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In a disappointing piece of news, it appears that the popular Microsoft-owned social VR platform AltspaceVR has dropped support for the Valve Index virtual reality headset (which is, of course, the one I currently use at home). All mention of the Valve Index has been removed from the documentation on its website:
A year ago, the Road to VR tech website reported that the Valve Index was the second most-used VR headset on Steam, and even as recently as last June, demand for the product has remained strong. So it is a bit of a puzzle as to why AltspaceVR would decide to stop supporting the still-popular Valve Index.
One person on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server reports:
It worked a year ago, but now when I try to start up the app using the Index, the login screen is skewed and distorted and appears on the bottom right of my field-of-view. Totally unusable now. So no more AltspaceVR for me.
Another noted, “It’s not even on the website anymore, I wonder why they keep it as supported on Steam, it confuses users.”
There has been some speculation that, with the recent announcement that Microsoft is working with Meta to integrate Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, Microsoft might be preparing to shutter AltspaceVR. I do find this a little hard to believe, since it is still a popular social VR platform, supporting dozens of meetups and events. I guess we’ll see.
UPDATE Oct. 13th, 2022: BenG tells me:
Just saw the new blog post, the Valve Index was never listed as a supported headset anywhere except for the Steam page and that was only because it was automatically added to all SteamVR games when the Index launched. I’ve been asking for Index support ever since I got mine in 2019, but I was always ignored. So they didn’t drop support for it, they never supported it in the first place. It somewhat worked, but the controllers were seen as Vive wands, so it wasn’t great. I had a much better experience using Revive to get into AltspaceVR, since the Index controllers match up with the Oculus controllers.
Thanks for the clarification, Ben!
Thank you to passTheKetchup and CGVR on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server for the heads-up on this news!
