Here's an unexpected twist: Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus VR and the creator of the Oculus Rift, recently pledged $2000 per month to the Patreon for the CrossVR project that's developing Revive—the software that enables the use of Oculus-exclusive software of the HTC Vive headset.
Revive first came to our attention in April 2016 as a "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR." It wasn't perfect, as you'd expect from that sort of early-development software, but it worked—although Oculus warned that it could stop working at any time as a result of future software updates. "This is a hack, and we don’t condone it," a rep said.
Luckey's support of the project could be seen as an amusing finger in the face of the company he founded but left (under under less-than-ideal circumstances) earlier this year, but as UploadVR reported in February, Oculus head of content Jason Rubin said at the 2017 DICE Summit that Oculus was not doing anything to stop Revive-type hacks from working, and was actually taking steps to enable them to run more effectively.
That stands in marked contrast to the "platform integrity check" that Oculus incorporated into the Oculus App in May 2016, but then removed a month later. In that light, it seems more plausible to me that Luckey is simply indulging the interest that got him into this VR business in the first place—and, with neither the Rift nor the Vive currently showing signs of changing the world, doing a bit to goose the process from a distance.
Update: Luckey confirmed via Twitter that the pledge did in fact come from him, although he declined to say what attracted him to the project. He also refuted a suggestion that it marked a return to the field, saying, "I never left VR, and I never will."
