The Tribune

AFTER delaying orders because of component shortages and angering wannabe early adopters, virtual reality (VR) company Oculus is confronting another headache as it seeks to technologically and culturally establish the immersive medium.

It is now possible to play titles that were intended to only be used with the new Oculus Rift system on an entirely different VR headset.

Less than four weeks after the launch of the $600 system, cunning amateur coders figured out how to unlock the cartoony platforming game “Lucky’s Tale” and VR vignette collection “Oculus Dreamdeck” for the HTC Vive, an $800 competing VR system released last month by smartphone maker HTC and gaming company Valve, which operates online marketplace Steam.

And in recent weeks, additional “only on Oculus” content has been cracked.

HTC and Valve, whose online hub is headset agnostic, means content purchased from Steam can be used for the Vive or Rift. However, titles from the Oculus Home online store are meant to only work with the Rift system, although neither Oculus nor HTC restrict developers from selling content elsewhere.

It’s another blow to Oculus, the Facebook-backed VR pioneer that has struggled to fulfil the promise of high-fidelity VR in consumers’ homes and faced questions over its privacy policies. While most VR developers are designing for as many systems as possible, several are initially releasing titles for either the Rift or Vive, which currently have different control schemes.

Sony will enter the marketplace in October with the comparable PlayStation VR system, costing $400 and which will only work in tandem with a PlayStation 4 console. It will also arrive with many more exclusive titles, including the robot battle game “RIGS: Mechanized Combat League” and a VR rendition of “Star Wars: Battlefront”.