In its war against the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift has the advantage of a major roster of exclusive games, right? Wrong.
Exclusive Oculus Rift titles are already running on the HTC Vive courtesy of a third-party program.
New software posted to developer site GitHub lets HTC Vive owners play Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck, both Oculus-exclusive demos.
“This is a proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR,” writes LibreVR, the programmer behind the software.
“It works be reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls,” LibreVR continues.
The Oculus Rift
This means that any Oculus-friendly game can theoretically run on the HTC Vive too, closing the title gap between the two platforms.
That’s good news, as the Rift already has access to some SteamVR titles, while HTC Vive can’t (or rather, couldn’t) play Oculus games.
Posting on Reddit, the programmer wrote: “It may work with plenty of other games, but that hasn’t been tested by myself. It’s still early days for this project, since it’s only been in development for a few weeks. In the future more games will be supported, but I’m glad to see such swift progress already.”
Related: Best VR Headset 2016
The ‘Revive’ software isn’t perfect right now. It doesn’t yet support games that use Oculus Platform online functionality. It also doesn’t work with the Oculus Touch controllers. As such, you can only play games with an Xbox controller for the time being.
But if those admittedly small downsides don’t deter you, you can find instructions on how to use the software here.
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Will you buying a VR headset this year? Let us know in the comments below.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
