{"id":24336,"date":"2014-09-16T15:54:22","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T20:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24336"},"modified":"2014-09-16T15:57:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-16T20:57:29","slug":"experienced-points-just-how-good-is-the-oculus-rift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24336","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Just How Good Is The Oculus Rift?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My column this week is a collection of observations and explanations<\/a>, aimed at people who are still wondering what the fuss is about. <\/p>\n

Here are a few more observations that are a little more technical:<\/p>\n

I’m surprised at the state of the SDKSoftware Development Kit – An SDK is a collection of code aimed at a specific task. In this case, it’s used to talk to the Rift hardware.<\/span>. It’s kind of rough in some places and really rough in others. Surprisingly, their OpenGL tools and documentation are primitive to non-existent. <\/p>\n

See, there are two main ways to make polygons on today’s machines: DirectX (Microsoft) and OpenGL (open source, sort of). These two have been dueling since the 90’s. Using DX will marry you to Microsoft platforms and Microsoft tools, while OGL you’re a bit more free but also might have some other headaches to worry about. <\/p>\n

I’ve spent several hours today just trying to build the most basic, elemental example of an Oculus project using OpenGL, and I have yet to make make anything happen on the Rift screen. There are examples in the wild, but they’re already obsolete because new features have been added, stuff has been re-named, and other things have been removed or consolidated. As far as I can tell, the API documentation doesn’t exist, so the only way to figure out what to do is to look at the example programs. And all of those are built for DX. <\/p>\n

I suppose I could use the DirectX projects to play with, but I know OpenGL really well and almost nothing of DX, so the move would be painfully expensive in terms of time. It would be like learning Swedish just so you can assemble some IKEA furniture. I only have so much time in the week to put into this, and I’m not really keen on spending several days making myself literate in DX, just so I can spend time writing code that I’ll need to re-write once the OpenGL version of the toolset comes together.<\/p>\n

Last week I complained about the number of cables on the Rift<\/a>. It looks like they’ve been working on this problem for a while:<\/p>\n