HTC Vive Setup Procedure

By Kevin Carbotte
published

Set Up SteamVR Home Space

It’s time to put the headset on and pick up the motion controllers. The only thing left to do is personalize your SteamVR Home space.

SteamVR Home is Valve’s latest version of the SteamVR landing page. It allows you to customize your environment with photorealistic recreations of real places, or you can choose from a selection of 3D Home spaces. SteamVR Home also allows you to decorate your space with 3D objects, some of which you can unlock by playing VR games.

Your SteamVR Home space is where you’ll spend your time between games and experiences, so make it a place you enjoy visiting. Better yet, make it a place you want to show off. SteamVR Home is a social space that you can open up to friends or the public so you can socialize in virtual reality.

Welcome to the virtual universe.


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Kevin Carbotte

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • gergguy
    It's a strange time to have a setup guide for the HTC Vive. After the huge discount of the Rift/Touch bundle (here in the states at least), there should be a large amount of people setting up their new Oculus Rifts right about now. I'm not a fan boy or anything, I'm just sayin'.
    Reply
  • Dustin_45
    Do not buy! Mine broke after 7 months, and I've hand a horrible experience thus far with their support team. I have proof of p7rchase, yet in one example of their terrible support process, they want 48 hours to "verify the security of my account". I've spoken with so called supervisors and it just gets worse. It took a week of numerous hours following up to finally be able to send it in. I've spoken with a handful of ppl that have had similar experiences, and heard of many more. The content doesn't warrant a $700 purchase, that's another major issue. Lastly, it's a serious pain to setup, even though it should be very simple. Save yourself the headache and do not buy!!!!!
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    When playing in room scale VR, the actual space we get is very small compared to the in game space. How do we get to walk continuously in the game and not hit the obstacles in real world(assuming the minimum is just 5X6.5)?? Can somebody point to a video that explains this? Thanks.
    Reply
  • computerguy72
    Dustin_45... The vive is great and has been getting much better via drivers and accessories. Bizarre highly uncommon experience you have relayed. Mine still works perfectly. Between supersampling and better drivers the quality is a lot better too. Vinay2070 - Lots of locomotion techniques in games they vary. However one that is typical is where you point to a spot in VR with the controller and teleport to it. Lots of other methods as well.
    Reply
  • Davil
    Don't know why this article is necessary, the setup guide is pretty simple. Had mine since the release and it's still working great.
    Reply
  • DbD2
    Lol, that's a silly guide in that the only people that have a custom room just to put a vive in are professionals and they know perfectly well how to set it up.
    The actual setup of the vive is more along the lines of:
    1) decide you fancy a play on the vive.
    2) pick a room in the house you think you can get the most floor space in (lounge, dining room, etc)
    3) drag all the furniture out of the room or into the corners at least.
    4) get the base stations, try to work out where you can put them that doesn't involve drilling holes in walls as this is just a temp setup.
    5) get out your duct tape and try to tape the base stations to something in the corners of the room.
    6) Realise this isn't going to work well, swear at HTC for not giving the vive base stations sensible bases for anything but a permanent install.
    7) Find some planks of wood, screw base stations into wood, duct tape larger and easier to work with planks of wood to something. Wonder why HTC couldn't have provided this in the first place being as the vive cost big $$$.
    8) Unplug your whole desktop, drag the whole lot downstairs, plug it in.
    9) Wonder how you will get the vive to work as your graphics card has one HDMI output and both the vive and the TV want to use it.
    10) Fiddle around will silly converter cables until eventually you get them both talking at once.
    11) Turn on vive.
    12) Go through setup procedure.
    13) Finish it, realise you've done it the wrong way around so the cable is always infront of you tripping you up not behind. Redo the setup again.
    14) Get a quick play, then see the kids, their friends and their friends friends all wanting a go.
    15) Realise the room is nothing like clear enough for kids swinging their arms around. Take all the breakables off the walls.
    16) Spend several hours giving everyone a go - taking on/off headsets, fighting with the extra cable's caused by having to have separate headphones, and the vive software which needs restarted fairly regularly between games.
    17) Collapse somewhat uncomfortably onto whatever chair's you have left to sit on (the rest being stacked out the way somewhere).
    18) Play for a day.
    19) Realise you've got to return the room to use-able again or wife will kill you, so take the whole lot apart, take the pc back upstairs plug it all in again, put all the furniture and breakables back.
    20) Put vive away having been reminded of the pain having the thing out is to people with a normal house that doesn't come with a "VR room".
    Reply
  • pegnose
    Man, what r u complaining?

    @5: you can use virtually any tripod, telescope stick, and whatnot
    @6: if they get moved, your tracking quality goes down - same with Oculus from some point
    @8: I am living in a single room apartment and have no issues whatsoever ;)
    @9: MiniDP cable for the connector box? also, there actually are graphics cards with 2 HDMI connectors (mostly from ASUS) - also same with the Rift
    @13: shoot, another 5 minutes; what a waste of life time for getting room scale tracking
    @14: oh, you have kids. your decision, I guess.
    @15: see above
    @16: must be something wrong with your PC, software is just robust
    @17: yawn
    @19: I really pity you; al the trouble and no fun. Sucks to be you.
    @20: yeah, people with a house really have a hard time ;)
    Reply