SteamVR 1.17 lets you pin windows to your controllers, adds field of view & world scale sliders, and fixes more than a dozen bugs.
This update is the culmination of months of beta releases – the previous stable version shipped back in February.
Docking individual windows was already possible with 3rd party extensions like OVR Toolkit and OVRdrop, but now it’s an official built in feature of the SteamVR Dashboard. Simply click the ‘Add View’ button on the left of the tray, select a window, and use the docking buttons on the right of the tray.
A new Field of View setting lets you trade off immersion for visual fidelity. By making the rendered area smaller, the angular resolution will be higher at no performance cost.
A new Override World Scale setting adjusts the perceived scale of the virtual world. This could be useful for VR ports & mods which don’t get scale quite right, or help with accessibility.
Both of these sliders are set per-application. Valve notes that changing them may sometimes require restarting the application.
As well as these new features, the changelog lists more than a dozen bugfixes, including Dashboard issues, OpenXR, and a crash when using room view with Vive Wireless Adapter.
Facebook’s Oculus Rift platform hasn’t seen a feature update in almost two years as the company shifts its focus to standalone VR. In the meantime, Valve continues to work on SteamVR, refining the interface and adding practical features PC VR users want.
