Oculus Quest Virtual Link (PC Mode)

GreenOrbs

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It was announced earlier today that the Quest will be able to connect to graphics cards with a USB VirtualLink port and play the Rift library as a tethered PC device.

I'm acutally quite interested in this and was wondering if any Quest owners with other devices have any ideas about how it performs in relation to other devices. In particular, I was wondering about tracking and the display. Yes, it is OLED but I was wondering if anyone was bothered by the 72Hz refresh rate?

I'm currently using a GearVR and Odyssey+ combo for my portable and wired PC experiences. Kind of considering swapping both out for one device that does it all and connects with a thin USB C cable to boot. I also feel like being able to connect the Quest to your PC with basically any USB C cable makes the Rift S kind of obsolete... What do y'all think?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...trick-it-can-double-as-a-wired-pc-vr-headset/
 
It looks like this Link software will work with any good USB-C cable, and there will be a fiber optic cable later this year.

It'll be interesting to see what the trade offs are. The Quest uses 72hz screens. Would they be bumped up when connected to a PC? What about added latency?
 
While it won't be as good as what a true native PC HMD can deliver, it will still massively boost the playability of what you can experience on a Quest when its gaming horsepower is being delivered via a PC/external gaming GPU rather than the Quest's built-in last generation snapdragon mobile hardware. All the big announcements today: Finger tracking, visual pass through, linking the quest to the PC via USB-C to play Rift content, etc. were all geared toward the Quest. This Oculus 6 keynote/talk was all solely focused there - no Rift S love at all. Oculus is going full bore on the Quest and expanding its potential for now.

With the Index, the Rift and the Quest, I feel I have all the VR bases covered for the foreseeable future... and I'm glad I made the jump to the Index for higher end VR. Rift S owners must be pretty pissed at Oculus right now. But I can't imagine that Oculus will drop Rift S support anytime soon... they just aren't pushing it as hard now for they see the Quest as the primary means towards driving the masses towards VR.
 
no surprise, it's the logical way forward for VR... bye bye rift s
 
It was announced earlier today that the Quest will be able to connect to graphics cards with a USB VirtualLink port and play the Rift library as a tethered PC device.

I'm acutally quite interested in this and was wondering if any Quest owners with other devices have any ideas about how it performs in relation to other devices. In particular, I was wondering about tracking and the display. Yes, it is OLED but I was wondering if anyone was bothered by the 72Hz refresh rate?

I'm currently using a GearVR and Odyssey+ combo for my portable and wired PC experiences. Kind of considering swapping both out for one device that does it all and connects with a thin USB C cable to boot. I also feel like being able to connect the Quest to your PC with basically any USB C cable makes the Rift S kind of obsolete... What do y'all think?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...trick-it-can-double-as-a-wired-pc-vr-headset/

I've tried relivevr, works amazingly well with full wireless. Some minor compression artifacts in transparent textures like smoke or fences, but otherwise quite good at 50mbps.

I think pushing the quest as the vr headset from oculus makes a lot of sense, it has ipd adjustment, good optics and screens and can now provide the full gamut of vr experiences from standalone to high end pc.
 
Did a bit more reading into Oculus link. Right now there is a latency penalty because VR video is compressed and sent over to the Quest where it is displayed by the Android OpenMax VR driver.

Oculus states that they are trying to get Qualcomm to give them low level access to the snapdragon processor so that they can use the Quest as a direct external display just like a regular PC VR. They claim that if they can get this they can have lower latency than the Rift S due to the rolling shutter of a OLED screen rather than an LCD screen which has to wait to refresh the whole panel at once.

I am going to wait to see if this second update to make the Quest have lower latency than the Rift S comes through (depends on Qualcomm cooperating). That would be sweet making the Quest better than the Rift in almost every way. If it does I plan to switch over but keeping my current WMR + Gear VR setup until it does.
 
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While it won't be as good as what a true native PC HMD can deliver, it will still massively boost the playability of what you can experience on a Quest when its gaming horsepower is being delivered via a PC/external gaming GPU rather than the Quest's built-in last generation snapdragon mobile hardware. All the big announcements today: Finger tracking, visual pass through, linking the quest to the PC via USB-C to play Rift content, etc. were all geared toward the Quest. This Oculus 6 keynote/talk was all solely focused there - no Rift S love at all. Oculus is going full bore on the Quest and expanding its potential for now.

