Playing VR games in a ~15$ headset
I recently received a present from my brother: a ~15$ VR headset called VR Box. I began downloading some well known apps for my Android phone, such as rollercoasters, 360 videos and stuff like that. Then, I started researching because Steam allowed to stream games directly to an Android phone, but what about VR games?
The software needed
So, if you are reading this, the answer is “yes, it’s possible to play Steam (or even Rift) games with the cheapest headset out there” (read the whole story to check out the limitations). This can be done because the Valve VR drivers are open source (link here). You will just need a software to stream from your computer to your phone using this driver. The most known ones are:
I’ve tested all of them (with the free tier available). The most famous one is Vridge 2.0. I was unable to make it work flawlessly, so my recommendation is TrinusVR. This tutorial will cover how to configure TrinusVR to make it work.
TrinusVR
Almost every software will need two different parts. The first one is the mobile app. Trinus do have a free app that will allow you to play games for 10 minutes. If you like it, the full app will cost you 8.99€. Download the app, start it, plug the USB cable into your PC and enable tethering tapping the USB icon (you can also stream without any wires, not my recommendation at all…). Check that the left triangle is ON (if it’s not, just tap it to enable).
Now, let’s talk about the PC software. Get the latest build from here. Install it and start the software. Here, you just have to change one simple thing: in the main tab, change the “capture mode” to “SteamVR”. Now, wait a minute before clicking the triangle in the right bottom corner: we must install SteamVR.
In order to do so, just launch Steam, open your library, select VR and download SteamVR. Already done? Let’s continue.
Go back to TrinusVR, select the SteamVR tab and click “install”. You just have to do this the first time (in the following picture, ignore the “external input” and leave it at “None”). Off to go: click on the triangle and you should see two black squares (one for each eye) on your phone.
SteamVR configuration
Do NOT launch SteamVR until your TrinusVR has connected. Once it’s done, launch SteamVR, select “Run room setup”, then select “standing only” and follow the steps. When finished, you will be able to see the “Steam room” on your phone. If everything is backwards or some degrees faulty, you can turn around some degrees with the TrinusVR software. Press 1 or 2 buttons in your keyboard (the upper numbers, not the numeric pad ones) to rotate 90 degrees. Press the 4 number to center view. You will have to do this some times since your phone is not as good as the Oculus or Vive sensors… not at all…
Time to test what we have done. Download a VR game such as Epic Roller Coasters and test your headset. You should have no problem to have a nice time turning yourself upside down.
Trinus improvements
You can tweak some configurations to improve the quality received on your phone. For example:
- Turn off the ALT mode in the SteamVR tab (I was unable to make some games work until I checked that out).
- Main tab > Image size can improve quality… but be careful with the fps
- Main tab > Use Moonlight (best option IMHO)
In order to use Moonlight, you will need an nvidia graphic card and the Moonlight Android app. Download the app and start it. Then, just start the Trinus app as before. Inside the main tab of the Trinus PC software, click on the Moonlight checkbox and click on the triangle. Then, you will have to tell your nvidia card to use Moonlight from the GeForce Experience software (same as for SHIELD devices):
Now follow the steps on your phone to launch the desired Steam games.
Playing with a gamepad
I do have an Xbox 360 wireless pad working for other Steam games. What about SteamVR games? Well… works like a charm. I had no problem in playing any of the Steam VR games with the gamepad. Of course, this is a PAD, so you won’t be able to play “touch required” games. If you want to do so, you can try hardware like NOLO.
But, searching for free pad games, I found Lucky’s Tale. Oh my gosh, not in Steam. Is it possible to play Oculus Rift games with the same ~15$ headset? It is.
Playing Oculus Rift games
You will be able to play (some) Oculus Rift games that are touch free or just with a gamepad, such as Lucky’s Tale. Be careful: exclusive games such as Chronos won’t work because it will check the hardware connected. You will need at least a sensor and some other software to make it work (you can achieve this with a PS3 Eye Cam, but I won’t cover it in this story).
So, first of all, download the Oculus software. Once done, download the game (Lucky’s Tale for instance). Once downloaded… let’s do some magic. Download the latest Revive release and install it. You have to start this software after launching the Oculus one. Revive will make your Oculus games work for Vive hardware using Steam VR (yes, it has to be running), but Trinus will allow you to play them without doing anything else. Just right click Revive (should be in the system tray) and open up the dashboard. Select the desired game and et voilà (if this is not working for you, select “inject” when right clicking the icon and find the desired game executable inside the Oculus Program Files folder).
Happy VR gaming!
Other stuff
You can check this links to read about more usefull stuff:
- Pseudovive: simulate device names for any SteamVR driver to increase compatiblity
- PSMoveService: A background service that communicates with the psmove and stores pose and button data (allows PSEye camera to work in Steam)
- OpenVR-InputEmulator: An OpenVR driver that allows to create virtual controllers, emulate controller input, manipulate poses of existing controllers and remap buttons. A client-side library that communicates with the driver via shared-memory is also included.
