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OSVR gains momentum with a surprising ally

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 19 May 2015, 2:07pm

OSVR gains momentum with a surprising ally

 The OSVR will undoubtedly be the last major VR headset out of the gate, which means it needs an ace up its sleeve.

Razer's OSVR headset came too late to the party to show up with the rest of the crew when they debut in the next few months, but that isn't daunting the company one bit. In fact, the guys at Razer been biding their time, slowly getting support from developers to join its open source VR program. Big gaming companies like Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed) and Techland (Dying Light) are already on board with OSVR.

The biggest wave the OSVR has created though came earlier today when Razer revealed that Valve is on-board with the OSVR initiative with their OpenVR. OpenVR isn't the platform that the HTC Vive will be running on though. It's called SteamVR on that headset as it's the only one that fully integrates Valve's Steam service into it. OpenVR is like SteamVR, just without the Steam integration. Everything else is the same. This is how Valve puts it:

OpenVR
Our SteamVR APIs are free to use and come with everything you love about Steam, but they can also be leveraged without it. We call this alternate version of our APIs OpenVR. OpenVR includes all the same great capabilities, minus Steam.

This is important because right now there are four major VR headsets (Oculus Rift, OSVR, Project Morpheus and the HTC Vive), with three of them (Project Morpheus is the only one currently planned only for consoles) aimed for the same PC market. With this announcement that OSVR and Valve are shacking up, it means the Oculus Rift is left to fend for itself on unsteady ground.

While SteamVR and OSVR aren't the same thing, with OpenVR fully compatible with OSVR, it shouldn't be much of a hassle to port games from one platform to another, which means that there's no reason for a game that's compatible with the HTC Vive not to be compatible with the OSVR too. It's a huge deal as it basically means a developer can reach twice the user base (assuming all of the headsets sell around the same amount) instead of just 1/3 of the whole PC VR market.

It remains to be seen how the Oculus Rift will respond but either way it seems as if Razer is well on its way to achieving its goal of providing a singular open source VR platform.

If Oculus Rift signs on to OSVR, then for all intents and purposes, the VR platform will be united under one open source banner, which was Razer's plan all along. If the Oculus Rift decides to forge their own path, Razer's still achieved a major victory with Valve on their side. Instead of a divided market split into three segments, Razer's effectively made it into a two way fray now, with OSVR and SteamVR in one corner and Oculus in the other.

While Razer's dream of a unified VR platform may have been wishful thinking in the past, with Valve signing on, it might actually be the future of VR now.

Source: OSVR twitter

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