Zoombael said:
It's one thing getting a mere controller to work. A VR HMD is a totally different one. Bear in mind PS VR has to work in tandem with the cam or it's useless. There doesn't seem to be much going with even getting the cam to work on a PC. And isn't connected via a standard electronic interface aka USB. |
Developing PC drivers for PSVR will of course be more work than developing, say, the PS BUZZ controller drivers was. But it's definitely gonna happen, maybe just not as quite as quickly as I think it will.
With a VR headset, being able to send the video data to the VR headset is by far the most important part. And that's hardly going to be a big problem, since it's just a standard HDMI connection.
The data flowing over USB will be a slightly bigger problem, but the most important part here is being able to read the data of a few sensors inside the VR headset from the PC side. Shouldn't be a big deal, that part of the work is quite comparable to developing a driver for the PS4 game controller (actually, developing a driver for the PS4 game controller should involve more work)
| Zoombael said: Bear in mind PS VR has to work in tandem with the cam or it's useless. There doesn't seem to be much going with even getting the cam to work on a PC. And isn't connected via a standard electronic interface aka USB. |
There is a certain truth to that, you just don't seem to see the whole picture:
1. Yes, strictly said, the PS4 camera is not connected via USB but via the proprietary "AUX" connector. But that "AUX" port is pretty much just a standard USB 3.0 connection with a proprietary connector, similar to how the controller ports on the original Xbox were USB, just with a proprietary connector.
2. That's also one of the reasons why there's not that much effort to use the PS4 camera on PCs: Since the PS4 camera uses a proprietary connector that is not easily available on the market, at least for a long time (don't know if that has changed meanwhile) there was no simple USB3.0<->AUX-adapter available. So at least in the beginning, people who wanted to try using the PS4 camera with a PC usually had to cut the PS4 camera's cable and solder a USB 3.0 connector directly to the wires inside. Few people were willing to destroy their PS4 camera cable like this (especially in the beginning when there was not even a PC driver available yet), so the momentum behind developing a PC driver for the PS4 camera was low. Additionally, reverse engineering the protocol of a USB-connected pair of cameras is indeed quite complicated; of all the playstation peripherals, reverse engineering and developing a PC driver for the PS4 camera was propably by far the hardest. And yet, they managed to do it, even though there may still be some issues.
3. But ultimately, that doesn't even matter, because:
While you are correct that PSVR requires a camera, it does not have to be the PS4 camera. The PC driver for PSVR will instead work with just any webcam, most people will NOT use the PS4 camera on PC for that, and pretty much all the software/driver needs to do is to locate the LEDs on PSVR's front side in the captured image and compute some 3D information based on that data. With the help of popular APIs like OpenCV, that is very simple to do these days, probably not more than an hours work for someone familiar with OpenCV.
Maybe SONY is well aware of all this and will actually take measures to try to prevent PSVR being used on PCs as good as they can. I don't quite see why they should do so, but even if they do: It's not gonna work, sooner or later the internet community WILL find ways to use PSVR on PC. And considering that PSVR is set to easily be the best-selling VR headset in 2016/2017, the internet community's effort to develop PC drivers for PSVR will be quite huge. And it will not even be hampered by proprietary USB connectors like the PS4 camera and it's AUX port, PSVR uses standard HDMI/USB connectors.
