I used to think VR wouldn't go mainstream - for social reasons (people are very cautious about what they put on their face). Now I'm not so sure.
The more I look at VR, the more parallels I see to the early internet. It's where the creatives and the weird and wacky mingle. That gives it, oh, maybe a decade or so.
It would be cool to see more open source support in the VR space: the current HMD's are proprietary and the drivers don't work on linux. All the major apps are closed source and proposed standards are few and far between. No-one has built a federated VR chat client yet. Hmm. Maybe that is something I should start investigating....
3 years ago
Another thing that's missing is all the supporting infrastructure, which I'm slowly chipping away at. Here's my latest addition, an OBS capture plugin for both mirrored VR views and directly capturing OpenVR overlays built by other apps (overlay capture = lots of copy overhead due to the current way I implemented it, but mirror = good). https://gitlab.com/mcoffin/obs-openvr · 3 years ago
https://gitlab.com/mcoffin/obs-openvr
While most of the major players in the space don't support Linux, Valve at least does with the Index (with an admittedly mediocre experience with proprietary SteamVR). Last I heard, OpenHMD was making leaps and bounds, and I know at least Sway has DRM leasing support for VR in the works on the Wayland side. · 3 years ago
I'm not sure how open the very very early web was: proprietary operating systems on non-standard hardware, no open source browsers, and probably pre-http there were small networks that required special hardware/software to access. We think of the web as 'starting' when it became open-access.
I wasn't there though, so I'm not to sure how it actually went.
However early-web probably was less creepy - or at least not funded by companies that already aggregate way to much personal data. · 3 years ago