Comments on: Does Valve have a major role to play for HMD ? https://github.blairmacintyre.me/site-archive/cs7497s13/2013/01/29/does-valve-have-a-major-role-to-play-for-hmd/ Virtual Environments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:21:09 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.2 By: Blair MacIntyre https://github.blairmacintyre.me/site-archive/cs7497s13/2013/01/29/does-valve-have-a-major-role-to-play-for-hmd/#comment-32 Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:21:09 +0000 https://github.blairmacintyre.me/site-archive/cs7497s13/?p=447#comment-32 I agree that getting Valve to embed support for commodity HMDs and trackers into their software would help push the hardware along.

The real question is the quality of the devices and how they are supported: lots of very popular games (and their underlying engines, like Unreal Tournament) have supported HMDs (we use to try them out in the lab when I was a grad student at Columbia, in the mid-1990’s). The problem was the tech (displays and trackers) sucked, and so no sane person would choose to play these games that way. Also, the way they used the orientation sensors was really bad.

We’ll see what the Occulus is like: they say they are shipping next month, so we’ll hopefully get some before the end of the semester! I personally think the HMD has to be REALLY good to convince someone to wear it, vs using their nice big flat-screen TV.

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