Sony’s latest PlaystationVR headset is arguably a smash hit. While competitors Oculus Rift and HTC Vive offer superior quality offerings, they require PC’s with approximately $1500 of hardware to power them.
Given the headset only was released today, we are bound to see either Sony or the modding community make this thing work on a PC soon enough.
Given that the PSVR headset is essentially what Rift and Vive are; optics, screen, sensors and software, we are bound to see the PSVR headset working on a PC.
I think the one tricky aspect of porting the PSVR headset to PC is the tracking aspect. The PSVR headset requires the Playstation Camera, which is USB 3 but has a propriety connector. How would tracking work given the camera works in combination with the LED’s on the headset to track.
Getting the Playstation 4 Camera working on PC has been done, but it isn’t straightforward as you can see here.
Another is the software for it, the PSVR headset won’t have an SDK initially or possibly ever But as we’ve seen with the Oculus Rift back in the early days, various open source and paid offerings appeared making it work with games and applications that didn’t support virtual reality natively like VorpX.
Time will tell, we might never see the PSVR headset working on a PC, at least not without some serious messing around and hacking.
I don’t see why the PS4 camera would be necessary. Tracking can be done by a hi-res webcam and special software (like the Wii remote technology) or, better yet, an array of webcams around the room that could track your position similar to the Vive’s hardware. You could easily outdo the PS4 camera’s capability. Might be fun to tinker with once somebody writes a driver that can take it out of cinematic mode.