I got my Frame today and found an unlabeled button at the side. Took me a bit to find out what it does. It’s actually a mouse button! When you click it once the cursor appears and from then on works like a mouse. Only trouble is that the cursor is right in the middle of the screen and you control it by moving your head.
Guess it’s good in a pinch, when you don’t have the controllers. Could be more useful if it used the eye tracking. Maybe with a later update.
I played around a bit, installing basically every VR game I have to see if it runs. Unfortunately none of them (or SteamVR itself) support lying on your back while playing. I’m disabled and basically can’t leave my bed. I was hoping for some setting to reset the pitch when you reset the forward view.
While it does position 2d windows wherever you look, that isn’t the case for the VR space itself. The floor is always downwards and not in the direction my chin is pointing. I think OVR Advanced Settings can give me that option. I just have to wait for them to add Steam Frame support, which is supposed to come with the next major version.
Still I was pleasantly surprised to see that many VR games just worked out of the box. At least the initial screens worked in Droid Works, 7th Guest, Spellbound Spire and I Am Cat.
What outright refused to run was Batman, The Lab and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
I also dabbled with the Linux port of MotherVR, the VR mod for Alien Isolation. For a moment it actually worked. Only trouble was that a second window with the game scene was showing over the VR view. But just positioning it outside of view kind of fixed that. In my quest to fix it probably I must have broken something because now I can’t get the game to work at all.
And on the topic of Quest, I grabbed Minecraft VR from SideQuest. I could not find a GUI option to add non-Steam games. But on the command line it ships with the script steamos-add-to-steam. You just have to modify it to also accept files with the type application/vnd.android.package-archive. After it was added I selected Lepton as the compatibility layer and to my surprise it started. Only running Minecraft itself did not work, as it complained about some missing libraries. Seems like a solvable problem.
All in all I’ve still got a lot to tinker with. Maybe I can whip up a quick SteamVR plugin to solve my laying down problem. We’ll see.
All these posts make me so sad I didn’t make the cut. 😢
The aux button is necessary if your controllers aren’t working, or you need to manually pair them to the device without any other method to go through the menus.
Gonna grab a comment from Hotrian on reddit as a possible solution to paste here. Hopefully it helps! It’s 9 years old, though hopefully it is either still viable or some else will provide a more updated method.
case you don’t read the other comment I made,
The correct solution is probably to just use OpenVR-InputEmulator to just rotate the HMD orientation. Then OP can lay down but face “forwards”, and the tracking system is still properly calibrated. I use this all the time when I’m developing and need to move my controller somewhere I physically cannot. This doesn’t solve the inner ear issue but with a bit of tweaking OP should be able to reposition and reorient his devices so they treat “left” as “down”, or whichever direction he needs them to. The Device Offsets page allows you to redefine device orientation.
Trying to trick the lighthouses (or rather the LH System) on the physical level is a bad idea as there is some pretty complex math going on. Instead I would recommend just redefining how SteamVR interprets the device orientations.
I haven’t tried redefining the down direction, but I offset my devices and rotate around all the time, and I think you should definitely be able to do it with OpenVR-InputEmulator.
Thanks, I saw that. The trouble is that this driver is over 9 years old and we have moved on from OpenVR to OpenXR. On top of that it is a Windows driver.
cyclops optic blast mouse. yes please.
The button on the side is called the Aux button, it’s mentioned in multiple reviews and I think? also on the product page.
Nice to hear that so many games just work!
Guess I totally missed that.
I missed it too, and forgot about it actually. So when I saw your post I was like oh yeah, cool, someone figured it out lol
The HTV vive has this too.
It’s very useful for cleanly exiting SteamVR if your controller batteries run out, if you don’t want to just take the headset off and use your normal peripherals instead (maybe there on the other side of a wall? Shrug.)
I like the pointer button. Helps when I’m seated at my PC and don’t want to fiddle with the controllers.
My first thought went to games like flight sims or sim racing where you use some other peripheral instead of VR controllers, but still want to be able to navigate the VR menus in a pinch.
That button, with the same functionality, was already a thing on both the Index and the Vive. Mildly useful to control the SteamVR panel when playing something with M/KB or a regular controller.
Holy shit, someone made a No One Lives Forever VR mod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrHUTnWPAw8
And he’s working on a Steam Frame version. I really really have to get VR working in bed!
