VRidge+ GameWarp a Unique and affordable means to play with VR – Impressions & Review

Lets face it, most modern tech whether its a VR headset, the newest and greatest consoles, computer parts. All come with a heft of a price if you are on a budget. Even the price of gas is getting up there, you feel the sting. Why should some entertainment be as pricey if you truly enjoy gaming? Specially if you are interesting in the idea of augmented reality. Sure there are some ok VR things out there, but what about having the full experience like with the Valve Index? Or a Oculus Quest 2 to slap some stuff around in Beat Saber.

The geniuses at Riftcat placed together some pretty impressive software with the means to emulate the process of which powerful tech like HTC vive or Oculus Rift could mostly do. The price of a combo meal at a Pizza place is how much it would cost to tether your phone to your PC and play various games. The only items you mostly need is a decent PC. A mobile phone, and a cardboard, or decently build headset to put your phone in to be able to view the spender in action. At first this seemed to good to be true. While some little downsides do pop up, it really overall is a solid experience. GameWarp, which is built into the software (costs about $25USD) offers a interesting experience to the package. Which surprised me.

I was able to project about just about everything to my phone, this included retro games from my Retroarch software, mostly all of my newer PC titles, my older games, with a few having resolution problems. As well as watching Netflix through them, pretending I was in a theater. As long as I have a keyboard and a mouse, with some light tinkering, it all works pretty darn well. The light tinkering came down to getting used to the experience and as I do not personally own the usual remotes that the usual devices requires, I was able to use a gamepad like the Xbox One’s controller pretty well. I tried out a few others with some moderate success like the 8bitdo SN30+, having the software grab it to. There seems to be all rainbows and sunshine in my words, but with wireless connectivity as you would guess, a weird hiccup in any of your usual wifi connection does cause artifacting. If you tether your phone directly to your PC, the software would detect it, with some light issues. Or if your PC does not use USB-C (like me) then be sure you own at least a few USB 3.0 ports to counter that. As this software is beefy. I sport a older video card or GPU to you tech bros with a NVIDIA 1070.

It is required for PC at least you do have Steam installed. This is the backbone for the software along with the aforementioned items above. Included with the software you can toggle a nice spread of features around. visual adjustment, as well as toggling down the frames or FPS to down to 60, to allow your PC to breathe of course. Stream settings can also be tweaked to suit your bandwidths strength so you get the clearest connection possible.

This all came pretty useful with this software for me, as I use at times a unstable connection during weather hiccups. Like heavy rain, snow, even a wind storm. Fios is a sensitive lady! What I discovered with the software is the fact I could be across the room nearest to the router and have the best connection. As this would be common sense, but also if you need leg room you can be ether at your desk full time, or find a nice spot to expand your legs and do some goofy stuff with your legs dodging demons or ghosts or whatever is your fancy. The major positives to this is if you happen to have a 3D VR theater house and watch movies with your headphones to PC. Adds to the experience. All again for the cost of maybe a cellphone plan, which most people have by now. Or a Android device that can be mounted to a custom VR headset. The option to use actual VR sets is also a option, but mostly this article of course is the factor of value, and you can not afford the said devices, right?! Nice little features like tapping the screen a few times allowed me at least to peak in front of me to make sure I was not knocking over a lamp or any thing like that. You know a lot of the usual suspect features of VR equipment in this.

“VRidge is a technology that gives mobile VR headsets a capability to run PC VR games. It consists of two parts – a desktop application and mobile application. When they are both connected, the computer starts to recognize the phone as an HTC Vive headset.

The communication between applications happens through USB cable or WiFi connection. VRidge sends the image from the computer to the phone as a high quality video stream with the lowest possible latency. The phone sends back the head rotation data to enable head movement for the user.

The final result is that the user’s phone paired with simple Google Cardboard (or any other mobile VR headset) acts as a fully fledged PC VR headset – supporting 3D stereoscopic view and head movements.

The software supports a wide range of games since it is compatible with OpenVR standard. All games that do not rely heavily on hand controllers will be perfectly playable. Several notable games that can be played through VRidge are: Minecraft (with ViveCraft mod) Subnautica Elite Dangerous War Thunder Project Cars Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Euro Truck Simulator 2 And many more…”

The plus and negatives to this software is common and the negatives are not as bad as you would assume. Given the respectable tweak of the software and experimentation. Unless you got very trashy internet. Yes it can artifact, it has happen to me while using it, but I just had to move a little bit, or tap my phone screen in the rare chance to fix the issue. So with the cons, you can fix it with a simple tap. Or the option like aforementioned to hook it directly to the PC directly, limiting some movement. This was a great thing for me. I was able to actually experience VR, and not break the bank. Others think $149USD is nothing, to me, that is bills. Yes, the price of VR is going down slightly. This is also from older models. So many factors come into play here, for now. I can safely say this software is top notch. It works, it makes on its promises. You can tweak and use it practically with all models of VR headset if you happen to have a older one hanging from the rafters somewhere. From my understanding most models of Android work great with this software. I can not confirm if any apple products work with it via testing for stability. As I do not own that sorta tech.

Grab it here! They offer a 10 minute test. To see if it is for you or not. As well as if your PC/connection can handle it. https://riftcat.com/vridge