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Comment by White_Wolf | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people are missing what I think are 3 main points before moaning about everything else: 1. It's freaking open source 2. It's DIY fun 3. It's the bare VR without being an over-engineered device that reports your farts to the manufacturer.

I can only respect and envy the guys for pulling this off.

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Doesn't the Steam dependency mean the reports are going to Valve?

Why would this be steam (or anything) dependent -- am I missing something?

It looked to me like it was Steam compatible, not steam dependent.

However, I can see where the idea would come from, because they do talk a lot about Steam on the site.

What would you be able to do with the headset aside from connect it to Steam? They could add support for OpenXR but OpenXR is just starting to get traction and that's on the application developer side. I don't know how widespread the adoption of the HMD agnostic bits of OpenXR are.

On the developer side, both Godot and Unity have some support for VR.

On the game side, there's also Windows MR, which supports some games. I don't know if this headset supports it now, but it could presumably be made to.

Godot and Unity have support for specific VR API's.

This headset is designed for SteamVR.

You can build for this headset by targeting SteamVR in Godot and Unity, but you'd have to do a TON of work yourself if you wanted to build your own VR runtime to bypass SteamVR for use on this headset.

Thanks for the additional info, I'll definitely have to do some more research in this area.

But to use it without steam you would have to develop VR software for your desktop. I think there is some open source stuff but idk how well it works. The PC software end is a much bigger job than the hmd.

Most of the VR graphics code & engine integration AFAIK is implemented within Steam, not on the headset. So beyond just getting some basic positional tracking you're not really going to be able to access any content without something else.

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