screen sees left image etc. So you see it is not just a matter of plug and play.

4K would be decent to use as a monitor. Not perfect, but decent. A 4K screen has 8 times the resolution of the current dk.

"3dheadcrab" wrote:
even when it hits the 4k mark it will not be usable like he wants, if I get him right he wants to just use it as another monitor if I can explain to him the rift is a single small screen which is halved by a plastic barrier, To focus on this screen as it is about 4-6 centimeters of your eyes a pair of strong magnifying lenses are needed these give the effect of looking through bubbles but with software it can be modified to look right, The 3d effect is done by swapping eyes so the right screen sees left image etc. So you see it is not just a matter of plug and play.

Well not really, but I thought it'd be interesting to kind of have an infinite display (for a desktop) and would be a lot easier probably for video/photo editing. (plus I would still use it with VR programs/games)