One of the defining and ingratiating aspects of Oculus VR as a company is their openness in sharing their progress and gathering knowledge from places other than their own offices. Their engagement with the community and their willingness to demonstrate new hardware and software at every possible opportunity is, I think, an enormous differentiator for them and one of the reasons they’ve been so successful at accelerating the push for great virtual reality into the consumer space.
It seems that other companies, if not necessarily directly following Oculus’ lead in this area, are also following this model at least in some limited respects. We know of Valve’s very close relationship with Oculus and how that has benefited both companies in solving hardware and software problems in VR, low persistence of vision being an example of shared research between Valve and Oculus.
What’s become apparent at this years E3 is that Sony too have a special relationship with Oculus. Two interviews have detailed this relationship and this ‘friendly’ openness this year. The first (above) is Engadget’s talk with Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida. In gregarious style he’s refreshingly positive about the two company’s goal in working towards a great VR future.
Singing a similar positive tune was CEO of Oculus VR, Brendan Iribe, who spoke to Joystiq about a similar subject. Brendan again shares that their relationship with Sony is pretty open, stating that both companies have visited each other to try internal prototypes not released into the public domain yet.
In some respects, you could argue (as Iribe in fact does) that Sony are not a direct competitor to Oculus just yet in the VR space, Project Morpheus, Sony’s VR Headset is tied exclusively to their Playstation 4 platform whilst Oculus are at present dedicated to the PC platform. But these things don’t remain static and there would still be a precedence for caution between the companies.
I find it enormously heartening that all these companies feel that, at least for now, working on the shared dream of a great virtual reality experience for consumers is taking the lead over company and PR politics. It means that we all can expect a better VR revolution much more quickly had that not been the case. The future is bright indeed.