Tag: Oculus Quest

Oculus Link: My First-Time Setup Experience, and Running Sansar on My Oculus Quest!

One of my projects this weekend was to see if I could get my Oculus Quest wireless VR headset set up with the newly-released beta Oculus Link software, in order to operate it as a tethered VR headset capable of running Oculus Rift apps (including, specifically, Sansar). Would I be able to run Sansar on my Oculus Quest, and if so, what were the differences between the Sansar experience in my original Oculus Rift VR headset and the Oculus Quest?

On Friday, the Anker USB Type C Cable, Powerline USB C to USB 3.0 Cable (3ft) with 56k Ohm Pull-up Resistor I ordered arrived from Amazon. This Anker cable is the one which is officially recommended by Oculus to use, at least until the official Oculus cable is released later this year, which is expected to retail for about US$70. (Note that you will NOT be able to use the cable that originally came with the Oculus Quest for this purpose. That is for charging the Quest, and you need a cable both for charging and for data transfer. Yes, it gets complicated!)

Now, that might seem rather expensive for a simple USB 3.0 cable, but, as Mike from the Virtual Reality Oasis discovered, it is exceedingly difficult to find a cable that will actually work with Oculus Quest and the Oculus Link software. Mike tested quite a few USB 3.0 cables, and found only one that would actually work for him:

So, take Mike’s advice: do all your research before you buy a cable for use with Oculus Link, and do not buy a cable unless you know for certain that it will work. Either buy the Anker cable recommended by Oculus, or wait until the official Oculus cable is released by the company. You could also check with other people who have tried other brands of USB 3.0 cables in the OculusQuest subReddit (particularly the very helpful Oculus Link megathreads), or on the Virtual Reality Discord server (I had to turn to the latter when I ran into trouble).

The Oculus Link installation procedure was not without its fair share of hair-pulling frustration. First, I turned on the Public Test Channel (PTC) in my Oculus Home desktop software, which turned out to be a mistake. It installed version 12 PTC, which I later learned doesn’t work with Oculus Link. Then I was told to turn PTC off, and the regular, non-PTC version of Oculus Home would then automatically reinstall. That didn’t happen, so I had to reinstall my Oculus Home software from scratch. Argh!

Then, I discovered that I only had two available USB 3.0 ports on my computer, both of which were being used for my Oculus Rift VR headset. So, I had to unplug one of the USB 3.0 ports used by the Rift in order to use it with the Anker cable and the Oculus Quest. Then, finally, I was able to connect the Oculus Quest to my PC, install Oculus Link, and…

It worked! IT WORKED! I was able to see my Oculus Home window on my computer, and run Oculus Rift apps from my library on my Oculus Quest!

And I can now happily confirm that Sansar does indeed work on the Oculus Quest with the Oculus Link software and the cable. (I also tested VRChat, and that worked too.) I did not notice any major differences between the 90 Hz refresh rate of the Oculus Rift and the 72 Hz refresh rate of the Oculus Quest when I was in Sansar. The scenery looked as gorgeous as ever.

The only problem I did encounter (and it was significant) was that the audio level was noticeably lower when I used the Quest compared to the Rift, even when I turned up all my volume settings to 100%. I noticed the same problem when I was in VRChat, so it seems to be a problem with the Quest headset, and not Sansar.

So, in answer to the question up top: Yes, you can indeed run Sansar on the Oculus Quest, provided that you have all three of:

  • a powerful enough gaming computer with a supported graphics card;
  • the proper USB 3.0 cable (this part is critical); and
  • the beta Oculus Link software.

But the follow-up question is: Would I consider using Oculus Quest and Oculus Link as a replacement for my trusty old Oculus Rift?

NO. Why? For the simple, practical reason that every time I want to use my Quest, I will have to pull my computer away from the wall, wrestle with the mess of cables in the back to free up a USB 3.0 port, plug in the Oculus Quest, enable the Oculus Link software, etc. Frankly, it’s just too much hassle, when I have a perfectly good, more powerful Oculus Rift already plugged in to my PC, which gives me a better audio experience and a higher visual refresh rate. (I don’t know why Oculus is choosing to lower the refresh rates on their newer VR headsets. The Rift S has a rate of 80 Hz, and the Quest is 72 Hz, whereas the Valve Index VR headset has a refresh rate of 120 Hz.)

But, if you were in the market for a VR headset, and you were trying to decide between the Oculus Rift S (which replaces the original Oculus Rift model) and the Oculus Quest, it is looking more and more like the smart decision is to go with the Oculus Quest. It’s really quite amazing what the Quest can now do, with capabilities far beyond what I had ever expected before it was released! It really does look like the Oculus Quest is going to become the flagship headset product for Oculus, and it is so attractively priced that it might just land up under a lot of trees this Christmas!

Editorial: The State of Current Social VR—Has Linking Newer Virtual Worlds to Virtual Reality Been a Tactical Mistake?

