This week, since Windows 10 Fall Creators Update came out, I was able to upgrade my main development machine. I have been waiting on that for a while as my main dev machine has the NVIDIA 1080Ti GTX.

Now a few weeks back Microsoft announced that SteamVR would be supported on the Mixed Reality devices. But there was little information as to what that looked like exactly. In fact, I had a fellow MVP tell me that “’SteamVR’ was a marketing promise, not a real one”.

Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. After I installed the Fall Creators Update, I opened a couple of native Windows Store apps first. The first one being vTime. It is a VR social area like a few others out there. I setup my avatar and tried out a couple of the cool locations they had. But I didn’t actually try to connect with anyone… I had more things to try out!

I did a couple of other things but then I brought up SteamVR and played the “War Robots VR: The Skirmish” game I downloaded when I first got the headsets to see if it would work. It didn’t work then, but I was able to launch a beta version of SteamVR that actually launched inside of the Mixed Reality Portal.

I transferred from my Cliff House room and I was brought into the SteamVR room. From there, I was able to browse the SteamVR store and my library and then I was able to play that War Robots game. It was a great experience. I really liked how I could move my head and it used that to turn the big mech I was in around.

I then grabbed a few more free titles from SteamVR like Google Earth VR, The Lab, Rec Room, Anyland, Bigscreen, and some more. I actually only tried out Google Earth VR and the Lab. I spent a lot of time playing and enjoy the Lab. I wanted Google Earth VR to work, but it was pretty buggy and I couldn’t get it to actually get past step 5 of 7 in the tour to get started. Assuming I can figure it out, I liked what I saw and would love to be able to see different places in VR.

The Lab was really a great experience. I think some of it is because of my love for Portal and Portal 2, but the actual Slingshot gameplay was really a lot of fun. You can see me playing that part of the game in this week’s video: