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The biggest problem for me is that in order to use it, I have to buy into their respective ecosystems. I actually don't want an ecosystem or an oculus account

The biggest problem for me is that in order to use it, I have to buy into their respective ecosystems. I actually don't want an ecosystem or an oculus account or a vr storefront, I just want a monitor for my face. If I can't have that without the nonsense, I guess I'll just wait until they go bankrupt and sell all the patent IP.

Macha 8y ago
You don't have to use viveport for the Vive.
mrguyorama 8y ago
The Vive is an open ecosystem. The hardware is all semi-open and off the shelf, and the software is all on github. The only hangup is that I am not sure whether you can actually BUILD the software on your own or not, as I've never tried.
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  I tend not to compile my own monitor drivers from source. If I have to do that to use the vive without steam, then I'm not sold on your assertion that I don't have to buy into their ecosystem to use their face-monitor.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    Ah, right, I'm not sure if you can run the Valve provided binaries without Steam. Although a quick google search offers up https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Vive-without-Steam/td-p/14146 https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Vive-wit...
    - Sir_Substance 8y ago
      Yeah. I did some googling and it seems that all non-steam options are in the "technically you can, here run this cmake file and then hand-calibrate the coordinate mappings in this json file" stage. It might be that we get to a point where it's more open, but I hoped the same for a bunch of other products (lytro comes to mind) that never made it. It's not like I don't have steam installed on every computer I own, but it's more of an on principal thing. I don't buy razer mice because I don't want to spend $50-100 on hardware that doesn't work properly if the vendors download servers go down, and razer mice have very strange profile defaults if they can't talk to the razer desktop program. If razer goes under it won't really be possible to move razer mice to new computers after a while. Similarly, I'm really not keen to buy $800 worth of kit that could become a paperweight if I get VAC-banned. I'm a big fan of separation of concerns on this front. I might part with $100 with a dependency on steam because that's throw-away money, but not $400 and certainly not $800.

Macha 8y ago

You don't have to use viveport for the Vive.

mrguyorama 8y ago

The Vive is an open ecosystem. The hardware is all semi-open and off the shelf, and the software is all on github. The only hangup is that I am not sure whether you can actually BUILD the software on your own or not, as I've never tried.

Sir_Substance 8y ago
I tend not to compile my own monitor drivers from source. If I have to do that to use the vive without steam, then I'm not sold on your assertion that I don't have to buy into their ecosystem to use their face-monitor.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  Ah, right, I'm not sure if you can run the Valve provided binaries without Steam. Although a quick google search offers up https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Vive-without-Steam/td-p/14146 https://community.viveport.com/t5/Technical-Support/Vive-wit...
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    Yeah. I did some googling and it seems that all non-steam options are in the "technically you can, here run this cmake file and then hand-calibrate the coordinate mappings in this json file" stage. It might be that we get to a point where it's more open, but I hoped the same for a bunch of other products (lytro comes to mind) that never made it. It's not like I don't have steam installed on every computer I own, but it's more of an on principal thing. I don't buy razer mice because I don't want to spend $50-100 on hardware that doesn't work properly if the vendors download servers go down, and razer mice have very strange profile defaults if they can't talk to the razer desktop program. If razer goes under it won't really be possible to move razer mice to new computers after a while. Similarly, I'm really not keen to buy $800 worth of kit that could become a paperweight if I get VAC-banned. I'm a big fan of separation of concerns on this front. I might part with $100 with a dependency on steam because that's throw-away money, but not $400 and certainly not $800.