A VR Developer's Thoughts On The Current Mess Of APIs & Hardware

The current VR landscape is fragmented and quite a mess with the lack of standardization and wide variety of hardware capabilities at this point, though fortunately the forthcoming OpenXR standard coming out of The Khronos Group for a standard API for application developers as well as a standard device layer / abstraction interface will clear this up when released later in 2018. But for now we have some interesting remarks from an open-source developer that has been engaging in this area and doing his best with the current VR scene.

Earlier in the week I shared news of the success in the effort to get the PlayStation VR head-mounted display working on Linux and running with SteamVR / Dota 2. Due to the current messy landscape between VR HMDs, it was quite a feat.

A lot of that independent PlayStation VR on Linux effort can be thanked to the OpenHMD and many code contributions done by Christoph Haag, including a SteamVR plug-in for OpenHMD.

In the comments to that earlier article, Haag shared some interesting comments about the current state of VR.

If you are at all interested in VR, I'd suggest you read Haag's interesting VR remarks from our forums for those unfamiliar with all of the different VR hardware and SDKs currently at play.

Separately, in June I will have up a fresh look to see how the current Steam VR Linux experience is working out with the HTC Vive to see if it's still in frustratingly rough shape or has improved since those tests done last December.