As many of you know, I’m a cell-phone addict and general nerd. As a tech lover, I’m fortunate to live close to the Mall of America. The Mall of America has everything a person could ask for. There’s an Apple store, a Microsoft store, a Best Buy, etc. Recently, I went in to the Microsoft store to have my Windows Phone looked at. They gave me an estimated wait time of 30 minutes. After debating whether I should use that time to ride the roller-coaster or log chute, I noticed one employee getting the HTC Vive demo ready in the front of the store. Naturally, all desire to visit the amusement park vanished and my curiosity took over. I jumped in line and in the time it took to fix my phone, had the most amazing tech demo of my life. I swam with sharks and whales, painted in 3D, and shot arrows at warriors attacking my castle gates. I was floored – the HTC Vive works incredibly well!
I left the store, working phone in hand, unable to focus on anything except the VR experience. I had used Google Cardboard before. I have brought it to family get-togethers and let others try it. Cardboard had let me ride rollercoasters, swim with fish, and take 3D pictures of my surroundings, but it was nothing compared to the massively interactive experience of the Vive. I was determined to figure out how to have that experience again. Unfortunately, the Vive, Oculus, and Playstation VR are all massive investments on their own. A well timed VR Heads article popped up in my news feed and set me on the quest to have the most interactive VR experience without spending a significant amount of money. I set out to build myself an inexpensive version of the HTC Vive.
What you need:
As your typical enthusiast, I had a lot of the equipment I needed on hand. All of this equipment is easily accessible if you can get to basically any big-box retailer that has an electronics department. Here’s what you need to replicate my setup:
Hardware – inexpensive VR Headset:
Hardware – inexpensive VR Headset:
- Android Phone – I bought a LeEco S3 to have as a backup device to my Windows Phone. It doesn’t have cutting edge specs, but it definitely gets the job done. I’d recommend a phone with a 1080p screen, and battery life shouldn’t be an issue here since we’ll be plugged in.
- Comfortable Google Cardboard viewer – If you want to interact in any way with your VR games that involves anything beyond simply looking around, get one that straps to your head. I also recommend one that has a good padding for your face since the weight of your phone will rest on your cheekbones.
- 10’ USB cable that will go from your computer to your phone – make sure the plugs are right
- A capable PC
- 10’ USB extension cable
- Leap Motion Controller
- 3M command mounting tabs – I recommend some Velcro and some sticky, but you can use both exclusively if you want
- RiftCat – the host on your PC and the client (named VR Ridge) on your phone
- Steam – You can use Oculus with this VR headset, but the Vive software is what sets this build apart
- Leap Motion core software: Orion for Windows
- Experiences – we’ll get to that further along
- OpenVR Driver for Leap Motion – Software to emulate Vive Controllers - useful if you want to try actual Steam games
- Surround sound headphones with a 10ish’ cable
TL:DR
In case you feel you don’t need a full write-up or if you like to have all the steps before you start, here’s what we’ll be doing. We’re going to make sure our phone works with Google Cardboard, install RiftCat, Steam, and Orion for Windows on our computers, install VR Ridge on our phones, mount the Leap Motion to our headset, set up our headsets in Steam, and experience interactive VR!
The Setup
Okay – that’s a lot of stuff. Before we put everything together, let’s make sure it all works. First, test your phone and your VR headset. Use a VR roller-coaster or 3D Youtube video. We aren't going to be installing anything external for head-tracking, so make sure you can look around with the headset. If either the 3D viewing or the headset motion tracking doesn't work, you’ll need a different phone. The LeEco has treated me great and you can frequently find it on sale if you’re going to buy a phone for this project.
Once we have Google Cardboard working, we want to make sure we have RiftCat’s software working. Install RiftCat on your PC and VR Ridge on your phone. You can demo the software for free. This allows you to make sure the connection works and test out its capabilities without having to buy it. It’s time limited in the free version, so if this works and you’re going to spend any length of time in VR, you’ll have to buy the software. Once both are installed, connect your phone to your computer with the USB cable you’ll be using for the headset experience – this way we are sure it will work once we are done putting everything together. I purchased two 10’ braided cables so I could have room to move. Once your phone is connected, start VR Ridge on your phone. It should tell you the name of your phone and that it’s waiting for the desktop app. Finally, with your phone still connected to your PC, find the USB tethering toggle under Personal hotspot and turn that on.
Now, head over to your desktop and start the RiftCat software. It will ask how you would like to connect. You’re going to pick the automatic connection. It will then give you a list of available devices. The name of your phone shown on the VR Ridge app should be there and you’ll be ready to use your phone as a VR viewer for your computer. Your phone, if placed inside a Cardboard viewer, essentially an Oculus Rift headset at this point.
Once we have RiftCat set up and working, we’ll want to download Steam, Steam VR, and some VR experiences. Head on over to SteamPowered.com and using the Install Steam button at the top, install Steam on your PC if you haven’t already. You will need a Steam account, so go ahead and log in or set one up. Once you're done with your Steam install, head back over to RiftCat in order to start the SteamVR extension of Steam if it's not already there. With your headset connected, push the button to Play SteamVR games. This will bring up the installer for SteamVR in Steam. Install and restart and you should be all set!
Setting up the physical headset should be a piece of cake once you've made sure everything is working. In the pictures below I tried to show you the two tricks to your happiness. First, use your double stick 3M command tab to attach the USB extension to the back of the headset (or somewhere similar). Make sure that cable is attached so it's not pulling on the leap that's mounted to the front. And on the front, mount the leap toward the bottom, and if you can, angle it a little down. That's the direction your hands will be 90% of the time, so the more field of view you can capture there, the better. Otherwise everything else clips, plugs, and straps into place as the directions (and common sense) should show you.
