Using SteamVR Controllers with the Varjo XR-4

The Varjo XR-4 brings its own controllers, but Varjo disabled their support when third-party tracking drivers such as LPVR-CAD and LPVR-DUO are in use. While this will likely be fixed in a future version of Varjo Bse, customers upgrading from the XR-3 might have workflows that already incorporate the Vive Controllers or other SteamVR controllers. These will continue to work with the SteamVR edition of the XR-4 but what about other versions of the headset?

It turns out that there is a way to use the SteamVR controllers without a SteamVR headset: if you have the Vive Tracker (original version or the Vive Tracker 2018), it comes with a SteamVR dongle. This is a small device that looks like a USB stick. A Vive Controller can be paired with the dongle just like it would with a headset, and it will work with LPVR-CAD just the same.

But what if you don’t have this dongle, or you only have one but you want to use two controllers or support multiple users, each with their own controller? While HTC’s original dongle can be hard to come by nowadays, there’s a third-party alternative in the SteamVR Dongle by Tundra Labs which you can find behind the link.

With the hardware in place, there is one additional configuration that you may have to make before being able to use the controllers. This will require editing the SteamVR configuration steamvr.vrsettings. It is usually stored in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\config\steamvr.vrsettings for SteamVR installed via Steam or in the config subfolder of your standalone SteamVR installation. In this file, look around for the "steamvr" object and add the "activateMultipleDrivers": true setting to it. If the setting already exists, make sure it is set to true. The relevant part of the file will end up looking something like this:

...
   },
   "steamvr" : {
      "activateMultipleDrivers" : true,
      "allowAsyncReprojection" : false,
      "allowInterleavedReprojection" : false,
...

Restarting SteamVR with this setting in place and your controller paired with your SteamVR dongle, the SteamVR window should now look something like this:

There are lots of icons: one for the XR-4, two greyed out Varjo controllers, two LPVR icons and an icon for the Vive controller. On the SteamVR side everything works at this point. You can then follow our usual documentation to continue your setup.