Meant to be Seen

Hi,

I've purchased an Oculus Rift and was very excited to get things working via Direct Mode only to discover Oculus disabled "desktop mode." Based upon my research, and I am now expert, it seems "desktop mode" is the compatibility mode allowing for many different games to work on the Oculus Rift without forcing development of new releases.

It seems to me this would be an overt attempt to force people to purchase and play their in-house games. Is this a reasonable conclusion?

Thanks!

Hey PowerTool,

That's not ENTIRELY true. Mirror Mode(aka Desktop mode) emulated a desktop and had your PC see your VR headset as no different than a regular monitor. It allowed for superior compatibility and no need to muck about API's.

The other method, Direct Mode, requires the hardware, drivers, and software to be in lock-step for compatibility. It does have some performance benefits over Mirror Mode, and supporting two methods would take additional engineering resources, but you're entirely right in your conclusion: Facebook disabled Oculus Mirror Mode for the sole reason of locking headsets, users, and games to their ecosystem so that they can collect data on you. If anyone could output Mirror Mode to an Oculus Headset, then you could sidestep the Rift Runtime entirely. If Mirror Mode worked, you wouldn't need an internet connection to use the Rift. If Mirror Mode worked, Rift would work on MacOS and Linux.

But they killed it around OVR 0.6 IIRC, and it's been dead & buried ever since.

My oculus tracking stopped working as the new rift S came out. I'm not sure if its some kind of a scam to make people buy new rifts, but i do hate all the autoatic updates and added content and lockups, so i do hope I can get this open source driver working so i can start developing software that is independent from oculu's marketing division's diabolics. I do think Oculus rift will just sop working at some point, and become a paper weight without custom drivers.