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HTC Vive

Update (iv/fourteen/2016): Oculus has contacted united states of america to state the following: "This is a hack, and we don't condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to pause hacked software."

Original story beneath.

Upward until now, the nascent VR market place has been something of a walled garden. Oculus Rift owners can play games on Steam VR, but the reverse isn't true — HTC Vive owners tin can't play games on the Oculus Rift. A new software utility on GitHub, dubbed Revive, aims to change that by offer a proof-of-concept compatibility layer betwixt the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift.

Currently just two applications are supported — Lucky'southward Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck — and it requires executable patches for the requisite titles. Revive's readme states:

It [Revive] works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls. Unfortunately Oculus has implemented a Lawmaking Signing cheque on the Runtime DLLs, therefore the Revive DLLs cannot be used unless the application is patched.

The Revive DLLs already contain the necessary hooking code to work around the Code Signing check in whatsoever application. However you volition still need to patch the application to actually load the Revive DLLs.

Controller back up, according to Ars Technica, is a bit hit-or-miss. Some games worked with any XInput device, some required the Xbox 1 controller specifically, and at to the lowest degree i application refused to recognize controller input at all. There are as well some distribution issues to consider, since the Oculus titles are currently free to whatever Oculus Home installer — probably in function because those games are meant to be reserved for Rift owners rather than Vive buyers.

Cross-platform compatibility: Consumers desire it, Oculus doesn't

Oculus CEO, Palmer Luckey, has stated "we tin only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do and then." Other vendors have indicated this isn't the case — Valve told Digital Trends "Anything Oculus or other stores demand to work with the Vive are documented in the freely available OpenVR APIs." HTC has made similar statements promoting openness and argued that VR content shouldn't exist locked downwards. Developers working on games for the Vive were willing to say on-tape that they weren't being held to exclusivity clauses; no Oculus developers responded to DT'south requests for comment.

LuckyTale

Lucky's Tale, now playable on Vive.

Closed ecosystems can work, but they're difficult to maintain. Sony and Microsoft operate airtight ecosystems for their game consoles, but the number of Xbox or PS4 exclusive titles has been lower this generation than in any generation previous. The fact that the PS4 is currently outselling the Xbox One by roughly 2:1 suggests there are plenty of Xbox 360 owners who opted for Sony this time around because they wanted more powerful hardware, as opposed to the "all-things-for-anybody" gated customs Microsoft initially proposed. Redmond attempted to apply Kinect to create meaningful differentiation, and when that failed it was stuck with the lower-performing of the two hardware platforms.

How Oculus responds to patches similar this will tell us a great deal well-nigh the company'south long-term plans for monetizing the Rift and its game store. If Oculus crushes the compatibility effort, it'll be seen equally bear witness that the company wants Rift games to be reserved for Rift owners. If it allows or encourages cantankerous-compatibility, it'll likely boost VR adoption, only possibly at the expense of its own exclusivity. Facebook may exist free to use, but it's non exactly congenital on interoperability. It'south generally easier to move towards an open model than to close a formerly open ecosystem; Oculus may be testing the closed garden waters before information technology leaps in and dedicates itself to an interoperable VR platform.