How to Add Steam VR to your Oculus Library
Even though I was initially shocked at the price of the Oculus Rift, I caved in and bought one. I’m a sucker for VR I guess! After picking up the Touch controllers for the Oculus Rift, I have been extremely happy with my purchase. I chose to get the Rift over the Vive because the Touch controllers seemed like an upgrade over the Vive wands and the headset itself is lighter and more convenient with its built-in headphones. I know the room-scale tracking is slightly more accurate on Vive, but the list of features that I was looking for nudged me toward getting the Rift headset instead. The final factor that swayed me was the ability to play games from both the Oculus and Steam store without having to use any sort of workarounds, such as “Re-Vive”.
The only thing that was annoying me though was the fact that I had to take my headset off to launch games from Steam VR. When you first put the headset on, it automatically loads up the Oculus Rift home interface. You can launch any games and apps that you downloaded from the Oculus store, but you couldn’t see any software that you acquired from Steam. In order to launch Steam apps, you had to remove your headset and launch the software from your desktop monitor. Quitting the game you were playing would send you back to the Oculus home storefront, forcing you to take your headset back off every time you wanted to play something from your Steam library. This was very inconvenient for me, so I decided to look into fixing this.
This fix is actually pretty simple and safe to do. Just download a game or app from the Oculus store, replace the game executable with a custom one that launches Steam VR, replace the icon images with some “Steam VR” logos, and you are done! Now when put your headset on, you will see a nice “Steam VR” option from within Oculus Home. Select it and Steam VR will boot up, allowing you to conveniently access your Steam library without having to remove your headset. If this is something that you would like to try yourself, I attached a zip file with some images and an executable shortcut that will launch Steam VR. Just follow the steps below.
This will replace “The Rose and I” with “Steam VR” in your Oculus library:
1. Download this zip file
2. Go to Oculus store, download and install “The Rose and I”
3. Navigate to the following directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software\Software\penrose-the-rose-and-i
4. Rename existing “RoseAndI.exe” file to “RoseAndI_backup.exe” located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software\Software\penrose-the-rose-and-i
5. Copy RoseAndI.exe file from the zip file in step 1 and place it in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software\Software\penrose-the-rose-and-i
6. Copy images from this zip file in step 1 and replace existing images in C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software\Software\StoreAssets\penrose-the-rose-and-i_assets
Once you complete all of those steps, you should now be see a new “Steam VR” option from within Oculus Home!
p.s. If you would rather not download the zip file above, you can make your own Steam VR .exe file by making a .bat file with the text: start steam://rungameid/250820 and creating the .exe using a “.bat to .exe” tool. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments below!
