Ok, i saw this question starting popping out in various topic, but seem it has not been discussed yet... and i really think is an important question. Are Oculus rift Games going to be compatible with other "PC" vr sets? What i mean is, will we be able to play, for example eve-Valkyre, on the HTC from valve and the Razer OVSR? or are we going to see something like the console war? Cause if this is the case... VR is really going to have problems... i mean... it will be a total WASTE of resources... or not? Anyone who know something about it?
There is incentive for VR titles to support as many headsets as possible, due to the limited number of headsets that will be on the market and no real way of knowing which ones will take off.
Even casting that aside, there are compatibility layers (like SteamVR/OpenVR) which support multiple headsets. For example, since SteamVR seems to support the current Oculus runtime, games that utilise SteamVR and work on the Vive do so on the Rift DK2 as well. This makes sense - Valve for their part are incentivised to support the Rift, and indeed a whole range of headsets in the future, to better sell content on their Steam platform.
The biggest problems will be where input is concerned, not the HMDs themselves. The input solutions are quite different between the Vive (Lighthouse controllers) and the Rift (Touch controllers) for example, in terms of what controls they offer and button configurations.
Well, button and controls can be easly mirrored, just see the motion joy, i use it to play with a ps3 controller on rocket league 😛 I reeeeeeally hope it will go as you say, been gived the "option to" and not be "forced to" chose what headset to use for VR because "every game will work" will probably be a big selling point for all the sistems (like for smartphones :P) you chose what you prefer based on his specific and not on the game that work only on it. We are all on PC afterall right?
Probably it will end up just like it is in console world. There will be exclusive games that are system sellers, and use all particular hardware abilities, while most developers will try to reach as wide audience as possible making their titles compatible with all available devices (or where it makes finantial sense).
True, Oculus have been funding exclusives, but also, so I've heard, have been helping/funding other titles even though they will be more platform-agnostic. Their approach is that this is better for VR as a whole instead of trying to lock out competition.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future the software stacks end up amalgamating into a one-size-fits-all solution. For instance, it might be that SteamVR gains the most traction due to the prevalence of Steam and Valve's intention to support all sorts of headsets. You might still have your HMD-specific drivers but SteamVR just plugs into those so effectively you don't need to care. Devs always like to target the solution that gets them the most exposure with minimal effort, so they'd target SteamVR too. If this happened, headset manufacturers are then encouraged to make sure their HMD will work with SteamVR too instead of trying to remain exclusive because it will sell more units if it works with everyone's existing software libraries.
Thus we end up with, effectively, a single solution for VR. To that extent this is probably inevitable (though whether it's SteamVR or something else, will remain to be seen).
As for the controllers, perhaps it wouldn't be unlike the way you might handle mapping of controls today, all through the generic game controller support inherent in Windows.
Outlier functionality, like input, is going to be the most problematic. Controllers aside, that could mean other things like eye tracking or other stuff. For example if the Vive incorporates a camera on the front, obviously software made to utilise that isn't going to work with HMDs which don't offer the same functionality. This is the compatibility problem I think Palmer has alluded to before - in that there isn't really a way to avoid it because nobody has figured out yet what features and functions will stick. Then we end up with a similar situation to support for things like PhysX or Kinect - where, due to their exclusivity, nothing really compelling can be made with them because it would limit the ability to sell the product to people whose hardware lacked that functionality.
I think we will see alot of cooperation between the major companies for these first few sets.. if you have followed the story of VR for the past few years you will see their was alot of interaction and cooperation between the groups. They all know that their will be plenty of room for different entities to exist at first.. and they know that they have to grow the VR market as a whole.. starting that with exclusive games and excluding potential players will limit the market rather than grow it.. so i expect to see a lot of cross compatibility.