With the Index, the Rift and the Quest, I feel I have all the VR bases covered for the foreseeable future... and I'm glad I made the jump to the Index for higher end VR. Rift S owners must be pretty pissed at Oculus right now. But I can't imagine that Oculus will drop Rift S support anytime soon... they just aren't pushing it as hard now for they see the Quest as the primary means towards driving the masses towards VR.

Why would Rift S owners be pissed right now? It's still a brilliant headset. It's still a faster, clearer display with very little SDE and it still has better tracking. The reasons a person might pick the Rift S over the Quest are still just as valid now.

This news is great for VR as a whole. It means that it keeps pushing forward and it shows that Oculus have plans for the Future. There are going to be exciting times ahead with the Second Generation Quest headsets.
 
Oculus states that they are trying to get Qualcomm to give them low level access to the snapdragon processor so that they can use the Quest as a direct external display just like a regular PC VR. They claim that if they can get this they can have lower latency than the Rift S due to the rolling shutter of a OLED screen rather than an LCD screen which has to wait to refresh the whole panel at once..

That's very interesting, thanks for posting. I wonder is this the same reason they might have technical difficulities bringing Finger Tracking to the Rift S.
 
Did a bit more reading into Oculus link. Right now there is a latency penalty because VR video is compressed and sent over to the Quest where it is displayed by the Android OpenMax VR driver.

Oculus states that they are trying to get Qualcomm to give them low level access to the snapdragon processor so that they can use the Quest as a direct external display just like a regular PC VR. They claim that if they can get this they can have lower latency than the Rift S due to the rolling shutter of a OLED screen rather than an LCD screen which has to wait to refresh the whole panel at once.

I am going to wait to see if this second update to make the Quest have lower latency than the Rift S comes through (depends on Qualcomm cooperating). That would be sweet making the Quest better than the Rift in almost every way. If it does I plan to switch over but keeping my current WMR + Gear VR setup until it does.

I was wondering about latency. It's a bummer that they can't drive the panel directly immediately. Not sure what the USB C port on the Snap 835 supports bandwidth-wise, but probably not enough to do uncompressed video, so I expect a slight compress/decompress penalty to be inescapable, however, direct access bypassing the OS should greatly reduce the latency penalty.
 
I was wondering about latency. It's a bummer that they can't drive the panel directly immediately. Not sure what the USB C port on the Snap 835 supports bandwidth-wise, but probably not enough to do uncompressed video, so I expect a slight compress/decompress penalty to be inescapable, however, direct access bypassing the OS should greatly reduce the latency penalty.

According to what I read its 150 Mbps for the video encoder on Snapdragon 835. This is really low so they have to use FOVeated compression reducing the quality on the edges of peripheral vision. If they could enable displayport functionality as an external display it would be great. The virtual link standard does support displayport over USB-C which is 30 something Gbps. But yeah, Oculus says they want to do this but its still in the works plus require cooperation from Qualcomm. Its definitely possible--Samsung got access for their Dex branded external monitor connection via displayport over USB-C. That said, Samsung is a big customer for mobile chips obviously so Qualcomm is more likely to be willing to help with requests like this.

Interestingly the screen is also capable of 90Hz operation. From an Engadget article:
The video encoder Oculus is using is also limited to 150Mbps, which is easily handled by the USB 3.0 standard (and technically should be fine with USB 2.0 ports too)... Carmack admitted that the Quest's OLED screen can actually run up to 90Hz, but the company stuck with 72Hz since that was a more achievable framerate for mobile games. He was considering unlocking the 90Hz refresh rate for Oculus Link content, but he was warned that would void the Quest's FCC certification.

So basically, the Quest hardware is capable of running as a full PC VR headset but they need 1. Qualcomm to give low level access to the Snapdragon 835 so they can run it as a Displayport external monitor and 2. Get FCC re-certification to run the screen at 90Hz which can be a somewhat lengthy and expensive process. So the potential is there. If they do get the processor unlocked and the 90Hz operation of the screen FCC certified though, the Quest might be one of the better PC VR options--just not yet. Still a huge plus for existing Quest owners--its just not quite good enough for me to switch and replace my existing WMR headset.
 
