Valve Launches Steam Virtual Reality Beta


Valve Launches Steam Virtual Reality Beta

Valve has released a beta for SteamVR, a new way to interact with Steam using the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

The announcement came from Valve programmer Joe Ludwig a few hours ago:

"As of the most recent Steam Client Beta steam now supports an experimental VR mode. If you own an Oculus Rift dev kit you can try it out by starting Steam with “-vr” on the command line. Then press the Big Picture button to enter Big Picture + VR mode."

The first time you run you may need to do the following:

  1. Run Steam in the desktop client without the -vr option
  2. Find “SteamVR” under “Tools” in your library. (If you don’t have it installed, install it.)
  3. Bring up properties on SteamVR and opt-in to the “Beta Update” beta. Let the update download.
  4. Quit the Steam Client again and start it with -vr


Reddit user Cunningcory has detailed instructions for Oculus Rift users to fix the initial problems users have been having launching SteamVR with Oculus Rift:
  • Go to “Library”, “Tools”, and download SteamVR
  • Opt into SteamVR Beta. Make sure it’s up-to-date
  • Set Steam to start in Big Picture mode.
  • Create a shortcut to Steam and add -vr to the launch options
  • IMPORTANT: Set the Rift as an extended monitor and make sure it’s the secondary.
  • Start Steam using your modified shortcut.
All of this is just ahead of the Steam Dev Days, the annual conference where this year Valve will demonstrate virtual reality hardware and hold several talks on VR.