Unofficial plug-in brings Oculus exclusives to the HTC Vive

Exclusive Oculus titles are making their way to Valve and HTC's rival Vive headset thanks to an unofficial plug-in. 

As it stands, Oculus users can access the Vive's SteamVR software hub, but Vive owner’s can’t access the Rift’s Oculus Home content hub.  

The exact reasons why are unclear, although Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told redditors that "we can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so," suggesting HTC and Valve may be blocking the move.

With the powers that be engaged in a perpetual tug of war, LibreVR’s Revive plug-in has emerged as an unofficial alternative for Vive owners looking to access Oculus software. 

Available through Github, Revive "works by re-implementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls."

Revive currently only supports two games, the Rift exclusive platformer Lucky’s Tale, and Oculus Dreamdeck, and requires players to use an Xbox controller.

According to LibreVR’s notes, Vive owners looking to play both titles must patch them first to bypass Oculus’ code signing check. 

"The Revive DLLs already contain the necessary hooking code to work around the code signing check in any application. However you will still need to patch the application to actually load the Revive DLLs,” explains LibreVR. 

It should be noted that working around Oculus' code signing checks is likely a violation of the Oculus Home end user license agreement. 

When asked about Revive by Ars Technica, an Oculus representative indicated the company hadn't decided if, or how, it would respond.