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Yea the Tested video above was great. If there was noticeable latency or other issues they probably would've stated as such. So far the only thing is some artifacting when moving your head very fast down to up, which of course they were only doing to see where things broke.
 
Why would Rift S owners be pissed right now? It's still a brilliant headset. It's still a faster, clearer display with very little SDE and it still has better tracking. The reasons a person might pick the Rift S over the Quest are still just as valid now.

This news is great for VR as a whole. It means that it keeps pushing forward and it shows that Oculus have plans for the Future. There are going to be exciting times ahead with the Second Generation Quest headsets.

You must not frequent Reddit much and you also misunderstand what I stated. There were a lot of Rift S owners pissed yesterday on Reddit in that Oculus never bothered to mention/cover the Rift S during any of their all day Oculus 6 event. Finger tracking was only discussed in the context of the Quest. The Quest was pretty much their sole focus. If I had just picked up a Rift S and it appeared that Oculus was focusing all of their attention on Quest instead, with no mention of any Rift S developments or tech, I'd feel pretty let down as well.
 
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If I had just picked up a Rift S and it appeared that Oculus was focusing all of their attention on Quest instead, with no mention of any Rift S developments or tech, I'd feel pretty let down as well.

I mean it makes total sense. During the keynote, Carmack mentioned that the Quest was by far the most retentive set. Elsewhere he states that the two allowed them to do an A/B test to see what people preferred to buy. Oculus also said that the Quest sold $20 mil of games on their store in 4 months. By comparison, the rift sold $80 million of games on the oculus store in 3 years (since 2016).

Put more simply, Quests are selling way more and people are using them more and buying way more games directly from facebook. The fact that they seem to be focusing 100% of their development on the Quest doesnt suprise me given these facts.

Reading between the lines, Oculus is saying the Quest is winner and the Rift S the loser in the A/B experiment they were trying. Or its as close to saying that in corporate speak as you can get.
 
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You must not frequent Reddit much and you also misunderstand what I stated. There were a lot of Rift S owners pissed yesterday on Reddit in that Oculus never bothered to mention/cover the Rift S during any of their all day Oculus 6 event. Finger tracking was only discussed in the context of the Quest. The Quest was pretty much their sole focus. If I had just picked up a Rift S and it appeared that Oculus was focusing all of their attention on Quest instead, with no mention of any Rift S developments or tech, I'd feel pretty let down as well.

Reddit? LOL don't make me laugh, it's typical over reacting drama over there. You had the rush of people, and I bet some don't have the Rift S, moaning about how Facebook is crap for not supporting the Rift S and then a few days later you have a whole lot of posts saying how the Rift S is still a great headset.

Why would I feel let down? It didn't suddenly become a bad headset. It's still a better headset than the Quest.

Focusing on the Quest is the right way to go. Headsets like that are the Future, anyone with half a brain would see that.
 
Reddit? LOL don't make me laugh, it's typical over reacting drama over there. You had the rush of people, and I bet some don't have the Rift S, moaning about how Facebook is crap for not supporting the Rift S and then a few days later you have a whole lot of posts saying how the Rift S is still a great headset.

Why would I feel let down? It didn't suddenly become a bad headset. It's still a better headset than the Quest.

Focusing on the Quest is the right way to go. Headsets like that are the Future, anyone with half a brain would see that.

We are saying the same thing, calm down. You're just stirring an empty pot. If you are a Rift S owner and the premier Oculus developer event didn't say shit about *anything* concerning the Rift S during an all day event, I could easily see why some owners would feel a bit let down by it... Great, it didn't bother *you*! Congrats! :) Yes, the Rift S is still relevant. Yes, it is a better HMD for PC VR than the Quest. Yes, I totally get why Oculus is focusing all of their efforts on just the Quest right now.
 
I wonder if it will give options for higher refresh. Rates? The reolution will still be the same. It does give it an advantage , I will agree to that.
 
I wonder if it will give options for higher refresh. Rates? The reolution will still be the same. It does give it an advantage , I will agree to that.
It will not be going above the 72. And what do you mean by resolution will be the same? Same as the Quest? No it will not be using the the full resolution based on what has been said so far.
 
It will not be going above the 72. And what do you mean by resolution will be the same? Same as the Quest? No it will not be using the the full resolution based on what has been said so far.
Bummer.... :(
 
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