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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

You can very easily use a large TV (or multiple monitors) if they cover a good amount of your vision plus any standard webcam and do "VR" without a headset. It just basically tracks your head movement and moves the view the monitor produces. Which is the entire point of VR.......

Also the headset does not transfer hand movements at all? Are you talking about the handsets like the two controllers that come with the Vive?

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I am not sure how that would work? You want a bunch of monitors mounted around your head somehow?

All modern VR does either full body tracking with the base stations or quest style hand tracking. It would be pretty hard to arrange the monitors in such away that you has full hand movement I dont see how they would not get in the way unless they were tiny and strapped to your face.

I think parent commenter is talking about something like TrackIR, that uses a scaling factor to turn small head movements into large in-sim movements. It has been around since 2001 and has some advantages over VR for seated applications, particularly in terms of cost and comfort.

A 180-degree sphere of monitors would cost a whole lot more than even the fanciest VR headset.

Usually people are not doing full VR with these - more like a large TV in front of you and you can look around but not behind you.

Is there a SteamVR driver for TrackIR-like setup? It feels there ought to be.

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