Oculus Rift exclusives come to HTC Vive thanks to unofficial patch

Owners of the HTC Vive headset longing to play games exclusive to the rival Oculus Rift headset (without spending another £500) have had their wishes granted.

Valve’s SteamVR platform can currently be used by Rift users, but the reverse isn’t possible – with Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey claiming that the VR firm’s SDK must be allowed to run by competing headset makers. Valve has responded by denying the claims.

This means that titles only available on the Rift, such as Lucky’s Tale and Oculus’ own Dreamdeck demo, remain just that.

Or perhaps not, thanks to a new homebrew ‘fix’ that translates Rift games running on Unreal and Unity to a Vive-friendly format.

LibreVR plug-in Revive patches Oculus runtimes by “reimplementing functions from the Oculus runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls" to run in SteamVR, even going so far as to include the Vive’s Chaperone system (the grid-like overlay designed to stop you walking into walls while the headset is obscuring your face).

Understandably, the method remains grey in nature – bypassing the .exe files’ code-signing check on its runtime DLLs almost certainly violates the strict terms and conditions for Oculus Home.

With so many of the Oculus’ launch titles being freely available, it’s an easy way for Vive owners to expand their VR library – though for how long, nobody yet knows.

Thanks, Ars.