Vive Setup Guide
This is a guide for setting up the HTC Vive's hardware and software to integrate with SteamVR. By the end of the guide, you should have a working development environment on either Windows or Linux as testable by the testing step.
For complete Quick Start guide on actual Vive development, see OpenVR Quick Start after completing this hardware/software setup guide.
According to SteamVR software and the pre-installation guide, the base stations need to be mounted with the following guidelines:
- Not more than 16 feet apart
- Above 6.5 feet off the ground
- Need to face each other somewhat
- Pointed 30-45 degrees towards the floor
This base station is mounted to a block of wood and only stands about 5 ft. above the floor. It has been working for testing purposes, but starts having issues when someone stands in between the two lighthouses and blocks "optical sync" communication between the two.
Note: each base station needs power and that the power cords are not very long.
Power the link box and plug the USB and the HDMI into the computer.
- Update/Install proper game-ready Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's download page.
On Windows, this is the best way to get up-to-date drivers for Nvidia graphics cards. Select the correct card and version of windows from the dropdown menus and install the graphics driver.
If your machine has two graphics cards, such as an Intel integrated graphics card for normal operations and a Nvidia high-performace card for rendering games/VR, the "Preferred graphics processor" may need to be changed in a Start Menu application called "Nvidia control panel" as explained in the first section of the VR Troubleshooting guide.
Install proper Nvidia development graphics driver and other required packages
sudo apt purge nvidia*
sudo add-repository ppa:graphics-drivers
sudo apt update
# The "<num>" represents the number of the most recent Nvidia driver.
# At the time of this being written, the nvidia-384-dev package was installed.
sudo apt install nvidia-<num>-dev
# Install the other required packgages in aptitude
sudo apt install libudev-dev libvulkan-dev libsdl2-dev libglfw3-dev
# Navigate to your development folder and clone OpenVR
git clone https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr.git
# (Optional) Clone the OpenVR Tracking Example Repository to
# test out the installation (or to use the tracking capabilities)
git clone https://github.com/osudrl/OpenVR-Tracking-Example.git
Next, Steam needs to be installed.
Goto the SteamVR installation step.
SteamVR is only availible as a tool downloadable in the Steam desktop client.
Steam Login Prompt:
Go to Library and switch listing from games to VR:
SteamVR should be an option under Tools:
SteamVR running after pressing Play. Base stations and controllers are disconnected:
This is what SteamVR should look like when functioning properly with everything connected:
Clone the tracking example repo and follow the instructions on the project's README file.
If there are any problems or OpenVR error messages, particularly with development and installation on Linux, see the troubleshooting guide.
For the next step in actual Vive development, see OpenVR Quick Start after completing this hardware/software setup guide.