Are all the social VR companies going the wrong way?
(Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash)

So, I’m sitting here in front of my computer on an overcast, chilly Sunday morning up here in Winnipeg, with my cup of coffee rapidly cooling beside me, my dirty dishes piling up in the kitchen, dust bunnies gathering in the corners of my apartment, and my wet laundry needing to be moved from the washer to the dryer, and it just seems as good a time as any to pause and ponder the state of current social VR. (Anything to avoid housework!)

And if you’ve been paying attention, like I have, it would seem that social VR is, indeed, in quite the state. And not a good one. Let’s do a quick recap:

First, everybody from Mark Zuckerberg to Philip Rosedale has said the same thing: that consumer uptake of virtual reality is taking much, much longer than originally estimated. It’s making some inroads (Facebook is apparently selling the Oculus Quest wireless VR headsets as fast as they can make them), but we’re not there yet.

Second, there are the metaverse platforms on which companies have spent years of time and toil to build, expecting that influx of consumers in VR headsets, and which, still, sit largely unvisited in spite of their best promotional efforts. In most cases, these companies are now having to make some pretty severe adjustments (a.k.a “pivots”) to their software development roadmaps in an attempt to become profitable, and make their boards and shareholders happy:

  • High Fidelity (which is burning through all that venture capital, and is now trying to re-position itself as a remote workteams platform);
  • Linden Lab’s Sansar (which is relying on the reliable cash cow of Second Life, and has just announced a new focus on live events, at the expense of other features);
  • Sinespace (although nobody really knows how profitable the company is, the platform still seems to be having similar trouble attracting large numbers of users, from what I can tell from my admittedly infrequent visits).

Third, there have been a few early success stories in social VR, but they, too, have some storm clouds on the horizon:

  • VRChat is still the most popular social VR platform, thanks to the livestreamers, and it is coasting along in merry pandemonium, but how long will the company keep throwing money into the platform if they can’t make some sort of profit from it? VRChat is a business, and they face a potentially rocky road in their plans to move to an in-world economy with user-generated content and an in-world currency. Any misstep, and its young, fickle userbase, who are accustomed to everything being “for free”, will abandon it just as quickly as they picked it up in the first place.
  • Rec Room, the second most popular social VR platform, has found a comfortable niche. But is it profitable in the long term? Again, how do they plan to make money off it? It’s a bit of a mystery to me.

So, it would appear that those social VR platforms that do have in-world economies can’t attract large numbers of users, and the ones that don’t have in-world economies might be popular, but obviously can’t keep running indefinitely without a means of generating profit. It seems like a Catch 22, a rather hopeless situation at this present point in time.

Add to this the fact that the 900-lb. gorilla in the room, Facebook, is planning to launch their own social VR platform in 2020, and you’ve got a situation that must be keeping the CEOs of these various companies up at night, pacing the floor, wondering how, when and where it all went wrong.

The fact is, nobody seems to have yet found the perfect mix of features and promotion to snatch the mantle of Second Life. The venerable virtual world, at 16 years old, is still is the most popular platform around, with approximately half a million unique monthly users according to recent statistics provided by Firestorm.

But again, Second Life doesn’t support VR. And, in actual fact, VR users in almost all of the social VR platforms to date are still the minority, compared to flat-screen desktop users (yes, even in VRChat). So perhaps, have all of us made the wrong bet: that virtual reality was going to be key to the success of the next generation of virtual worlds?

It’s certainly not playing out that way, at least not yet. Facebook might succeed with Facebook Horizon, given its almost endless resources, but it hasn’t had a particularly good track record so far (witness the recently-shut-down Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms as examples).

If Facebook fails (or fumbles) with Facebook Horizon next year, then that will be the strongest signal yet that linking virtual worlds and virtual reality is, perhaps, a tactical mistake. And if Apple, who has so far stayed away from VR, launches augmented-reality glasses (as some confidently predict), could that be what finally catches fire in the public imagination, instead of virtual reality? Have we made the wrong bet?

So, is the news all doom and gloom? Hardly. There are a few bright spots, metaverse-building companies which are already making a profit:

  • ENGAGE has been able to carve out a profitable niche for itself in the educational market
  • NeosVR is profitable, largely due to its passionate Patreon supporters, and also by offering commercial licenses for businesses and schools (of course, it helps that it has a small, nimble development team!)
  • Cryptovoxels is already earning enough money via the sale of blockchain-based virtual land to support its full-time software developer, Ben Nolan

But even I must admit, these are the exceptions that prove the point: social VR is, by and large, not yet profitable. And the bigger the company, the more trouble it seems to be in. It seems to be the smaller firms that are able to cut costs and find niche markets to excel in and generate profit. Which doesn’t look especially good for Linden Lab and High Fidelity, with their large staffs and all the associated overhead.

