SteamVR And The Oculus Rift..?

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
1

Okay, so I’m new to all this so please forgive me if I’ve got things wrong and any help would be much appreciated lol :smiley:

I haven’t done any sort of programming for 20 years or so, so I’m planning on messing around with UE4 and Blueprints before I start re-educating myself on c++.

I just need to get things regarding SteamVR, the Open SDK, Oculus Home and the Oculus SDK straight in my head.

I’m getting a Rift in November (unless I resist the temptation to get one earlier because my credit card company has increased my limit by £500 lol) so I’m going to start developing small demos and stuff as a hobby for the Rift, so I’ve got a few stupid questions that I need answering before I start messing around with things.

  1. If I start work on stuff using the SteamVR template will people with both Rifts and Vives be able to try them out…? As far as I understand things SteamVR uses a translation layer(?) that translates Vive head tracking, positional tracking etc so that it works with the Oculus SDK and the Oculus Rift HMD…? Is that right…?

  2. Will I (or anyone that tries my stuff) need to have Oculus Home open or will it automatically open itself and work on a Rift without a problem…?

  3. Will I be able to upload stuff to Oculus Share (or whatever it’s called these days) if it’s using a SteamVR template…?

  4. Are there a set of Standards for stuff for Oculus Share/Store like there is for gaming consoles…? I want to get ahead of stuff just in case I do decide to share my stuff with the world, I’ve experience with Standards testing for the PSP, Xbox 360 and PS3 so am guessing it’s the usual checklist affair with Requirements and Recommendations…?

Many thanks in advance for any help! :smiley:

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I do not know about some of those questions, but steam is silly and if you list your game as including seated support it wont let you not support the rift, so, i had to support the rift. So i have a bit of experience.

In the project in UE you need to enable the oculus plugin, and the steam vr plugin.
Your app then works almost identical on the oculus, and on the vive. (aside from motion controls obviously)

In my game in VR the first thing you see is a menu screen that you can pick between seated and standing. I have the cursor controlled by the HMD, and this works the same across both units. I use this start menu to pick how the cursor is controlled in future menus, and what game modes show up.

For the majority of things, it seems to actually work really well. All the calls such as “get orientation and position” seem to function the same on the vive and on the rift. I think there is something funky going on with the floor height, but i do not have a rift to test, so i’m just judging this on what my testers are saying.

I know that oculus have some “Recommendations” but i don’t think they have standards, i don’t plan on using the oculus store so someone else will have to answer those for you.

Good luck!