On the 18th of April 2016 Valve did something amazing: they released OpenVR driver source code for the old Sixsense Razer Hydra motion-tracked controllers. Wow. Wow. Why the Wows? Because if you own an Oculus Rift and a Razer Hydra – you can now play virtually any VIVE VR title on SteamVR ! The Razer Hydra controllers (shown below) have buttons that actually map quite naturally to the VIVE controllers that you don’t miss out on any functionality.
In one respect this is even better then Oculus Touch – because you immediately have access to a large catalog of games on SteamVR (and navigating SteamVR itself) using motion controllers.
I know many early Oculus Rift backers, developers and enthusiasts bought up the Razer Hydra’s when they were on sale (like myself) so if that is you – now is the time to dust them off and plug them back in.
If you aren’t lucky enough to have one, you may find one on ebay or craigslist.
Valve have released the source code at OpenVR Driver for Razer Hydra using Sixense SDK which requires compilation with Visual Studio. To make it easier for everyone, user betavr has a compiled version available.
Within Steam install the SteamVR tool.
Within Steam, install the”Sixense SDK for the Razer Hydra” tool.
Now download the latest Razer Hydra compiled driver from https://github.com/betavr/steamvr_driver_hydra/releases.
(I downloaded steamvr_hydra_driver_v1.0.1.2.zip) then unzip it and run the installer.
Now, plug-in your Razer Hydra and it should flash green and you are ready!
Next, locate the floor, using the headset again, measure the distance to the floor.
Note: The wizard seems to get the direction reversed with the Razer Hydra – but I’ll show you how to correct that in a later step.
Note: The cable length of the Razer Hydra controllers are just long enough to measure the smallest space permitted. So make sure you walk as far as you can with the cable fully stretched out.
Now put on your Oculus Rift and pick up the Razer Hydra motion controllers.
Now look at your controllers. If they are not aligned correctly, hold them up at shoulder height (one on each side of your face) and press the center button (tall skinny) on both controllers to reset the calibration.
Then have lots of fun blowing up balloons and then blowing up balloons.
Did you manage to get the teleportation working in Aperture Robot Repair?
I don’t have enough space / range to reach the charging dock and it seems odd that Valve didn’t implement it in this demo.
great tutorial, have you found a way to throw sticks for the robot dog, or knifes in Budget cuts.
everything else is working very well thanks again.
The latest version of the driver has ‘IMU emulation’ (button 1 on both wands to enable) and ‘angular velocity support’ (button 2 on both wands to enable). It doesn’t work with all games and can cause jitter.
Cool as it is, when they say “room scale VR” I hear “you need to tidy your room before you play video games” you’re not my real dad, HTC.
I’ve had limited luck with this, unfortunately. I was able to get to the point where SteamVR saw the Hydra controllers and was clearly detecting them, but when defining the room scale space in SteamVR setup the Hydra controllers were operating in some weird, inconsistent radial coodinate system that was relative to the position of the Hydra base station, and it was impossible to define a recognizable room shape. Tried several times and never got any better results. Did you run into this problem?
It worked well for me. Maybe you have interference?
Installed everything, but SteamVR is not seeing my razer controllers. Grr. Oculus Touch will probably be better anyway, seeing as the drivers aint working for me.
What color are the icons for the controllers in SteamVR – gray?
Hi Peter, thanks for your great guide! I just got some Hydras, and everything is working well thus far. Unfortunately, I just can’t get a big enough area in room scale! Where are you placing your Hydra base station – underneath your monitor? In the middle of your play area?
I have the base station setup just to the right of my monitor, and the cable was just big enough to reach around to make the minimum space!
This is amazing i just happend to get my cousins old dk2 since he got the vive. And i have the hydra.
Im having some trouble tho I cant seem to be able to get my controllers to be connected. When i try to pair them on steamVR i get the message “your headset must be connected prperly in oder to pair new controller” any ideas?
I got it set up ok but I was trying to play poolvr and it was a very poor experience, I suppose because of having only one camera setup the hydras kept needing calibrated, it was altogether a very jittery experience which I hope will be rectified when the touch controllers come out (I really hope so as I love pool) , anyway I then tried the budget cuts demo and I was stuck in the floor (this also happened with poolvr but I was able to sort this by repeatedly pressing the down arrow on my keyboard until I arrived at the right height) but this refused to work on the budget cuts demo?
I had a similar issue on Lightblade VR. In that case, I right-clicked on the executable in steamapps and used Windows 7 Compatibility mode.
Hi there – I am wondering if anyone can help… everything was working flawless (enough so that I purchased several vive games to play). Not sure what has happened however when I plug in my Hydra Windows installed drivers for it and Steamvr no longer will load up the hydra’s? I have uninstalled the betavr drivers and reinstalled, made sure that multicontrollers are true, etc… please help!
How frustrating.Did you try switching to a different USB port? That will reload the drivers.
didn’t realise i could just pause and un-pause the game to get rid of that screen thought i had to end the program to get rid of it so that doesn’t matter so much. just the mouse movement and onscreen keyboard thing. have you tried that waltz of the wizard game that’s kind of awesome.
ok sorry not sure where to talk about these issues that pausing unpausing thing only seems to work with waltz of the wizard not with the lab. I have to exit out of the lab not been able to get past the little balloon part of the archery game before it happens yet.
In standing/seating mode one of my ingame hydra controllers is flipped(its pointing backwards) do you know how to fix this?
In the roomscale calibration part i’m unable to locate the floor, the client says that it’s tracking the headset and controllers but when i put them on the floor and start the calibration nothing happens.
I hope that someone here can help me with these issues.