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Visually speaking, the "displayed image" (in the steam/vive window) looks very similar to any other game being rendered on the desktop. Eg: Counterstrike, WoW, etc.

Question: Why is it then these games don't "feel" like being in a VR environment?

Also, programmatically speaking (image rendering, camera angles, depth field, etc)

Question: Can a non-VR game work with the VR sets as long as you configure the controls to the headset and wands? Eg: Headset = joystick; wand buttons = menu etc.

Thank you.

Edit: Please let me know if you have any reading recommendations on this subject.

alpharomeo
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  • There are many differences. Stereoscopy, non symmetrical frustum, 10ms frame budget for two eyes (90fps), lens distortion, head tracking, etc. – Joan Charmant Jun 23 '16 at 19:27
  • Frankly, the frame budget is not that big of a problem as timewarp manages to help with that, also most VR enabled machines are quite good in terms of hardware. Stereoscopy, frustum and lens distortion are fixable (in some cases) by hacking the rendering system as Vorpx does. I would count the head tracking as the only show stopper from the list of your issues. – Krzysztof Bociurko Jun 24 '16 at 11:25
  • Thank you Joan and ChanibaL for your insight. A follow up question on the back of that - Lets take a 3d tree for example. If a character in the game can walk around the tree; hypothetically a person with a VR headset will see the same rendered tree but with additional information (data) being loaded that is not in the scope of the current "field of vision". Is this understanding correct? – alpharomeo Jun 24 '16 at 13:08
  • If you mean a non-VR game that you're trying to play in VR then the answer will probably be that the graphics system will get exactly the same information (polygons, textures etc) that the non-VR gamer's system would. The issue here is that this might be not enough. The hacks usually change your field of view, try to rotate the camera and do a some postprocessing - they cannot get additional information like what is behind that building (an example of something that a VR player could see, but a normal one constrained to a screen could not). – Krzysztof Bociurko Jun 24 '16 at 13:32

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The non-VR games simply weren't made for VR.

That said, there are hacks that make non-VR games semi-work in VR. You can check out Vorpx for Oculus, but I don't know of anything for Vive. There will be very big issues and headaches, though.

A lot of things will look bad - like missing graphics as almost all games go through shortcuts so they don't render what you will not see. For example there is no sky in RTS games and the map ends just after the end of scrollable space. Or when you're driving a car in a race game, there probably isn't even more to the car then the dashboard (no seats, back of the car etc). No one should see them, so no one made them.

It's even worse with the user interface of these games, no one had depth in mind when they designed this, so you'll have an ammo counter that makes you cross eyes end such.

I could go on and on with the issues, as this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Krzysztof Bociurko
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