Valve just added full support for the recently released Oculus Rift S PC VR headset to the SteamVR platform.
When the Rift S launched, haptic feedback on the Touch controllers wasn’t working in SteamVR. Valve released a hotfix less than 24 hours later to resolve this.
Over the last few weeks, Valve has been expanding support for Facebook’s new headset in SteamVR Beta builds. SteamVR now visually shows the new Touch controllers in the Dashboard, Home, and apps which use the default SteamVR controller model.
Before this release, SteamVR (non-Beta) detected the Rift S as a regular Rift with three sensors. This is how the Oculus runtime presents the VR hardware to apps built on older SDKs. Now that Valve is using the latest Oculus SDK, Rift S is detected as its own headset, with its own (higher) default resolution and no external sensors.
The Steam store has also been updated to consider Rift S compatible with all games marked as compatible with Rift. Beforehand Rift S users would see a message warning them that their headset was incompatible.
With the Rift S, users can redraw their Guardian boundary from inside VR using the black & white Passthrough+ mode. SteamVR now detects when this happens so as to position VR content in the center of the space without the need for restart.
The release is also supposed to fix “numerous stability issues and bugs”.
Valve Index Improvements
Of course, Valve is launching its own PC VR headset later this month. The company has been polishing up the Index software experience to get it ready for consumers.
This release improves the Hidden Area Mesh for the Index, which Valve claims will “better account for canting, increase stereo overlap” and “better accommodate re-projection”. It also claims to have improved AMD support for Index, “across all frame-rates”.
The update also adds auto-detection for VirtuaLink, likely for the Index VirtualLink adapter the company intends to ship at the end of July.
