Hacker News Reader

The SDK has always been relatively closed even before the Facebook acquisition. They've always touted it as being important for guaranteeing the quality of an experience which I don't necessarily disagree with but its also important for their goal of becoming the biggest VR software platform.

View on HN

Before the facebook acquisition you could download the source code for the SDK and it had cross platform support.

After Facebook: Closed Source, Windows-only.

No, the Oculus server process that does the actual webcam analysis and communication with the HMD and graphics hardware has always been closed.

Yes, but this server application was only introduced with the DK2 and the 0.4.x SDK which was delivered after the facebook acquisition. Whether they would have hold back the source code without facebook - who the hell knows?

Huh, I didn't know that. I never really had a look at any SDK earlier than that. I just had a false memory that the DK2 came out before the fb acquisition. I do remember Oculus intimating that they couldn't open up the tracking code because it was some proprietary stuff they'd bought but that's almost certainly not the case now.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought the server had been around since the beginning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com