For the past couple of nights I’ve been using the Meta Quest 2 for my ‘workouts’ and the Rift S for VR gaming. I really have very few complaints about the Quest 2. Yes, the image quality isn’t as sharp as PC VR games but that was something I was fully aware of going in. It’s a question of a mobile processor vs a beefy GPU in the PC.
I have prescription lens inserts for it so glasses aren’t an issue and a third party strap for additional comfort over what came in the box. I also got a nicer interface (the bit that presses against your face) that is easy to clean after a sweaty session.
The Rift S is actually quite comfortable but it is of course a tethered solution. For me that means running a cable from my gaming PC located in the corner, across the room to the spot in front of the TV where I have clear space for VRing. (Is VR a verb?) It’s a pretty beefy cable that eventually splits into 2 at the PC: one strand for display port and the other a USB cable. It’s kind of a hassle because the cable will knock things off tables and stuff as I route it around loveseats, lamps and doggos.
Additionally I don’t have prescription lenses for the Rift S so I have to cram my glasses in there which, honestly, isn’t THAT big a deal once I got used to it. And I could always order a set of lenses.
But the Rift S is older tech. It has a lower resolution (1,440 x 1,280/eye) than the Quest 2 (1,832 x 1,920/eye) and a lower refresh rate (80 Hz vs 120Hz for the Quest 2).
So tonight I decided to try out linking the Quest 2 to the PC. Originally this required a long USB-C cable that was fairly expensive ($80 from Meta) but a while back some clever person figured out how to do this link via WiFi. Originally it was kind of a hack but at some point Meta added it to the software.
I’m pretty old school when it comes to WiFi and gaming. In other words, I’m a skeptic. I have all my gaming consoles and my PC hardwired to Ethernet. But before I spent $80 on a Link Cable I decided to try it “Air Link” as it is called. It was pretty easy to do. I ran into 2 issues. First was I had the Oculus app on my PC enrolled in a ‘Public Test Channel’ and had to back out of that for some reason. Second was that I had disabled the Oculus Virtual Audio device when I was futzing with sound issues. Without that the Quest 2 got no sound.
Once those two very minor issues were sorted, it just kind of worked. You put on the Quest 2 and you see your usual Quest 2 UI. Then you go into settings and turn on the Link and you get the Oculus PC UI. I fired up the PCVR game I’ve been playing and off I went. Tetherless PCVR gaming, yay!
Or mostly yay. It ran pretty smoothly until it didn’t. At one point I had a little glitch where I hit a pocket of lag and then everything caught up. Normally this wouldn’t have been too big an issue but in VR it was pretty nauseating. It only happened once but I was only testing (aka hacking undead skeletal soldiers with a broadsword) for 30 minutes or so. So we’ll see.
I do think if the Air Link doesn’t work out, I may spring for that $80 cable so I can just retire the Rift S. Maybe find someone to sell it too. It’s kind of silly to have both when the Quest 2 can cover all bases.
What I haven’t tried yet is Steam VR with any of this; that’s the next thing on my list to get sorted.