SteamVR instant Screenshots Oculus Quest

Standard way of Taking Screenshots

Playing Half-Life: Alyx made me want to take screenshots while playing, and to be honest: it is a shame to see that Oculus has defined a simple way to take a quick screenshot in VR games.

Note: other HMD’s (VR headset, or Head Mounted Display) may suffer from the issue – depending on the pre-assigned functions to controller buttons.

Standard Screenshot in Steam: Useless in VR with an Oculus Quest

Steam DOES has a shortcut to take screenshots, namely the F12 button.
(and of course the previously mentioned menu+trigger button, which does not work with the Oculus Quest).

The quality of the screenshots are really good, arguably better than the screenshot function of the Oculus Quest.
However … in VR we do not see the keyboard of our PC, so this becomes quite unusable while playing a VR game.
You’ll have take off your HMD, find the freakin’ F12 key, and … oh wait, our “position” is completely different now … crap.

The quality of the picture is excellent though.
In my tests, running my laptop screen at 1080p, the resulting PNG was 1920×1080 – a higher resolution screen settings will most likely result in even better pictures.

Note: you may have to enable “Save uncompressed” in the Steam settings to get PNGs (Steam Settings In-Game check “Uncompressed“)

Standard Screenshot with Oculus Quest: useless as well …

I play my VR games with the Oculus Quest – truly a nice and affordable HMD and playing wireless with ALVR is just the best experience ever.

To take a screenshot, one has to press the Trigger on the left controller, keep it pressed, and then press the Oculus button on the right controller.
A screen pops up, where you then have to select “Take Screenshot”, return to the game, wait a few seconds (hold!!!) until the red light in the upper right corner stops blinking, and you’re done. Yikes!

This of course works, but it is far from practical, try this when playing Beat Saber!

A better way of taking Screenshots in SteamVR

After being seriously annoyed by this for a while now, I started thinking about ways to get an easier way to take screenshots to show off my accomplishments in Half-Life: Alyx.

The options I thought about included a huge button (probably wouldn’t find it while in VR) and even using voice control (extra resources needed and she’d probably not listen anyway). But let’s be honest: none of that would be ideal.

Why not use one of the buttons on our controllers? Why not just trigger F12 straight from your controller?

Binding the Steam Screenshot Key to a VR Controller Button

In the standard SteamVR settings, I was unable to find a proper option to set this.
I did however have OpenVR-AdvancedSettings installed (related to an Audio issue I had with the Quest) and remembered there something being available to change the controller bindings.

Step 1: Install OpenVR-AdvancedSettings on your PC

Close Steam and SteamVR before you begin!

Install OpenVR-AdvancedSettings – it’s free! Kudo’s to Ykeara for developing and maintaining this excellent tool!

A detailed description can be found on the OpenVR-AdvancedSettings Github page, but it is pretty straight forward: Download the OpenVR-AdvancedSettings installer and run it.

Windows may bark at you, since the executable is not signed, just click “Run Anyway“.

On that note: signing executables is in general a good idea. However, to me it feels like yet another way to take money from people. If we really think of security as our main goal, then the needed certificates should be much cheaper, so we can all help in making the world a safer place. As a Freeware developer I can say: I simply cannot afford a couple hundred dollars every year, to sign my freeware applications. So I’m not signing mine either.

Note: from the instructions I read, I can see that this is also available for Linux (not macOS), but I have not tested this.

Step 2: Remap the F12 button to something OpenVR-AdvancedSettings can handle (F9)

OpenVR-AdvancedSettings is a very cool addon for your SteamVR, but it has one small issue for our screenshot purpose:
We want to bind the F12 button to our controller, but OpenVR-AdvancedSettings only supports the keys F1 – F9.

For more information: see the OpenVR-Advancedsettings Keyboard-input specifications where it states:

Only F1 through F9 is supported.
This is because there is no way to tell if F12 is meant to be F1+, F1-, 2+, 2- or F12+, F12-.

There is a relatively easy work around for that though, by simply changing the assigned screenshot button.
In my case I picked F9, being totally unaware of any potential conflicts with other games.

Open Steam, and open the “Steam” menu () where you select the “Settings” option ().

A window for the settings will now open up, where we select the “In-Game” options ().

In the section indicated below () we can change the “Screenshot shortcut keys“. Click the button to clear the field, and press the button you’d like to use (F9).

Steam – Remap the button for screenshots

In this same section, while you’re at it, you may also want to change these settings:

•   HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Set the default screenshot directory!
  Simply click “SCREENSHOT FOLDER” and browse to a suitable directory – I used a Dropbox directory for this so I can access it on from anywhere,
• Recommended: Make sure you get audio feedback when taking a screenshot (you’ll hear it in you VR HMD as well) by checking “Play a sound“.
• Optional: Make sure it saves an uncompressed PNG as well by checking “Save an uncompressed copy“,

Click the OK button when you’re done.

Step 3: Define Keyboard Shortcut in OpenVR-AdvancedSettings INI file

OpenVR-AdvancedSettings by default defines 3 identical keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+SHIFT+M = Discord Mute Microphone):

We’d like to change one of them for our screenshot purpose, and for this we need to edit the OpenVR-AdvancedSettings INI file which can be found here:

In Windows you’ll find it in this directory:  %APPDATA%\AdvancedSettings-Team  (you can copy and paste this path straight into Explorer or the Run command)

Note: In Linux this should be ~/.config/AdvancedSettings-Team/.

