Just in case you picked up an HTC Vive and were bummed you wouldn’t be able to play Oculus Rift exclusives, there’s already a program available that makes at least some of those games for the latter playable on the former.
The Rift and Vivehave been out for a few weeks now so, of course there’s already a homebrew piece of software that makes it possible for the two VRdevices to play nice. The software is called Revive and, according to reddit user CrossVR, it serves as an Oculus compatibility layer proof-of-concept. CrossVR explains that anyone wishing to give the program a go would head on over to GitHubin order to grab the files and instructions on how to use them.
While Revive might actually work for more Oculus games on the Vive, its creator explains that the software has only been tested on and confirmed for two exclusive games including Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck . With this software, users should be able to tackle those experiences on the HTC Vive even though they are only supposed to be played on the Rift.
If you scroll down through the comments, some folks are reporting that Revive is working as advertised for those two games while others are reporting problems. Since it’s a pretty tricky process to go through, this could of course be due to user error. Also, we’re talking about extremely new hardware and software that lets you do things you’re not supposed to do, so we aren’t surprised if there are some bugs popping up.
CrossVR went on to explain how the whole shebang actually works, saying that it basically implements functions from Oculus Runtime and translates them to OpenVR calls. They further state that they’re going to continue working on the software and iron out issues as they arise, with “many more” versions of the software planned for the future.
That is, of course, assuming that Oculus or HTC don’t squash this functionality in a future update. Again, the software allows the Vive to operate in a way it was not intended to and makes it possible to play games that are supposed to be platform exclusives, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see steps taken to make it more difficult for software like Revive to function.
In a weird sort of way, this might actually prove especially harmful for the Rift. Plenty of folks are already sore that the Oculus headset has been delayedfor delivery to some by up to a couple of months. If folks decide it would be easier to buy a Viveand just use backdoor methods like Revive to play Rift games, that could certainly hurt sales of the Oculus machine.
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