Is streaming from the web possible for Rift?

Checkout Riftmax, they do streaming, mostly from youtube.

If you just asking is it possible, then yes. I think the technology is there. With Google adding Oculus rift support to the Chrome browser, I think someday content will be streamed to you. I think with technology like Onlive.com that streams games in real time over the internet someday it would be able do it. Doing what Onlive.com does to allow people to play FPS games in real time and not have the computer power in your house, could help with the Oculus Rift. Right now it is about balance of a good graphics card, good coding, and a good oculus rift to perfect frame rate for HD video.

If the computing power, and graphics card where in a data center somewhere in the US, and you only needed the oculus rift or other VR unit for display, then it wouldn't be so important for the customer or player having a high quality graphics card or computer system in your house. This would lower the cost of VR for everyone.

"tg022011" wrote:
Hey, I'm wondering how does real-time streaming for Oculus Rift work? In addition to compression, the streaming process also involves image distortion.

If you want to stream a pre-distorted image, then you're basically giving up head tracking. There's no way you'd be able to get the kind of latency required if you had to send the head position across the network and have the remote side render a view and send it back. The appropriate thing to do is to stream undistorted content and perform the distortion locally, so that the Rift can be responsive to the head tracker.

"tg022011" wrote:
How much latency would the additional task of image distortion add (using a normal computer)?

There are different ways of doing distortion and they have different relative costs, ranging from negligible, to extremely negligible.

"tg022011" wrote:
Are you able to distort the content from Netflix or ESPN without their permission?

Distorting it isn't the issue. The issue is whether you can legally play a stream from a provider in a program other than the ones provided. Distortion, in itself, almost certainly can't be considered a legally significant modification to the source image.