Mellott's VRDK2 + Razer Hydra with SteamVR
July 30th 2016
Just tried using the Razer Hydra for hand controllers in SteamVR with my DK2. Pretty cool! Really impressed by Value and their willingness to support non-Vive hardware. The experience is definitely the poor-mans HTC-Vive setup.
It would be better if you could get the Razer Hydra’s cheap! I see some people trying to sell them for $250 to $500 on eBay. I remember when they were on fire-sale at the local Frys Electronics for $99. Too bad people are trying to gouge now. If you could get a DK2 for $300 and Razer Hydra for $99, that would be a pretty cool setup with hand controllers for the price of an OSVR HMD. If the entire setup was closer to $500, not so sure it would be worth it. So if you can find the Razer Hydra cheap enough, you can get a taste of a HTC-Vive like setup.
The hydra tends to drift so it isn’t anywhere near as good as the Vive controllers but if you’re on a shoe string budget then it’s a step in the right direction. You very often have to re-zero the hydras. But the over all experience is quite fun. And with SteamVR support you have a massive (400 games now, I’ve read) game library to choose from.
The hydra is quite fun to play with Half-Life VR, which I’ve written about previously here. The Half-Life VR with Razer Hydra was my first experience of what would become the HTC-Vive setup. It was very impressive but just slightly annoying enough to not catch on. The potential was there for sure. Check it out if you get a chance!!
