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HTC-Vive.md

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HTC Vive and Vive PRE

OSVR supports using your HTC Vive and its controllers to use any OSVR software, whether in direct or extended mode, with distortion correction, with full tracking and input support.

The OSVR-Vive plugin and tools provide for access to the Vive hardware through OSVR.

Download pre-compiled OSVR-Vive plugin binaries here!

Compatibility

While the drivers should be compatible with all Vive family devices, it has only been tested so far on the HTC Vive and Vive PRE (not the earlier Developer Edition). If you have one of these early devices, please consider helping out by testing and reporting back how it works!

The OSVR-Vive driver interacts with the SteamVR driver for the Vive (driver_lighthouse), so the version of SteamVR matters as well. The pace of releases has slowed since earlier this year, but typically the driver is only compatible with the latest stable release of SteamVR as Valve usually makes incompatible changes to the betas shortly after each new stable. The version, listed below, can be seen in a number of places, including the SteamVR "System Report" dialog.

Known-good stable release, for the current build as of the time of this writing:

  • 1467410709 (released as stable on July 5)

Setup

You'll need to first make sure the Vive is working well in SteamVR and that you have a room setup, preferably a standing or room-scale calibration, for your space. Then, download the plugin binaries that match your OSVR server in bits.

You'll have files as follows in your extracted download:

  • A plugin file - on Windows, this is a .dll file in something like bin/osvr-plugins-0. Put that file in the same directory of your OSVR server as the other plugins.
  • In bin, a ViveDisplayExtractor tool - copy to the bin directory of your OSVR server.
  • A sample osvr_server_config config file that you'll want to start with (as well as some pre-made display descriptor and mesh files, which we'll be replacing shortly.)

Note that each time you want to run an OSVR application on your Vive (including the initial setup app), you need to tell SteamVR to release control of it: in the SteamVR menu, disable "Direct Mode" (if it was enabled) then exit SteamVR. (You may actually be able to get away with leaving it in direct mode - it may depend on your system. Test it and see!)

One time setup: Your Vive needs a custom display descriptor and mesh distortion data file, which can be extracted using the included ViveDisplayExtractor tool. Making sure that ViveDisplayExtractor is alongside osvr_server, that your Vive is plugged in, and that SteamVR has exited, run ViveDisplayExtractor.

When successful, you'll see something like:

[DisplayExtractor] Writing distortion mesh data file:
C:/Users/Ryan/Desktop/OSVR/bin/displays/HTC_Vive_PRE_meshdata.json

[DisplayExtractor] Writing display descriptor file:
C:/Users/Ryan/Desktop/OSVR/bin/displays/HTC_Vive_PRE.json

[DisplayExtractor] Press enter to quit...

Note: The resulting configs contain an absolute path to the mesh data, so if you move where your OSVR Server is located, just run ViveDisplayExtractor again.

That's all there is to it! You can now use the sample osvr_server_config.vive.sample.json as your server config file (rename it to osvr_server_config.json to make it the default) and you'll be ready to run OSVR-powered applications on your Vive!

(When you want to run a SteamVR app, no problem: just close the OSVR Server and any OSVR apps running in direct mode.)