Is unhooking VR rendering from player rendering theoretically possible?

[Flynn]

Just curious about a theoretical future Vorpx.

Currently we always see the player view but in VR. Could it ever be possible to play DirectX games the same way Dolphin emulator for Oculus works: you have free look in any direction completely unhooked from where your player character is looking. And typically the game UI is painted on a plane in the direction the player character is looking. The emulator is just rending the games geometry all around you by itself, even if the game never would have shown you those areas.

This does lead to some weirdness – like you can look away from your character’s view and see the game shifting around NPC positions out of sight, or removing buildings from the scene to save on memory, but it’s all really cool to see usually. Even menu scenes become places to explore as there is tons of geometry and objects all around some of the 3D menus in gamecube games that the developers just left there.

[Ralf]

I did some experiments with something that probably works similar in the past, but in the end the idea was ditched. Most games clip the geometry very close to the visible volume, so even small head movements would cause major visible artifacts. Not good enough.

[Author]

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