I have been following the Rift Santa Cruz, and wanted to give suggestions for the project:
With the hardware (CPU, Gpu, memory and etc) in the headset is not possible a powerful hardware and can still leave the headset heavy
I recommend that the Hardware be in a separate part, it would look like a Walkman, the hardware would be in the waist, and would be connected to the headset by a single cable that would transmit Video, Sound and Data, and the cable would pass through the backs of the people and fit behind from the head.
With the Walkman Style hardware can be bigger and thicker than a smartphone is possible more powerful hardware and more battery, having 3 layers, one of the hardware, another for a heatsink, and another for the battery.
It would be possible a battery the size of an ultrabook battery.
The SoC could be a custom from either Nvidia or Qualcomm, something like the Tegra Xavier, as the battery could be much bigger than a smartphone could have a much more powerful GPU, something close to 3 GFlops.
Part of the memory could be low cost HBM that will be released in the near future:
The hardware could also be used in TV, being able to be docked to a Dock connected to the TV, would be another function, since it would be possible to have all type of game being played in a simulated TV mode inside the rift.
The tracking of the controls would not be by cameras, but by gyroscope 6 DoF as in the control Finch Shift:
The control could have the tracking feature of the finger position on the control equal to Valve Knuckles (trackpad on left control, 4 buttons on right control)
