Oculus Rift owners using the SteamVR beta will be happy to know that Valve’s developers are continuing to work towards making the Rift user experience on the SteamVR beta better than ever. SteamVR has become a central hub of virtual reality (VR) content on PC, and PC VR head-mounted display (HMD) owners will be pleased to know their HMDs will continue to work better than ever with Steam, thanks to some new updates.
This time, Valve have added some specific improvements for the Oculus Dash 2.0 while using Steam VR. The exact patch notes are;
- Support for Dash 2.0. The Rift Dashboard will now render on top of the scene (where supported) rather than swap to a white room. Depth can be passed from applications for proper compositing, but will require individual applications to update to use the latest OpenVR SDK.
Not only that, but gameplay itself should get a bit smoother thanks to some other updates and improvements regarding controllers;
- Hooked up new OVR status for hiding controllers, lowering rendering requirements and pausing.
Needless to say it’s good news for VR HMD owners of all kinds; not only does this ensure Oculus owners are getting a better experience, but it reinforces Steam’s commitment to bringing a good user experience to a range of devices.
The Oculus Dash was added with Rift Core 2.0 back in December, which brought with it a variety of enhancements for users. It’s good to see it didn’t take Valve long to implement the new firmware into SteamVR in some capacity.
SteamVR has been improving for users of all HMDs on all platforms, as evidenced by the MacOS beta going live mid last year.
See below for a full list of updates and improvements in the latest SteamVR update;
General:
- Rewrite of the Vive’s Link Box Bluetooth subsystems to provide for wireless Base Station firmware updates and Power Management. Added SteamVR->Settings->Bluetooth.
- Fix for hotplugging displays in direct mode for both Nvidia and AMD.
- Added a dismissible warning when an application attempts to render using the wrong video card (requiring user to plug headset into different port).
Lighthouse:
- Added system for recovering from permanently tilted world. Level should improve immediately, but in the most severe cases the first play session may take a few minutes to show improvement. Corrections are saved on the PC, so moving the HMD to another computer may briefly show the problem again.
SteamVR Dashboard:
- Fixed issue with laser mouse clicks on web pages.
Compositor:
- Fix for reusing old frames when newer ones are available during interleaved reprojection in async mode in cases where applications took too long to call Submit.
SteamVR Home:
- MOAR crash fixes
Make sure to take a look at the announcement page for the full list, and a download link for the latest OpenVR SDK. For all of the latest news on VR and Steam, make sure to keep reading VRFocus.