SteamVR Play Area Size Stats

[PersonGuy]

A unique requirement of room-scale VR is the physical space necessary to interact with the virtual space. Early developers have asked us what Play Space sizes to target and support, but we've hesitated to make recommendations based on speculative research and surveys. Now we have SteamVR data to share from the first 2 months of Rift and Vive usage!

If you're new to VR, here's the basics for how a Place Space is defined. It's a rectangular area that players keep clear from floor to ceiling and developers keep their required interactive objects within. Room-scale VR requires a minimum of 2 x 1.5 meters, but VR applications may specify a larger minimum required size. Some VR content is designed to scale based on the Play Area size, effectively giving the best experience to players with a large Play Area while still supporting a smaller minimum size. SteamVR also supports Standing-Only VR which is simply defined as a 1 meter diameter circle.

First let's look at the most common specific Play Area sizes used in SteamVR (all units are meters):
18.5% - 1 x 1 (Standing Only)
14.1% - 2.5 x 2
12.4% - 2 x 2
8.0% - 2.5 x 2.5
7.3% - 2 x 1.5
7.0% - 3 x 2.5
6.5% - 2.5 x 1.5

As implied by 18.5% using Standing Only, there are 81.5% using a Play Area 2 x 1.5 meters or larger. And since a larger Play Area supports any smaller Play Area that fits within it, we find it's more helpful to visualize percentage supported at each size in 2 dimensions:

	1.5	2	2.5	3	3.5	4
2	81%	65%				
2.5	62%	52%	28%			
3	33%	30%	20%	9%		
3.5	14%	13%	10%	6%	2%	
4	5%	5%	4%	3%	1%	0.4%

Here you can see that the most popular Play Area size (2.5 x 2) is used by 52%. We've also compared this graph from April to May and see no notable percentage changes.

In conclusion, an 81% majority of Play Areas used in SteamVR meet the minimum room-scale size and more than half of all Play Areas support 2.5 x 2 meters. 1 in 5 support 3 x 2.5 meters, but increasing in either dimension leaves only 1 in 10 or less.

Numbers updated Feb 27th here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/358720/discussions/0/350532536103514259/?ctp=2#c133258092253222557

[BOLL]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! :D

It would be interesting to see how large portion of those 18.5% are Rift/other headset users which I presume are defaulted to standing. Unless they use Hydras or the Motion Leap for hands, can users do the room-scale setup with those?

[dipth]

Maybe I'm not reading the table right, but wouldn't the most popular size be the minimum of 2x1.5 with 81% ?

[BOLL]

@dipth: 81% of people can run anything requiring 2x1.5 m but only 7.3% of users actually have that size as their play space, see the first group of values :)

[sakea]

On the bright side, my 3.5 x 3 play-area is apparently gigantic. On the downside, I'm probably not going to get many games that utilize it.

(Also Valve could you add one's own playspace size info to some place where it can be checked after the room setup?)

[dipth]

Originally posted by BOLL:

@dipth: 81% of people can run anything requiring 2x1.5 m but only 7.3% of users actually have that size as their play space, see the first group of values :)

Ah yes I see, but I think that makes the results a bit misleading, as not everyone will be using sizes divisable by 0.5, I for instance have a play area of 2x1.7 which isn't mentioned specifically.

Either way, I certainly don't hope that game developers will start using these stats to reason not supporting the minimum play area size.

[sayre85]

Originally posted by sakea:

On the bright side, my 3.5 x 3 play-area is apparently gigantic. On the downside, I'm probably not going to get many games that utilize it.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I've got 2.9 x 3.9 and I love it. Very rarely have to deal with Chaperone popping up unless I'm really trying to test the boundaries. But the only game I've found that really makes use of all of it is Chair in a Room: Greenwater. And if I position things just right in Pool Nation, I can walk all the way around the table without having to teleport.

[Gerald]

Very helpful. Thank you!

What I would like to know is how often do people override the requirements (I know I did) and maybe how many deactivate the chaperone with a small play size.
I would even care for an info on what the most common chaperone settings are.

[RogueQD]

Originally posted by dipth:

Ah yes I see, but I think that makes the results a bit misleading, as not everyone will be using sizes divisable by 0.5, I for instance have a play area of 2x1.7 which isn't mentioned specifically.

True, mine is 2.9x2.4 I also have extra space along two walls that makes the chaperone area 3.4x2.9 across the middle. But technically I fit in to the 2.5x2.0 play space category.

[Ragnar Drake]

This also shows that requiring a square area can cut your audience in half compared to taking 0.5m off one side requirement. Makes sense since rooms and their contents are rarely symmetrical.

[hyperion]

Also interested to know if this is Vive-only or including Rift users on SteamVR?

[FolkSong]

Originally posted by dipth:

Ah yes I see, but I think that makes the results a bit misleading, as not everyone will be using sizes divisable by 0.5, I for instance have a play area of 2x1.7 which isn't mentioned specifically.

I'm sure they are rounding or truncating to the nearest 0.5 so that every user is included, otherwise the data would be useless.

[AtlasShrugged]

Where do you see your own play area stats?

[jdt3969]

I wonder how skewed this data is. There are currently ~100,000 Vives that are in customers hands. All of these are very early adopters and I'm guessing they would dedicate more space than the average person. Also VR is currently novel and that may also skew results early on. I hope Valve continues to make this data regularly available.

[fury]

Originally posted by BigScreen hyperion:

Also interested to know if this is Vive-only or including Rift users on SteamVR?

It literally says Rift and Vive in the first paragraph.

[AllCatsAreBeautiful]

Could you release the data for all playarea sizes? I'm specifically interested in knowing how many people have a playarea that's much longer in one dimension than the other (e.g. 1.5m x 4m)

I guess there's probably a way of figuring it out from the table, but I can't figure out how