Play Oculus Rift and HTC Vive games on your Samsung Gear VR with new VRidge for Gear VR

photo by VR Bits

​

You can now play Oculus Rift and HTC Vive games and apps on your Samsung Gear VR, with “perfect” head tracking.

VRidge is a software that allows you to use a Google Cardboard headset to emulate the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.  Naturally, because Cardboard relies only on your phone’s sensors, the tracking is nowhere near as good as the Rift or Vive (separate from the fact that there’s no positional tracking whatsoever). 

Now, VRidge has been updated to add native support for the Samsung Gear VR (reviewed here).  With the Gear VR’s better sensors, you can get better head tracking than with Google Cardboard.

To use VRidge, you need to install VRidge for Samsung Gear VR using Sideload VR.  You’ll also need the RiftCat software for your PC.  Please note that, you will need a gaming PC to run RiftCat.   The minimum card is an NVidia GeForce GTX 650 or greater with NVENC support or  AMD Radeon 7750 or greater with VCE 1.0+ support.  The recommended specs are the same as for a VR-Ready PC.

Note also that because VRidge uses Wi-Fi to connect with the Gear VR, there is substantial lag.  Hopefully they will add support for the new Gear VR which has a USB OTG port.