Did Oculus rip off Valve?

[Melmix]

Read this article:

http://uploadvr.com/valve-shared-vr-oculus/

So according to this article, Oculus stole pretty much everything from Valve and are more or less doing everything wrong in regards to having an open VR platform. Does anyone know if this is correct? I must admit after reading the article I started thinking about selling my Rift and buying a Vive instead 😞

[CharlieHobbes]

VizionVR said:

CharlieHobbes said:

It's not like Oculus stole KFCs secret batter recipe.

Aw hell no. They'd buy the chef and say they invented it. 😉

Seriously though, it was clearly a collaboration from the start. What happened later is where things get a little fuzzy.

I don't think it's that fuzzy at all, at least my best guess is that they were happy working together. 

Steam was assuming that Palmer would want a piece of that hardware revenue pie but when they found out that Oculus grand master plan is to profit from software sales (and later make money off social, facebook style) Gabe got a bit snippy as skimming of the top of software sales is his thing and he doesn't really want anyone to make money of software sales, at least not without his cut. 

(Remember Origin? You can't have your game sold on steam if you don't also let all in-game purchases and DLC go through Steam, god forbid Steam missed their 30% cut!)

it's all business in the end.

And in the long run for consumers it's also not a big deal. 

I remember in the olden days, one of my dads friends had a Betamax. 
It was a great system! he even had some home videos on it he cherished.

VHS won the standards race, you know what the guy did?
He sighed, bought a VHS recorder and transfered his home videos to VHS. 

He enjoyed the practical use of that VHS recorder for many years. 

Best part of it is, he has neither a betamax nor a VHS recorder anymore, doesn't even have a DVD player. 
A Tivo box and a Netflix sub is all he uses these days. 

This too shall pass.

[maxpare79]

Nothing is black and white, I get it, it's cool to hate Oculus these days, but people thinking Steam is all high and mighty should think again, both company are probably at fault for the current state of the VR market...let's just deal with it and move on...

And when you work hand in hand with someone on a project, and then go your separate ways, and both party still continue to work on the same project, it's a normal thing to see idea that were shared make their way in both product....Killer quotes like "they ripped off our design" is just bitterness and PR war...

It's Apple vs Samsung all over again....

[kojack]

EliteSPA said:

If this turn a war like Apple vs Samsung or Sony vs M$ is Oculus fault, I dont understand the profit of using DRM. But dont surprise me really, still a bussiness market strategy.

The profit of DRM? Without it Oculus couldn't play protected content such as Bluray movies. The sdk docs and 1.4 release notes talk about the new protected content requirements and how it affects rift operation (such as when protected content is playing they have to disable mirroring to a monitor). The sdk also has to verify that the entire pipeline to the HMD screens is HDCP compliant, which they probably can't do if Revive is detouring to OpenVR.

Damn movie industry.

[Zandil]

Don't give a Rats Arse who started what and where, VR is here and it's AWESOME 

[Luciferous]

The telephone itself was a collaboration of ideas and patents when it was created although Alexander Graham Bell takes the main credit. To highlight the point made above by @jon here is a picture of my great grand fathers Rift. Even has a dual screen 🙂

The picture on it is dated 1906. For any Canadians out there this is St Louis Street Old Quebec. I have about 100 cards for it.

[gmaciocci]

I don't think so. I think Valve got a lot more back from Oculus than they ever gave them. 

[Keylo415]

CharlieHobbes said:

EliteSPA said:

If this turn a war like Apple vs Samsung or Sony vs M$ is Oculus fault, I dont understand the profit of using DRM. But dont surprise me really, still a bussiness market strategy.

So in your opinion Oculus should just give up the idea of their own platform/store and give in to the Steam overlords?

Couldn't agree with you more man. Look I love Valve like the next guy, but I'm not so blind to think that they aren't a cut throat company that will do whatever it takes to stay on top..

[EliteSPA]

But then Iribe got a call from Michael Abrash, an engineer at Valve; the gaming software company had conducted VR research for a while and had begun collaborating with Oculus. Valve had a new proto­type, and it didn’t make people sick. In fact, no one who had tried the demonstration had felt any discomfort. Iribe, who was famously sensitive to VR-induced discomfort—“cold sweat syndrome,” he calls it, or sometimes “the uncomfortable valley”—flew up to Valve’s offices outside Seattle to be the ultimate guinea pig.

Abrash escorted Iribe into a small room tucked off a hallway. The walls and ceilings were plastered with printouts of QR-code-like symbols called fiducial markers; in the corner, a young engineer named Atman Binstock manned a computer. Connected to the computer was Valve’s proto­type headset—or at least the very beginnings of a headset, all exposed circuit boards and cables. Iribe slipped it over his head and found himself in a room, the air filled with hundreds of small cubes.

Source: Wikipedia

[CharlieHobbes]

EliteSPA said:

But then Iribe got a call from Michael Abrash, an engineer at Valve; the gaming software company had conducted VR research for a while and had begun collaborating with Oculus. Valve had a new proto­type, and it didn’t make people sick. In fact, no one who had tried the demonstration had felt any discomfort. Iribe, who was famously sensitive to VR-induced discomfort—“cold sweat syndrome,” he calls it, or sometimes “the uncomfortable valley”—flew up to Valve’s offices outside Seattle to be the ultimate guinea pig.

Abrash escorted Iribe into a small room tucked off a hallway. The walls and ceilings were plastered with printouts of QR-code-like symbols called fiducial markers; in the corner, a young engineer named Atman Binstock manned a computer. Connected to the computer was Valve’s proto­type headset—or at least the very beginnings of a headset, all exposed circuit boards and cables. Iribe slipped it over his head and found himself in a room, the air filled with hundreds of small cubes.

How exactly is this relevant? Nobody is denying this happened.

This happening does not equal "Oculus ripping Valve off"

Maybe try and read a bit more in this thread and others as to why people are resisting the "rip off" label.

But there's probably no point because I guess you are in the camp of people that believe Samsung ripped Apple off when they put rounded corners on their smart phones.

Or every car company ever ripping off the first company because they copied the "round wheel" concept.

Now, if Oculus had come out with a copy of the lighthouse base stations, I would have been right there with you.

But considering they have different takes on tracking methods, controllers and styling I have to conclude just about the only similarity between the two devices is that they have screens.

Which you have to agree with me, is unavoidable in a head mounted DISPLAY!.

I'll add to that if you are concerned about Oculus ripping off Valve on the HMD front, at least they improved on it as I find the Rift more comfortable, more polished, more feature rich (integrated sound solution) and overall preferable over the DK-like Vive.

But this makes sense if you take into account that Valve was happy theorycrafting around with VR headsets and only really decided to make an actual push to product after Oculus had paved the way and created a market for VR.

It's not rocket science, neither product currently is perfect, neither company is in it for any other reason than profit, and neither the Vive nor the Oculus CV1 will matter 5 years down the line once the market matures a bit and standards exist.

[Gigantoad]

CharlieHobbes said:

But considering they have different takes on tracking methods, controllers and styling I have to conclude just about the only similarity between the two devices is that they have screens.

I'm not in the camp who thinks anyone got ripped off, but come on now. The notion that the only similarity is "both have a screen" is very silly. They have the same resolution, both use a screen per eye, use the same type of lenses, generally work the exact same way except maybe one has ATW and the other doesn't.