Razer’s open-source VR project eyes the future with new partners, free headsets for university labs - burkeawking

One matter that's been endlessly fascinating about the fledged virtual world manufacture is the amount of collaboration and cooperation going on between disparate companies. Get-go you had Valve providing its research to Eye, then Oculus and Samsung partnered up for GearVR.

But surprisingly it's Razer taking collaboration to still further extremes with its OSVR initiative. Announced back at CES, Razer's OSVR (or Agaze-Source Virtual Reality) hardware seeks to standardize some aspects of VR tech so as not to estrange consumers with incompatibilities. Basically information technology's virtual world's "We get one barb at selling this to consumers, or this technology goes back in the box for a decennium" Hail Mary.

In support of this, Razer antitrust announced a long ton of new partners for OSVR, including Jaunt (maker of virtual realism films), 3DRudder (lets you use your feet in VR), Pixel Titans (the team up behind the game STRAFE), and a bunch of others. This is, of course, in addition to OSVR's original slew of partners—Unity, Unreal, Intel, Sixense, Leapmotion, Gear case. OSVR testament have plenty of partners when it gets dispatch the ground.

But it's Razer's other newly announced drive that may do even more for the future of essential reality.

Razer OSVR HMD Back — Razer's OSVR HMD features a 1080p screen and with the plans and eyeglasses being published, you can build your own.

Priming the VR pump

Once the OSVR launches, Razer will now provide ten of its headsets for dead free to whatever eligible university setting up a VR lab. The program sounds great for the VR ecosystem as a unimpaired. Razer's offer drastically lowers the barrier for students to hack together VR software and computer hardware, which could be a large boon for the market. Ten Oculus headsets would cost a school $3,500 by comparability.

Naturally, it could reap big rewards for Razer and the OSVR initiative specifically going forward, too—getting Macintosh computers into classrooms was an early coup for Apple, and the same when Microsoft cut in with Windows 95 machines.

I still don't really bang what Razer's play is with OSVR. The company claims it's not an Oculus competitor, but it is one just by nature of "consumers probably won't buy multiple VR headsets." Regardless, the company's finish of "an ecosystem designed to set an yawning standard for realistic reality input devices, games and output to provide the best possible VR game experience" is noble.

Simply even with all this jockeying for positioning in that respect's static—still—in that respect's no consumer-grade Oculus Rift connected the market. The pits, with the exception of the ultra-expensive GearVR ($200 for the headset plus the cost of a Galaxy Annotation 4) thither's nobelium viable consumer VR platform on the commercialize at whol. I'm session Hera with my DK2 on twiddling virtual thumbs.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/431754/razers-open-source-vr-project-eyes-the-future-with-new-partners-free-headsets-for-university-labs.html

Posted by: burkeawking.blogspot.com