Valve has officially announced great news for all Oculus Rift S users. SteamVR is now a platform that the Rift S can operate on.
This news came from Valve themselves.
When the Rift S was first released, the haptics on the Rift S controllers would not work while inside of SteamVR. If you have ever played inside of any type of virtual world, you know just how important “feeling” is to your hands. This is something that Oculus has worked endlessly on perfecting, and the Touch Controllers have great haptics.
Over the last few weeks, beta users have noticed how much Steam was expanding to include this new Facebook and Oculus headset. This new update finally includes the Touch Controllers, something no other update for Rift S has had. This shows the controllers in the Dashboard, Home, and even apps which use the SteamVR controller that is already baked into the software.
There has been some updates that have helped, but this update (1.5.8) is by the far the best yet for the Rift S. Before this update, the Rift S was not recognized as its own headset. When it was plugged into your PC, it would be detected as a common Rift. This didn’t cause any problems, but it needed fixing. Not only was the Rift S not recognized as itself, but SteamVR would say that there was three different external sensors connected to your computer. This was not the case. The Rift S tracking is purely inside-out, nearing that there is no external sensors anywhere to be found.
Another huge part of this update is the game compatibility. Before now – unless you were on the beta – any game that was compatible with the Rift S would say that the headset you are using was not compatible, even though in most cases it was. Users would just have to go with games that they knew were compatible with the original Rift, as those games are always playable with the Rift S.
This error message has been fixed and now the SteamVR store recognizes the Rift S as a real virtual reality headset that has been made and produced by Oculus.
The last big feature that was fixed was the passthrough feature. Now when users want to use the Passthrough feature to redraw their Guardian, SteamVR will recognize it. After you redraw or even correct your boundaries, the Steam software will recognize what happened and will reset the game or experience you are currently in. This will keep you safe in not only your next game, but your current one as well.
These updates are also expected to be polished for Valve’s own headset that releases next month, but because we don’t have our hands on that hardware yet we are unsure how this latest update has impacted the Valve Index. To be sure that this software is completely ready for the upcoming headset, we can expect small but effective updates coming to SteamVR for the next few weeks.
