How do you use two HTC Vive headsets in the same scene (Virtual Reality)

I'm attempting to create a cooperative game where two players are engaging in VR tasks simultaneously. I have two first generation HTC Vive headsets I'd like to use, but I don't understand how to have them render separately in Unity. I attempted to set their displays differently and change the depth, but they still fall under the same control input as one another (moving one controller is mirrored to the second player).

How would I go about solving this problem? Any and all help is appreciated.

 

Two computers and networking, probably. SteamVR doesn't really have much in the way of handling multiple headsets, so the limit is more on that end (also rendering for 2 headsets would be tough for one PC). They can use the same sensors, though.

 

Plus, I have to wonder how much GPU power you'd need from a single computer to pull that off. VR rendering is already an expensive enough process.

 

Not actually as bad as you might think, depending on the pc -- if a game will render fine on a 980 or 1070, you could probably run it twice on a dual 1080ti or 2080/2080ti. Super situational, of course, and no software supports the concept, but from a theoretical standpoint, not as out of the question as you might think.

 

A dual 1080ti is gonna run you like, what, $1500 USD? I'd say that's a pretty high barrier to clear.

 

Depends on what you have available. If you already have two Vives, you're probably running decent hardware. In my case, I work in the AEC space, where they're happy to drop money on things that make us more productive.

Definitely wouldn't try sell anything that requires dual 1080TIs, but would develop it for work if there was value in it.

 

Two grad students at our school created a virtual environment where two Vive headsets were connected to the same machine and it was running fine. I can't get a hold of them anymore, but I know two things: Their PC had the same specs as mine, and they used Unity to make the application.

Lets presume it'll run on my machine, how would I go about enabling the two headsets?

 

A small amount of research suggests multiple virtual machines running on the same physical hardware, in which case they'd have to communicate via LAN networking. Other than that, I don't think SteamVR allows for it. Did the grad students not leave their source accessible, or not write any technical papers/documentation?

 

Bump, has anyone here explored this topic in the last year and some change. PC power isn't an issue for us (TitanXP 12GB GDDR5, 32GB DDR4, i7-8700K) so it's just determining how to pull it off.

I know Linus from tech-tips did it running VM's on a single system, but our need would require a single application instance feeding two users without multi system networking being available.