Valve’s just lately introduced Steam Body is promising a novel twist on VR headsets. On prime of being a Quest 3-style standalone headset that may each stream video games from a robust PC and run much less demanding video games by itself internals, the latter received’t be restricted to VR titles – by utilizing SteamOS as its working system, the Body can regionally run any Steam recreation in your library, offered it will probably carry out on the {hardware}.
That’s all high-quality, particularly in the way it bypasses basic VR points like the necessity for base stations or an costly desktop. However the smartest factor in VR proper now shouldn’t be the Steam Body. It isn’t even {hardware}. It’s a mod. Enter Praydog’s UEVR, or Common Unreal Engine VR: a mod that’s quietly turned lots of (doubtlessly 1000’s) of Unreal Engine video games into playable, room-scale VR experiences since its launch.
The Body’s skill to regionally run your Steam library – enabled by SteamOS, the identical working system because the Steam Deck – could be new, however in the end it’s nonetheless about working flat video games in a 2D theatre view, and that’s one thing that Valve’s personal SteamVR platform has been doing for years. UEVR really adjustments the video games, not simply the display you’re utilizing to show them.
This free, open-source device injects VR assist into Unreal Engine video games (at present these on UE variations between 4.8 and 5.4) by hooking into Unreal’s personal, built-in stereo rendering pipeline. It permits for true stereoscopic 3D rendering utilizing Unreal’s native VR path, in addition to 6DOF head monitoring, so the in-game digicam is definitely your head, and strikes as you go searching. The result’s that acquainted flat-screen scenes achieve actual bodily presence, letting you peer, lean, and occupy the sport world fairly than merely watch it. For a lot of of those video games, UEVR additionally gives assist for movement controllers, which remaps in-game actions for VR enter.
So, as an alternative of projecting a flat body onto a digital cinema show, UEVR mainly rewires the sport to suppose and behave prefer it’s all the time been a VR title – simply as long as the sport is made in Unreal Engine. To grasp why that is such an enormous deal, it’s important to have a look at how the video games are performed utilizing theatre mode vs UEVR.
The Outer Worlds is a very good instance of how UEVR works. In a 2D theatre mode, the sport is simply one other sci-fi RPG enjoying on an enormous digital rectangle. Positive, it seems good, and the dimensions of the planets pops a bit extra, however each cutscene and digicam transfer remains to be staged for a TV or a PC monitor. You possibly can’t lean across the nook or a hall to test whether or not a marauder is hiding; you are locked to regardless of the builders framed.
All of that adjustments when you hearth the sport up via UEVR, as a result of your headset place drives the in-game digicam, so you may bodily lean over railings to stare down at stuff, or duck behind crates whilst you line up a shot. It actually begins feeling such as you’re there within the thick of it, blasting raiders and sneaking via area stations.
None of that is doable with out some meticulous engine tinkering. Beneath the hood, UEVR allows native stereo the place doable whereas counting on Unreal’s personal VR view path of every eye, and falls again to different strategies, like synchronized sequential rendering, if the engine objects and native stereo misbehaves. It additionally rebinds the digicam and inputs, so your headset and controller successfully change into the “participant” from the engine’s perspective.
The dimensions of what UEVR’s builders (and comparatively hands-on group) managed to tug off and unlock is actually onerous to overstate, particularly since 1000’s of titles working on Unreal Engine have been examined with the mod to some extent; here is only one, partial listing of appropriate video games that is hit 667 on the time of writing. Of the video games I’ve performed, The Outer Worlds undoubtedly ranks among the many most profitable, shockingly natural-feeling implementations, with the open hub areas gaining a specific allure when exploring them in 3D VR. Strolling via a dusty frontier settlement and turning your neck to learn a neon signal immediately feels much less like transferring a digicam and extra like area tourism.
Borderlands 3 is one other nice instance. On a monitor or in theatre mode, its capturing and visuals are already loud and busy. However with a headset, it’s full sensory overload, with loot dropping at your ft, bullets hailing round your head, and NPCs barrelling into your private area. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice swaps the chaos creeping dread however is not any much less involving in VR, particularly while you’re creeping round dungeons by torchlight and in search of environmental cues to match the runes you are seeing. Oh, and the whispers that nag at Senua within the flat model? They orbit your head when enjoying in UEVR. It’s much more uncomfortably intimate, and an terrible lot scarier.
Then there’s Useless by Daylight, which, in equity, already will get fairly intense when performed on a monitor. It is much more so in VR, although, as you may hear the killer’s footsteps getting nearer and see their shadow stretching throughout the bottom in entrance of you. Not your character – you. I discovered myself instinctively shrinking down, having to remind myself it was only a recreation.
As difficult because it appears for UEVR to do its factor with flat video games, some new releases can get assist with surprisingly fast turnarounds. Oblivion Remastered, for example, obtained VR up and working inside hours of its (principally) shock launch. In different phrases, it’s not only a again catalogue of older video games that will in any other case by no means obtain an official VR port being retrofitted. Newer stuff is increasing the vary of appropriate video games on a regular basis.
On the person’s finish, UEVR can also be surprisingly straightforward to arrange, and there isn’t any scarcity of how-to guides floating round YouTube when you get caught. There are some drawbacks: you do want a powerful PC, because you’re mainly asking the sport to render twice (as soon as for every eye) on prime of the sport’s normal {hardware} calls for. Nonetheless, the mod works with any OpenVR- or OpenXR-compatible headset, from the Valve Index and Meta Quest household to the HP Reverb and Pimax sequence. It should, likely, work with the Steam Body as nicely, when it’s streaming from a desktop in PCVR mode.
Clearly, the Body and the UEVR aren’t really rivals. If something, they’re allies, as they clear up completely different halves of the identical downside: the Body seeks to maneuver VR {hardware} additional away from shackling base stations and high-end PCs, whereas UEVR handles content material shortage by merely VR-ifying present Unreal video games.
However whereas the {hardware} will come and go, VR will all the time want video games, and UEVR is proving itself a really intelligent engine hack that’s serving to present extra causes than ever to place a headset on.
