[faide]

It's hardly a peripheral though. VR games are incompatible with traditional displays, and the development requirements are quite a bit more strict (low latency, high framerate).

It's quite a stretch to say that VR is "just a new way to display a game," in my opinion.

[mklim]

It's an extremely complicated peripheral, but it's still a peripheral. It's a monitor with an intricate tracking system that allows it to tell the PC powering it its exact location and orientation within a limited area. Playing a VR game is nothing like playing a game on a 3D monitor, it feels like you've been transported to another dimension, but the hardware itself isn't doing anything to execute the game and is still "just" a peripheral like a keyboard, monitor, or gamepad. It's just being fed what it should display by the PC and feeding the PC back information about its location and orientation. That's why Oculus initially needed to put a hardware check into their DRM to block shims like this, there's no real technical reason you can't use one in place of the other once you translate its I/O.

[toast0]

Vr games work fine with traditional displays, I've seen plenty of screenshots on my traditional display. It isn't pleasant or immersive that WA, of course.

[mklim]

Some games purposely designed for both or originally designed for monitors and then ported to VR might be able to, but the vast majority of them are going to rely on the headset's position in real life to move the player character in the game. If it's developed for the Vive or Touch it'll also rely on motion controllers to interact with the game world. You could look at the game on the monitor, but you'd have no way to move or actually do anything in the game.

[ldehaan]

it's a display, there are outputs of location data to the computer but they don't come from the headset, they come from other peripherals.

if I then plug the display into my video card; then that makes it a head mounted monitor with drivers to output data specific to that display.