I strongly doubt Oculus will go the lighthouse route. I don't know how much lighthouse will cost. But it's probably considerably more expensive than just a camera and some LEDs on the HMD.

Lighthouse is cool and all, but to me the breakthrough Valve brought us is not even that.

It's the fact that they recognize that VR has different requirements to be good. They seem to understand that VR with out walking, might as well not be VR at all.

So the fact that they are setting up the vive as a "room scale" experience is to me, by far, the biggest deal and it takes bravery to do that.

I think Oculus let their lawyers dictate too much what VR should be, when they know damn well that a "seated experience" is inferior in every way to moving around in real life.

Now, i'm not saying that seated experiences don't have their place, because let's be real here, a lot of people won't go trough the trouble of (or won't even be able to) dedicate an entire room for VR.

Cockpit games, or games where the world looks small will all work great in VR (in fact, miniature worlds is perhaps the best way to play traditional games in VR with out too much hassle)

But lets be honest, walking around experiences are what really makes you feel like you're somewhere else. and to not even give their users an option, and the proper tools to do standing experience is a huge mistake by Oculus. If they are really worried about lawsuits, they could just have you sign a waiver to "unlock" the standing features.

So i have a guess...

I think that now that Valve has shown that they don't give a damn about what lawyers think, Oculus is now scrambling to see how they can do their own version of "room scale VR".

Now, there's a good chance that most experiences will still be "seated" ones, because like i mentioned earlier, most people will probably just be able to play on very limited space right next to their computer.

But giving players the option, and encouraging developers to do "room scale" experience now has to be something they will have to support. Even if most people won't do it. (well, at least i'm hoping they support it now that Valve through the gauntlet)

A week ago or so, someone compared pools to VR, and I agree with the premise. VR is just too cool, and to important to just say "ok, we're going to do VR this way, because we want to sell millions, even though we know this isn't the best experience".

I think we need to promote the culture that VR, much like swimming pools, needs it's own dedicated real estate. (and has it's risks just like pools do) I personally don't know yet how i'll set up my "room scale" experience in my house. But i'll figure something out!

So TL;DR -

Lighthouse is cool, but the breakthrough is the philosophy if the standing experience.