FreeTrack is already trying to do that for head tracking.

That's perfect then, because OpenGL has been having ...

The oculus SDK isn't that super special, you just need to provide a split-screen image to it

GL_FRONT_LEFT and GL_FRONT_RIGHT buffers for about two decades.

Only no IHV bothers to support them, instead a lot of hacks and shit are put in place. Now what I'd really like to see is that what's already standardized and -- in theory working -- is used, instead of reinventing the wheel for every little piece of hardware.

In other words, get away from what we had in the 1980s when you had to write separate versions for every different little bit of hardware.

Only no IHV bothers to support them, instead a lot of hacks and shit are put in place. Now what I'd really like to see is that what's already standardized and -- in theory working -- is used, instead of reinventing the wheel for every little piece of hardware.

Nvidia has supported them for quite some time... on their Quadro series. As with other "advanced" OpenGL features like... any form of readback, they decided that you need a $3000 Graphics board to be allowed to use them (in the case of readback it is part of core so you get an unnecessarily slow version instead).

[armchair opinion]

I also agree with ranakor - yet another a self-contained console would be horrible. We have had, what? Eight of them in the past year and near future? No thanks!
But a new hardware peripheral that works with your existing computer, that'll help encourage other hardware manufacturers to develop similar offerings and lead to lower prices and greater support in games? Yes please!

But isn't that exactly what the Rift is not? Unless I grossly misunderstood what's on Wikipedia and in the company propaganda, you need to use a "special SDK" to use it. In other words, it is the same shit as all those hobby engineer products.

There's no existing general-purpose SDK for these kinds of headsets, so they have to make their own. But just like with gamepads (and videocards, monitors, keyboards and mice, scanners, printers, digital cameras, and other ubiquitous hardware peripherals), for the first five or ten years, every company will be creating their own SDKs for their own products and it'll be a mess for developers.

Eventually, one or more of these things will happen:

A) Microsoft, Intel, Apple, NVidia, or AMD will create a consistent API for developers (because it directly benefits these companies' user satisfaction with the new hardware), and the peripheral companies will choose to support it (because it directly benefits user satisfaction with their hardware).
B) Developers will get fit up, and create a SDK that wraps the four or five SDKs of the different peripheral companies.
C) The companies (two or more) will come to mutual agreement and work together on a standard, and the rest will fall in line.
D) One of the companies will create a standard that, if the others accept it, will become a governing body like OpenGL or the DVD standard body, or the BluRay standard body.
E) One of the companies will become dominate, and the other companies will design to imitate that company's interface for consistency, or nobody will buy the "buggy" hardware that developers aren't supporting.

It directly benefits everyone involved to create consistency. The reason why it'll take ten years before that consistency arises, is because every company will duke it out to try to dominate the field with new features and to try to make themselves become the one that writes the standard.

There's many ways that it has happened in the past, but IF the market for these products become large enough, it eventually will lead to standardization. The market will ensure it.

Ofcourse, others can upset the standard. Microsoft created a uniform standard for gamepads, and then stabbed everyone in the back by making the XBox 360 controller a new standard of its own... but it quickly balances out by other gamepad makers taking path [E] above.

3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator comes to mind here. I bought one of these back when they were "big hype" because it's so awesome, such a great help for modelling, and many programs including Blender support it. Turned out it was good for next-to-nothing and Blender didn't support it at all (eventually a homebrew developer snapshot did). In the mean time, like 3 years or so later, it is indeed supported, but even so, it's more of a nuisance than a help. Using the numpad to align and the mouse to dolly is a hundred times faster and easier, and zooming doesn't work very well either way in any case.

The key is that the market has to become big enough. If it stays a small market, then the companies making the product have to fight an uphill battle to get developer support. Developers will support it if enough devices are sold, enough devices will get sold if developers support it. It's kinda a catch-22 you have to break through, either by throwing money at developers (paying them to support it in its infancy), or making it so easy for developers that they can just throw a day or two of work to get it working, or making the peripheral "just work" out of the box, by imitating another device type like a keyboard or mouse or monitor or printer.

The first 5-10 years will definitely be a mess, unless the hardware manufacturers decide to work together straight out of the gate - which is possible, but uncommon.

[/armchair opinion]