Razer brings virtual reality to China

Virtual reality is one of the next big things in gaming. And while Facebook, Sony, and Valve prep their proprietary hardware, Razer continues to expand the reach of its open standard for VR.

Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), which is a platform for virtual reality run that a coalition of companies run and PC hardware maker Razer leads, has made a deal with Qihoo 360 that will give the VR standard a strong presence in China. Qihoo 360 is a Chinese Android app store that has over 800 million users, which gives it a mammoth presence in a market that should overtake the United States as the biggest in the world for mobile games before the end of this year. And that spending on games should translate directly to the virtual-reality sector.

“China’s appetite for virtual reality is growing very rapidly,” Razer chief executive officer Min-Liang Tan said in a statement. “There are hundreds of VR developers looking for ways to increase the reach of their content and grow their virtual reality technology further. OSVR’s goal is to help accelerate the development of VR in China by helping developers to support an ever-growing variety of VR hardware on a local and global scale and to collaborate with the best of the best in the industry.”

With Qihoo 360 supporting OSVR, this enables developers releasing games in China to know what they’re working with. Any studio can drop $300 on an OSVR Hacker Dev Kit and know that if their game works with that, it will work with an OSVR-supported device.  The OSVR standard lays out specifications for VR input, output, and games. So game makers hoping to reach an audience in China with virtual-reality content can start building software now with some amount of comfort.

Qihoo 360 joins a list of other OSVR Chinese partnerships that include companies like KatVr, LingVR, and VR-China that are building input devices, head-mounted displays, and more.