Enlarge / Oculus Touch controllers (bottom) and HTC Vive wands (top) join in harmony… at least in Facebook Spaces. Is this an indication of VR harmony to come? (credit: Facebook)
In a major about-face for the virtual reality teams at Facebook, the company announced a surprise Tuesday update to its VR “Spaces” app. The social media service’s first VR chat app, still in beta and free, now officially supports its biggest home-VR rivals in the HTC Vive and the SteamVR platform.
This may come as a shock to anyone who has tried using Facebook VR software on rival hardware. Facebook and its home-VR company Oculus have spent more than a year telling customers that many of its major VR games and apps must remain exclusive to Oculus hardware, as opposed to being opened up and used by owners of rival hardware like the HTC Vive. This, in part, inspired a homebrew community to break Oculus’ hardware-locking systems and prove that cross-platform issues were never technical. (The SteamVR platform, conversely, has supported outside hardware such as Oculus and Windows Mixed Reality from the moment those headsets reached the market.)
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Source: Ars Technica – Facebook’s stance on rival VR hardware just softened in a big way