VR market fragmentation was a think long before it should have been. But, with Khronos attempting to set a new standard for the new-born technology, we could be seeing that issue fended off with a wand controller very soon.
The issue has been brought up many time not just on this site, but across practically every media publication with a slight interest in the emerging virtual reality market. When the Oculus Rift was first proposed and prototyped, the future had arrived. And when there's a potential new market, everyone attempts to dominate the emerging revenue potential.
But where does this leave those actually willing to become the 'early adopters'? In a case like this, with so many virtual reality headsets crawling out of the woodwork, the people attempting to enter said market will do whatever they can to gain a foothold - usually by signing developers to make exclusive content for their own product. This eventually breaks the platform apart by having certain 'must have' experiences locked between competing, and very expensive, hardware. Meaning users either have to make a difficult decision, or back out of the movement altogether - making everyone the loser and the market set to shrink before it's barely begun to grow.
Already seeing the light, Ubisoft recently decided to make all their current and future VR titles multi-platform.
And with this fragmentation issue already prominent, it's good to hear the major hardware manufactures are starting to back a VR standard in the hopes of developing a single 'API' developers can utilize to add VR support for ever major headset rather than having to choose 1 or 2 to focus on. Less fragmentation, happier consumers, happier developers and a happier VR market.
Already in on the initiative is Nvidia, Google, Oculus, Valve and Epic Games; and who else do you really need there? AMD and Razer are already working on an 'Open VR' platform, so naturally that should fall into the same place. Hopefully. You can read the extensive report over at Gamasutra.
