Valve Launches SteamVR Beta For The Oculus Rift

By Nathan Kirsch

Did you know that the most recent Steam Client Beta steam now supports an experimental VR mode for Oculus Rift owners? Valve has launched a new experimental mode for Steam that integrates virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. 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. Be sure to opt-in to the SteamVR Beta Update to get it. On the SteamVR group page, Valve programmer Joe Ludwig explained how to get the VR mode set up.

Oculus-TF2

The first time you run SteamVR Beta 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

Here is a video that a YouTube user uploaded today that shows off the new VR interface for steam’s big picture mode. It looks pretty cool, but right now it looks like it is only working for Windows users and that it can be finicky.