The file is called “OpenVRAdvancedSettings.ini“.

In this file, you can open the file with Notepad for example, you’ll find a section that looks like this:

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2
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[keyboardShortcuts]

keyboardOne=^>m

keyboardTwo=^>m

keyboardThree=^>m

Now change the “keyboardThree=” line to keyboardThree=F9, so that it will look like this:

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[keyboardShortcuts]

keyboardOne=^>m

keyboardTwo=^>m

keyboardThree=F9

You can now save and close the file.

Step 4: Map the F9 to a button on your VR Controller

Now here you’d want to be careful, and pay attention if you’re right-handed or left-handed, and check your VR controllers, if you’ve not using an Oculus Quest.

Before we can do these steps: Start your VR system and get into a SteamVR game or the SteamVR home.
So SteamVR is running and your HMD (headset) is showing SteamVR content.

To get to the OpenVR-AdvancedSettings menu, we first need to open the SteamVR Settings (in VR!).

On the Oculus Quest this is done by pressing the MENU Button () briefly – it is on the LEFT controller.

Oculus Touch Controllers

Now the SteamVR menu should popup (in VR), showing something like the screenshot below.

Select the indicated button in the lower left corner to open OpenVR-AdvancedSettings.

SteamVR Menu – Open OpenVR-AdvancedSettings

In the next step, we need to go to the “Bindings” of OpenVR-AdvancedSettings.

OpenVR Advancedsetting – Bindings needed for Screenshots

On my screen, with the version I was using anyway, I did briefly see a screen flashing by where it seemed like you could select an application. But before I could select anything (tried it 4 times, all with the same result) OpenVR-AdvancedSettings jumped to this screen where we have to select the “Misc” tab.

The other options, Motion, Music and System, will not allow you to bind a keyboard shortcut.

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Misc Tab

 In this next step, we have to select the LEFT Joystick (if you plan to use the Joystick on the left controller, like I did):

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Left Joystick

 In the Joystick section we will now (unless you already have something defined here), we will now be ask what you’d like to do, and here we choose “BUTTON“.

OpenVR Advancedsetting – Left Joystick BUTTON for Screenshots

 Since the button only shows us the 2 basic options (Click or Touch), we will need to click “More options“, to reveal the “Long” (long press) option.

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Left Joystick Button – More Options

Now we can define what happens when we do a long press on the joystick. We wouldn’t want to take screenshot constantly by accident of course, but you’re totally free in selecting another option. Click on the “NONE” block next to “Long“.

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Using Long Press for Screenshots

 Now we can select our keyboard shortcut, called “Keyboard Shortcut Three“.

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Keyboard Shortcut Three is our Screenshot key

 Now we are pretty much done, just don’t forget to save your settings:

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Save Settings

OpenVR AdvancedSetting – Save Settings Details

And that’s it …

Just a reminder: SteamVR or your VR game needs to be the active window on your PC – otherwise this won’t work.
The window is by default active, unless you’ve been clicking on stuff on your PC in between starting and playing a game.

How to use the new Screenshot Feature?

It’s pretty simple: anywhere in the game, or in SteamVR for that matter, press and hold the joystick on the left controller.
You’ll see a tiny Steam animation and you’ll hear an audio feedback that the screenshot has been created, you can release the joystick now, as shown in the short video below.

Make sure the SteamVR window is the front most / active window on your PC, which is default the case, unless you started clicking around.

After that you’ll find your screenshot in your screenshot folder – you did change the default setting to a directory of your own, right ?

Comparing Results

Now, one thing to keep in mind is the difference in screenshot when comparing a SteamVR screenshot and a native Oculus Quest screenshot.

The Oculus Quest will take the screenshot of what is being displayed in your HMD, where as SteamVR seems to take a screenshot of what is being displayed on your computer monitor. Here an example, where I tried to take the same screenshot of Chompski (the garden gnome, seen in Half Life and other Valve games).

 A few notes:

• SteamVR seems to be using your screen resolution.
  My laptop display was set to 1920×1080, so I assume that if your screen has a higher resolution, your screenshot will as well.
• The resulting PNG in SteamVR is probably related to enabling “uncompressed pictures” for screenshots in Steam settings.
• To retrieve an Oculus Quest screenshot: See this description at Oculus.
  Short version: Connect you Quest to your PC with a USB cable, and it will appear in explorer like a regular camera would.
  Unless you have your Quest in Developer Mode (required for ALVR), in that case I use SideQuest to find the screenshots in the “Oculus” directory.
• Where the Quest image seems better when it comes to what you see, the SteamVR screenshot will be of a higher quality and easier to retrieve on your PC.
• The SteamVR option obviously only works for SteamVR Games and not for native Oculus Quest games.

Oculus Quest Result

This screenshot was taken using the Left Trigger and Oculus button method on the Oculus Quest.

Format: JPEG
Resolution:  1,440 x 1,440 (the image here has been proportionally scaled down to accommodate the website)

Oculus Quest – Chompski Screenshot

SteamVR  Result

The following screenshot was done with the SteamVR screenshot functionality:

Format: PNG
Resolution: 1,920 x 1,080 (the image here has also been proportionally scaled down)

SteamVR – Chompski Screenshot