So, for the various companies engaged in building the next generation of metaverse platforms, it becomes a waiting game: trying to find some way to survive until such time as social VR is profitable—or just giving up on VR. But I rather doubt that the companies that have already made such a huge investment in virtual reality will pull out now.

Linden Lab has decided to pin Sansar’s future on live events. High Fidelity is hoping that remote teamwork use will keep it going. Every company is going to have to come up with its own strategy to make it through these leaner-than-expected years.

Zoom Goes VR: Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App (Avatars? Who Needs Avatars?)

You might remember that I coined an acronym which I hope starts to catch on in the industry: YARTVRA, which stands for Yet Another Remote Teams Virtual Reality App. This is an emerging use for VR, and I have compiled a list of YARTVRA apps in this recent blogpost.

Well, it would appear that LearnBrite (which I have blogged about before), the company behind Zoom (the well-known, popular remote conferencing service) wants to embrace virtual reality, and hop into the nascent YARTVRA marketplace.

It looks like they are offering a couple of different ways to represent each remote participant. Take a gander at the following one-minute video, showing three men communicating via flat-screen video “avatars” in a 3D photograph of an office:

Watching this, I ask myself: why would anybody want to do this? What benefits does this bring? Sorry, but this is just weird. No avatars at all? Horse confetti?!??

Here’s another one-minute video showing you not only the flat-screen video “avatars”, but also a tantalizing glimpse of an actual, 3D avatar:

In the first part of this video, Zoom again eschews user avatars completely, choosing instead to have each participant displayed in a video screen in a 3D virtual conference room. However, notice at the 0:38 mark in this video, someone puts on an Oculus Quest VR headset, and you can then see his three-dimensional avatar standing in one corner of the conference room.

Here’s another one-minute video (no audio) that shows you a bit more of the setup for the Oculus Quest:

Now, it’s not clear to me if this is a real avatar that you can embody, able to move around the room, or if it is just a stationary object, a placeholder that merely represents the user. Unfortunately, there’s not enough in these videos to be able to tell!

In a page from the LearnBrite website showing you how you set up a virtual room in Zoom, the company states:

Why?

LearnBrite already includes tightly integrated WebRTC conferencing capabilities such as audio, video, VR presence and dial-in by phone.

In some enterprise environments it may be preferable to leverage the tools already in place, this helps with costs and also managing change in an organization. If everyone is already familiar with using Zoom, then adding VR to it can get better user “buy-in” than asking them to use a new or different solution.

But whether or not this is actually something that is going to be truly useful, something that adds a real benefit to remote work team collaboration, remains to be seen. So I’m a little skeptical, and frankly, I want to see more of this in action before I pronounce final judgement (especially how they implement 3D avatars).

As far as I can tell right now, this half-baked solution just gives LearnBrite the bragging rights that they now support Zoom in VR, without a lot of the features seen in competing YARTVRA products. Sorry, but I’m not impressed. This looks like a cheap gimmick to me.

An Early Review of Oculus Link: Play Oculus Rift Apps on Your Oculus Quest VR Headset (And Will It Work with Sansar?)

Nathaniël de Jong (a.k.a. Nathie) is a Dutch YouTuber with half a million subscribers, who often posts review videos of the latest and greatest VR hardware and software on his channel.

Yesterday, he posted the following review of the Oculus Link software which allows Oculus Quest users to play Oculus Rift apps using a cable connected to a gaming-level computer with a good graphics card:

The review is esssentially a rave. The only complaint that Nathie has about the Oculus Quest/Oculus Link setup is that the headset is front-heavy (something which I can also attest to). However, there has been no shortage of headset modding advice posted to places like the Oculus Quest subReddit (for example, attaching a battery pack to the back of the headstrap, which not only redistributes the weight, but also lets you play for several hours longer!).

The Oculus Link software will be available in November 2019, and it will be free. You will need to purchase a USB 3.0 cable; you can buy your own, or you can wait until Oculus sells their own fibre cable for a “best in class” experience, for about US$80/CA$106.

I expect I will be among the first people to test Sansar via the Oculus Quest and Oculus Link, when it becomes available later this year. If it does work, it will truly be a game changer, allowing a potentially much larger audience for apps such as Sansar. And I’m quite sure that Linden Lab will be testing this out too, once Oculus Link is available.

But DON’T buy an Oculus Quest right now, expecting that it will automatically work with Sansar. It’s still too soon to tell; wait for me and others to test it out and report back before you buy. Better to be safe than sorry! Linden Lab is not recommending users purchase the Oculus Quest if they are planning on using it just for Sansar.

Please note that currently, the only VR headsets that Linden Lab officially supports for Sansar are the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive headsets. Some users have reported that they have been able to get Windows Mixed Reality headsets to work with Sansar, but it’s not officially supported (you can get help via the official Sansar Discord). While Linden Lab has reported some work on getting Sansar to work with the Valve Index controllers, it is also not yet officially supported.