What do people use OVR Toolkit for?

[Zar]

I'm using a quest 2 and I'm thinking of getting this but I'm not sure what it really does.. A friend of mine uses it to see the battery percentages and to place desktop windows in their vr play space but I feel like my quest 2 can already do this or am I missing the point?

What do most people use this toolkit for?

[CurtisVL]

Hi there!

As you're using Quest you have Oculus Dash and this does help drastically. People using Index, Pimax, Vive, etc. don't have access to those features and the built-in desktop viewer in SteamVR is very lacking even with the new changes.

The main advantages in terms of desktop usage over Oculus Dash would be that you can attach windows to controllers or Vive Trackers, have windows fade in/out when you looking directly at them or away, change the capture frame rate of windows to improve performance, along with a bunch of other customising for how desktops and individual windows are displayed around you.

The main advantages in terms of battery usage displaying is that you can see it all on your wrist easily, unless you're on an Oculus device as these don't provide battery info to SteamVR! This exists because on Vive/Index/Whatever that isn't Oculus it's actually pretty difficult to view battery info of devices, this makes it easily visible whilst giving you low battery warnings too and estimated time remaining when you get very low.

For me personally, here's my main use case:
- Replying to Discord messages. (OVR Toolkit has a good built-in keyboard, 1000x better than SteamVR's one)
- Changing songs on Spotify.
- Using the media quick-controls on the wrist overlay to pause/play/skip songs.
- Monitoring time and battery life.

[Zar]

Thanks for the reply!

[ISuxGaming]

Just to toss in here, I actually use OVR Toolkit for Viewing of Chat when Im streaming VR games. I love it and use it everytime.

[Sonuchi]

Originally posted by ISuXGaming:

Just to toss in here, I actually use OVR Toolkit for Viewing of Chat when Im streaming VR games. I love it and use it everytime.

Does this work in every game? Even the ones that don't necessarily use the VR controllers? For example, I'm trying to use this for streaming American Truck Simulator's Beta VR, but I can't get the windows to show up while in game. I can get it to show up in SteamVR and it all shows, but it disappears once I run ATS. I'm going to test other non native VR games like racing games and so forth...

[CurtisVL]

Originally posted by Sonuchi:

Originally posted by ISuXGaming:

Just to toss in here, I actually use OVR Toolkit for Viewing of Chat when Im streaming VR games. I love it and use it everytime.

Does this work in every game? Even the ones that don't necessarily use the VR controllers? For example, I'm trying to use this for streaming American Truck Simulator's Beta VR, but I can't get the windows to show up while in game. I can get it to show up in SteamVR and it all shows, but it disappears once I run ATS. I'm going to test other non native VR games like racing games and so forth...

Hi there!

Yeah, it'll appear in all games running through SteamVR. :)

In the case of ATS, you need to specify running through OpenVR instead of Oculus Runtime.
(Run the game with -openvr instead of -oculus)
https://ovrtoolkit.co.uk/docs/#/Oculus?id=american-truck-simulator

On none-Oculus headsets OVR Toolkit appears in all games without needing to use specific parameters as Oculus is the only headset to not use OpenVR natively.
(SteamVR communicates with Oculus Runtime instead of directly with the headset like on other headsets, games can run through the headset directly instead of using SteamVR so OVR Toolkit isn't visible when that happens)

[Sonuchi]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Originally posted by Sonuchi:

Does this work in every game? Even the ones that don't necessarily use the VR controllers? For example, I'm trying to use this for streaming American Truck Simulator's Beta VR, but I can't get the windows to show up while in game. I can get it to show up in SteamVR and it all shows, but it disappears once I run ATS. I'm going to test other non native VR games like racing games and so forth...

Hi there!

Yeah, it'll appear in all games running through SteamVR. :)

In the case of ATS, you need to specify running through OpenVR instead of Oculus Runtime.
(Run the game with -openvr instead of -oculus)
https://ovrtoolkit.co.uk/docs/#/Oculus?id=american-truck-simulator

On none-Oculus headsets OVR Toolkit appears in all games without needing to use specific parameters as Oculus is the only headset to not use OpenVR natively.
(SteamVR communicates with Oculus Runtime instead of directly with the headset like on other headsets, games can run through the headset directly instead of using SteamVR so OVR Toolkit isn't visible when that happens) [/
Good to know! I'll give this a try. I feel this might not work with Oculus Quest 2? I've tried various VR tools to see chat and they all do the same thing: display in SteamVR and other games such as Project Wingman, but nothing in Elite: Dangerous, Project Cars and so forth....