Two 'exclusive' Oculus Rift games are now running on the HTC Vive
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The project, called "Revive," is the work of two coders who accomplished this by building a compatibility layer that takes the Oculus Rift's runtime and translates those functions into OpenVR calls.
While what's happening under the hood is very technical, the process of getting the games to run takes four steps, each of which is detailed in a user-friendly way on the Github page.
In the video game industry, exclusive games are typically a company's greatest leverage over their competition, but in a Reddit thread from last December, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey indicated exclusivity wasn't his primary concern.
"If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want," he wrote. "As I have said a million times (and counter to the current cir******k), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware."
If that's still the case, then the creators of Revive may not get into any trouble. It also gives people canceling their Oculus preorders over shipping delays another reason to pick up the currently in-stock Vive.
Vive owners have already posted YouTube videos showing off the performance of Lucky's Tale, a Super Mario like game featuring a fox. It seems to run well enough, and if more games get patched through Revive, the battle for VR supremacy may end up being more about hardware than software.