Steam Starts SteamVR Beta Ahead Of Steam Dev Days

One of the most interesting products for gamers that has been unveiled in a while is the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. The product landed some significant funding to help it be developed into a consumer product back in December. While money to bring that device to market is important, it will fail without game support.

Steam has taken a significant step towards supporting gaming with the VR headset with the launch of SteamVR. SteamVR launched on the night before Steam Dev Days conference kicks off. Steam had previously promised to hold talks about VR and to demonstrate VR hardware during the conference.

SteamVR is described as a new way to interact with Steam using the Oculus Rift headset. The launch of SteamVR came from Valve programmer Joe Ludwig. He wrote that the Steam Client Beta now supports an experimental VR mode for those who own a Oculus Rift dev kit. The developers can try out the VR headset by adding "-vr" on the command line.

After adding that string in the command line, the devs can then press Big Picture to open it in VR mode. Apparently, there is a bug that prevented the Oculus from working initially that has now been fixed. Users need to download a Beta Update to get things working correctly. If you own an Oculus Rift dev kit, be sure and let us know how this works.

SOURCE: Roadtovr