Before we go any further, we have to set up our room. There's a great tool in Steam to do this called SteamVR Room Setup. This is a pretty well guided setup. One thing I do want to point out is that a floor height of 55 or 60 inches is a sweet spot for most of the experiences I've done. If you find yourself not able to reach things below or above you, adjust the height accordingly. If you find that your center is off, you can fix that with this tool as well. I highly recommend running this before each experience you try.
And if you notice something is not acting right, I recommend rebooting Steam first. 9 times out of 10 that has solved the issue. Once in a rare while it's an issue with the app running on the phone, so clearing that from recents and reopening it up will solve a buggy app.
Now time to have some fun!
The experiences that show off the capabilities of your new FrankenVive best can be found on the Leap Motion website. Here you will find an array of experiences. We’ll hit on the three I consider the best examples of what your new headset and hand tracker can do! First, we need to download these programs and put them into our Steam library. To do this, head over to the Leap Motion developer gallery. We’re going to download Blocks, Weightless, and Pinch Draw. After you’ve downloaded the programs, unzip the folders. Once you’ve done that, open up the Steam client. At the top, click the, Games, dropdown and click on, “Add a non-steam game to my library…” That will bring up a new window that will list of all your installed applications. On the bottom of that window, there is a browse button. Click that and find your newly downloaded and unzipped games. This will allow us to launch each experience from Steam.
The first experience I recommend trying out is Pinch Draw. It’s an exceedingly simple idea that’s summed up in the title. If you pinch, you draw. It’s a great way to understand the hand tracking and motion, both what it allows you to do and what you can’t do. Since you are stuck on a pivot, you will find that you quickly fill up your canvas. This makes the experience quick, but pretty effective in getting you used to your new environment.
The second experience should be Blocks. If you’re looking at this list and saying, “Matt, I don’t have time to try all three of these experiences,” make sure the one you try is Blocks. In my experience, it’s the best done experience in the gallery. The premise is simple, but this time you have a guru showing you the way. When it’s all said-and-done, it’s an incredible 10 minute experience playing with blocks in VR with a guide to teach you the controls and show you some surprises along the way. Again, with this one you are stuck on a pivot, but the room is totally open and you will have a lot of fun playing with blocks and your new VR buddy.
The last experience is an example of how, without room tracking, you can explore an entire room. Weightless starts with you waking up in a space capsule and you get instructions and challenges as time goes on and you complete certain tasks. This is the experience that feels most like a game and lets the player explore more than the other two. I like the move commands. Eventually it feels natural and you can control your movements well with a little practice. It also has the best environment and is much more open ended compared to the other two. If you want an experience that’s much more like a puzzle game and allows you to explore, this is the experience you’re looking for.
And how is it?
Visually? It’s great! I’m using a 5.5’ 1080p screen and I feel completely immersed. The cardboard viewer does a great job and my screen is fine. Using this as a simple VR headset for your computer a la Oculus headset is a great option. If you’re going to sit at your computer and game, it’s totally on. Grab a controller and let it rip.
If you've already tried this setup, you have no doubt noticed that what we’ve done is by no means a perfect replacement for the HTC Vive experience. We already touched on this a bit, but your limited to what you can reach in games. Since we’re not using any room mapping or head tracking, we don’t have anything but the rotational tracking that’s built into the phone. Also, since it uses the same motion tracking that Google Cardboard uses, you can be subject to a fair amount of ‘drift,’ which just means your room slowly rotates orientation. To reset, simply run the room setup tool in Steam again. It’s worth the 30 seconds each time you get off.
The interactive part of this headset is where it can’t compare. The hand tracking is cool and surprisingly accurate, but it lacks the precision and stability that the Vive controllers can provide. The Leap Motion tracker has a limited field of view. I noticed this first while I was trying out a bow-and-arrow game. If I drew the bow behind the motion controller, it’d drop the arrow. This is a result of having a single POV tracking hands that’s mounted to your headset.
It's getting better, too!
Some improvements take a lot of work installing. You can use LEDs to track your head with your webcam. You can use your Kinect sensor to track your body position. Both solutions have mixed reviews at best. Razer offers wired controllers that work, but have the limits of wires and will double the cost of your setup, depending on what phone you’re using. One solution that I’m most interested in is the NOLO VR tracking system. It has Vive-like controllers, a desktop sensor and a head mounted sensor. They claim the entire package will cost $100 USD and will provide room and body position tracking. This should be a great alternative to the Leap Motion Sensor and provide, theoretically, a much closer experience to the Vive than the Leap. With the technologies coming out, if you don't already own a Leap motion tracker, I don't know that I would invest in one quite yet. It's a passable answer, but due to its limitations, I would save the money to invest in other upcoming pieces of hardware.
And there you (hopefully) have it: a working interactive VR headset and experiences. If you want to try SteamVR games specific to the Vive, the optional piece of software I listed above will do some controller emulation. It's far from perfect, but still lets you do some things. Worst case scenario, you can now play controller-based VR games using RiftCat and Steam or Oculus software. Best case, you have a few fun experiences that you can play with as the technology grows and makes cheaper options and add-ons available to you, or until you’ve finally saved enough money for the full experience. Thanks for reading, and here's a bonus video of my mom playing Blocks!
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