LIV News

We’ve got some major feature updates cooking for you with Quest-on-PC and Segmentive Keying!



You can use your Quest wirelessly with your PC! Your PC can take care of all the recording and streaming, while you get to enjoy cord-free gameplay. We’ve worked hard on making it as simple as possible to setup, but if you need help, check out our walkthrough on Zendesk!

Once you boot up LIV, all you need to do is click on the Quest-on-PC Launch button from the main menu!





We’ve taken it a step further too: whether you’re using Quest-on-PC or normal PCVR, you no longer need a green screen! Just flip the Segmentive Keying toggle, and our machine learning technology will cut out your background and keep you in the shot! Find Segmentive Keying in the "edit camera" menu on the LIV PCVR app, and in the keying section if you're using Quest-on-PC.



Learn more -- read our blog post on how we can do automatic background removal with Segmentive Keying!

Of course, a green screen and quality lighting will always produce the cleanest results, but here are some quick tips to make Segmentive Keying look 99% as good:

1. Make sure your room is evenly lit with lots of light!

2. Have as plain of a background as possible, a clean mono-colored wall looks best!

3. Segmentive Keying does additional CPU strain, you’ll need a more modern CPU for smooth
video in mixed reality.

We really want to boost your videos, whether you make it with Segmentive Keying, Quest-on-PC, or the traditional LIV PCVR setup. Please share anything you make with us on our Discord or Twitter!

We're trying to push for overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam - so, if you love LIV, we'd love your valuable reviewbles!

It seems we broke Kinect support in our recent update. Here's a small patch to get that sorted out 😅
Also, Steam updated their library format and LIV wasn't quite ready for it. No more crash on load for new PC installs & library-havers!


Fixed:

• LIV's Kinect input is now correctly processed and de-backgrounded.
  
• Updated LIV's support for Steam libraries.
  

Love LIV? We'd love your valuable reviewbles! 👛💚

Just over a month ago, we released Quest-on-PC support to public beta; after a couple rounds of polishing, we're happy to bring Quest-on-PC to everyone!

This means, you can now use LIV to capture content with your Oculus Quest games, and you'll no longer need a super powerful PC!
(Note: only certain games with Oculus MRC support can be captured. View our list here.)

Want your content to be shared on the official LIV accounts or showcased on our Steam page and website? Post your videos in our Discord or ping us on Twitter!

To be clear, Quest-on-PC is still in beta and doesn't have all the functionality of our PCVR tools. We have a lot of big plans for future updates, so stay tuned!

New:

• Quest-on-PC Beta is now available for EVERYONE on the main Steam branch!
  
• Performance update for webcam users with weaker CPUs
  
• Games with LIV's SDK are kept updated automatically, so you get the best possible performance while playing
  

Fixed:

• Quest-on-PC: Build-ups of latency resulting in HMD lag and latency drift should no longer happen
  
• Quest-on-PC: You can now open the calibration app to skip directly to calibration
  
• Quest-on-PC: Various crashes and weird behaviours
  

More info:

• Jump into our Discord then check out #quest-general and #quest-support!
  
• Official Quest-on-PC help page and support

We're trying to push for overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam - so, if you love LIV, we'd love your valuable reviewbles!

Avatars are a core part of the LIV experience. Who wouldn’t want to dance around as your favorite superhero, video game character, or waifu? Today, we wanted to solve one of the hardest parts of using avatars: getting one.

There are plenty of free resources you can use to get avatars, but sometimes those avatars don’t animate properly, or you’ve seen everyone else using them.

Starting now, in collaboration with personal avatar provider Wolf3D, you can make your own avatar at https://liv.tv/create-avatar, completely free!

Customize your avatar's hair, clothing, eye color, and more. Just want a VR doppelganger? Upload a selfie and we’ll generate an avatar using your real life face.

ReadyPlayerMe avatars can be imported directly into LIV, complete with eye animation, lip movement, and finger tracking! No need to download dozens of different avatars anymore to see what works properly.

More clothing and styling options are coming too, so be sure to let us know what you want!

Get yourself started now at https://liv.tv/create-avatar and share your avatar with us on Twitter or Discord!

Since LIV’s v1 update, we have been testing “StreamerKit”, a utility to make running a stream in VR possible. With LIV v2, that’s now stable and available for everyone!

You can bring your chat, sub/follow alerts, donations, channel points & even hype train events all into VR. A dedicated message log window follows your head around so your chat’s always close by - and while you’re in the action we’ve got heads-up notifications to keep you up-to-date with what your audience is up to!

It’s highly customisable and takes up minimal extra resources from your already overburdened system 😉

Right now we have Twitch fully supported, with YouTube coming in an update and other streaming platforms as we go! Here’s a quick rundown of everything StreamerKit offers:

• Twitch support! (Chat, Raids & Hosts, Subscriptions, Cheers, Channel Rewards, Hype Trains)
  
• Donation events from Streamlabs and StreamElements!
  
• Full emote support, including BetterTTV & FrankerFaceZ.
  
• Fully customisable heads-up alerts with prioritisation, mute, position, and duration adjustments!
  
• In-VR historical event log with filters - wanna see only donations?
  
• Fully-customizable chat window - adjustable colours, viewer count, a clock, message timestamps, ignore users and more!
  

To get connected with your audience, grab LIV from Steam and hit “Launch StreamerKit”. Login with Twitch and you’re off!


[h2]Avatars, from a new perspective[/h2]

When using LIV’s avatars, you can now have another camera angle.
It renders with a transparent background, so it’s easy to overlay a front view of your stylish moves directly on your gameplay!

To get started, go into LIV’s camera or in-VR avatar settings and enable it - you can customise the resolution and a new window will appear for capturing with something like OBS. Don’t forget to enable transparency in OBS’s Game Capture.

That’s not all though - did you know LIV has a gamepad-controllable camera? We’ve also got a programmatic camera API that allows you to script and customise LIV’s avatar cameras.

If you know a bit of Unity and C#, our template project is available over in our Discord community’s #how-to-camera-plugins channel!


[h2]We run on borrowed cycles...[/h2]

When you’re playing a VR game normally, your entire PC is dedicated to running that VR game. When you bring LIV into that mix, your PC now has to do 3 things all at once - run your game, handle your camera, and render LIV!

To that end, we have been doggedly optimising our compositor and SDK to be thrifty with your PC’s vespene gas. We have completely rebuilt our compositing backend to handle this delicate situation while causing minimal interference with your gameplay.

We now have greatly reduced VRAM hogging by min-maxing our buffer sizes, and we’re recycling every resource possible to remove hiccups and stutters!
The result of all this levelling is that LIV’s output is silky smooth - and synchronised tightly with your camera. As long as your PC can render the content, LIV can composite it 💪


[h2]ハロー ワールド！[/h2]

Along with everything else in the v2 update we’ve added support for different languages! You can pick one from LIV’s “About” menu. The list of languages we support isn’t final, so let us know if you’d like to see your language added!

Starting with App v2, we’ve got:

• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Spanish
  
• French
  
• Russian
  
• Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)
  

[h3]And that's a wrap![/h3]

Wanna chat? Join our Discord, we'll see you there 😊