Some months ago, HTC announced “Viveport Streaming”, a solution to wirelessly stream PC VR games to Vive Wave standalone headsets. Today, this solution gets finally launched, giving all Vive Focus Plus owners the possibility to play PC VR games via Wi-Fi.

Viveport Streaming

“Viveport Streaming” lets you play Viveport PC VR games on your standalone headset compatible with Vive Wave. The idea is conceptually similar to the one of the Oculus Link, that is letting the owner of a standalone headset enjoy its library of PC VR game, with the difference that it operates via Wi-Fi. Oculus has gone the safest road, using a wired connection that can offer more reliability and more throughput, while HTC is going all-in trying to offer the best option possible, that is playing PC VR games without the hassle of the wire. The problem is that wireless connections may be slow and unreliable, so this solution has to be tested to verify its effectiveness. I remember Mr.President Alvin Wang Graylin saying on Twitter that someone has been able to play Beat Saber at the Expert+ difficulty using Viveport Streaming… but I want to try it myself. Be sure that I will do that very soon! 😉

The interface to let your standalone device connect to your PC (Image by HTC Vive)

To work, both the PC and the standalone headset must be connected to the same 5 Ghz Wi-fi network. The PC must be VR-ready and so feature an NVIDIA (GTX 1070 or higher) or AMD (RX480 or higher) GPU. The standalone headset must be updated to its latest runtime. Currently, it must be a Vive Focus Plus, but more Wave headsets will be compatible in the future. The solution is currently in beta and is available only to Viveport Infinity subscribers.

What I appreciate of Viveport Streaming is that its UX is very handy: to activate it, you just have just to:

Connect the PC and the mobile headset (Vive Focus Plus) to the same Wi-fi network (a 5Ghz Wi-fi is advised);

Make Viveport recognize your Vive Focus Plus;

Wear your Vive Focus Plus, and inside the main UI of the headset, choose the “PC Stream” tab;

Select the game you want and start playing.

The third part means that inside the UI of Viveport on your Focus Plus, you directly see the games installed on your PC (in a separate tab) and you can launch them as if they are games installed on your headset. That’s super handy since it doesn’t require you to do anything on your PC, after you have made it recognize your Focus.

At a first sight, this seems the standard UI of the menu of the Vive Focus Plus. And in fact it is… but if you read the titles of the games, you can see that they are actually PC VR ones. On the right, you can see that the user has selected the “On My PC” tab, and so he is able to select PC VR games and play them on the Focus Plus (Image by HTC Vive)

For sure HTC is doing that also to increment the content available for the Vive Focus Plus, that in China is sold as a consumer headset (while it is an enterprise one in the West). There are 300 pieces of content on Viveport M, and thanks to this addition, the users will be able to play also more than 2000 titles available on Viveport PC. HTC states that users will be able also to play “thousands more [pieces of content] on other content platforms”, and this makes me think that it will also be possible to launch SteamVR games that gets launched through Viveport. That would be awesome for all Vive Focus Plus owners.

A last note: the solution is currently available only for home users, and will be distributed to enterprise ones later on.

If you have a Vive Focus Plus, be sure to check out the Viveport Streaming feature just launched today! And stay tuned for my hands-on that will happen very soon 😉

(Header image by HTC Vive)

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