as someone who has all the headsets, I'm super curious to know what the quality gap between this and the Rift S will be. Rift S + Laptop is my portable VR dev setup, lol, and if there isn't a tangible downgrade to using Quest on PC...
Facebook announce Oculus Link: you will be able to run Oculus Rift contents on Oculus Quest via high-quality USB 3 cables
- Thread starter Arthands
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Wireless is not just about convenience, it's a game changer for VR IMO. I've used my Quest outside, you can replicate that expericence with a Rift without strapping a computer to your back. I've never noticed the lower framerate on my Quest vs my Rift personally but your experience may vary.
Magic Leap uses that too. Works well, but those controllers are like $300 to buy separately.
Comfort. Quest requires extra purchases to be comfortable for extended sessions, because by default, the headset is front-heavy and the strap designed to clamp the headset to your face. Quest also has a fairly small sweet spot, so if the device slips down your face a little things become blurry. Visuals are a different matter, it'll be interesting to see if there are compression artifacts or if the extra latency is noticable.
Note that you can already stream PC VR to Oculus Quest wirelessly using sideloaded third party apps (Oculus won't allow them on the store).
Can almost guarantee latency and image quality will be better on the Rift for PCVR.
Try both. The sweet spot and comfort of the Quest is brutal compared to the S. Had both and returned the Quest without hesitation.
This is fantastic. I already have an Index along with my Quest, but this is EXACTLY the kind of device that should be the future of VR. Not the biggest fan of FB's business practices in the VR space, but I'll begrudgingly admit they're definitely winning on the VR innovation front so far. Their devices are the closest to what I think the future should be.
That's definitely YMMV. I have an amazing sweetspot on my Quest. Now, I've also modded the hell out of it. I use a 6mm vive face cushion attached to the lens adapter. I'm super close to the lens and the thing barely touches my cheeks. Super comfy. It is Frankenstein to the extreme though.
I'm not saying it has any special processing power, just an additional chip for processing directly inside the headset that the Rift S doesn't have, which can be used for certain tasks like in this case low-latency hand-tracking without the need of any additional resources.
There's absolutely no reason for that if you use a cable with enough bandwidth. The DisplayPort/USB combo of the Rift S can easily be matched by a USB-C cable.
Except it's not transmitting a raw signal.
I got really excited about this until I just saw that the Quest is only 100 cheaper than the Rift S, and thats for the shitty 64GB one. At this point is the Rift S still the best buy? What do you miss from that vs something like the Index?
Uhhh... no? DisplayPort 1.2 is 21.6 Gbps. USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps. As mentioned above though, they aren't sending the raw signal.
Why is 64GB shitty? That'll hold more games than most people will ever reasonably need at once. Most games are < 1GB. Movies on a plane can be a pain, but the transfer rates are slow anyways. If it's home media viewing, you're better off just streaming from your PC with the Skybox Client (or Plex or DLNA).
64GB + Vive DAS adapter >>> 128GB version. Spend the money elsewhere.
I'm going to have to wait for reviews before I get hyped up about this. There are all sorts of potential downfalls such as added latency and compression artifacts. Buying a Quest now strictly based on this announcement would be premature for me. Did they say that the Quest would also draw power from the USB3 cable or are we just assuming it will? Will the optical cable they are talking about be a hybrid of some sort that also transmits power over copper?
This is fantastic - and exactly what I had hoped the Quest would be from day one.
Well almost; I had hoped it would work as an external display, rather than receiving a compressed video stream.
Now that it's been out for a while, I'm a bit more hesitant to buy into the Quest, but would have if this feature was there at launch.
Cheaper cables may work just fine over the specified length for charging devices, or lower-speed data transfer (USB2 speeds); but this will be a high bandwidth device.
An optical fiber cable will allow it to be significantly longer than the USB-C spec permits, and will be thinner & lighter. You're probably going to need that if you want to do room-scale experiences rather than seated experiences near the PC.
Type-A is not limited to USB2 speeds.
Well almost; I had hoped it would work as an external display, rather than receiving a compressed video stream.
Now that it's been out for a while, I'm a bit more hesitant to buy into the Quest, but would have if this feature was there at launch.
The "high quality cable" thing is just that many cables are not built to spec, and the spec does not permit particularly long cables: 2m for 3.1 and 1m for 3.2 if I recall correctly.
Cheaper cables may work just fine over the specified length for charging devices, or lower-speed data transfer (USB2 speeds); but this will be a high bandwidth device.
An optical fiber cable will allow it to be significantly longer than the USB-C spec permits, and will be thinner & lighter. You're probably going to need that if you want to do room-scale experiences rather than seated experiences near the PC.
There are USB3 Type-A ports too - those are far more common than Type-C ports on PCs.
Type-A is not limited to USB2 speeds.
It's rendered on the PC, and compressed to a video stream that is sent over the USB cable.
PSVR is notorious for that happening due to its very limited tracking system.
For me, it was all about the media AND games.
HD movies aren't small and Quest is an awesome travel companion on flights and in hotels. 64GB would have made it a far less convenient portable cinema proposition.
We'll see how good things look through this Link system, but I do hope it replaces my need for my OG Rift.
I would hope that it can use USB 3.1 if available for a higher throughput. That's the max spec the Snapdragon in the Quest should be able to support. Of course using 3.0 they'll have to seriously compress it.
Yeah. That's the main caveat. If you want to load it up with movies for travel, 128GB is definitely useful. Although if it's just for hotel rooms, there's a USB battery (that doubles as a counter-weight) that can create a wifi hotspot and do DLNA streaming from its USB port. Bandwidth limits it to 1080p stuff, but it's an interesting travel option.
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They've confirmed it will draw power from USB, if the ports provide enough power: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQues...link_just_a_cable_from_headset_to_pc/f1fcfvy/
I own a Rift CV1 that I mostly use for sim racing. Very curious if the Quest could replace that. I never use my rift for anything else as it's such a pain to setup the sensors elsewhere. Would really like to replace it with a Quest.
I know, I was talking about USB 3.1 vs 3.0.
But that's one thing that makes me wait for actual technical details about Oculus Link. They're talking about USB 3, but I would hope that that's just the minimum spec they require to make it work at all, not the only available option.
Maybe? I've never tried it. Which apps could possibly do that?
Good point. It's been a bit since I've gone back and forth with the two but the S is better for long-haul experiences for sure.
Compared to the Rift S the Index takes better advantage of a beefy PC with higher selectable refresh rate support, has a wonderful FOV, is the most comfortable, has insanely good built-in audio, has better controllers (with really cool finger tracking and "natural" grabbing for games that support it like Pavlov), has a better IRL camera passthrough (despite having less HMD-mounted cameras), and other "smaller" niceties. This isn't a slight against the Rift S at all, though: Index is the better experience and the one you should get if you don't mind the higher cost and some more initial setup, but the Rift S does a great job at being almost as good for a whole lot cheaper. And having no lighthouses to set up is really nice.
Skybox VR can apparently access content through DLNA. Or you could sideload Android apps like Plex to it.
I've never tried that either. If you can have your phone act as a DNLA or PLEX server, you would be able to stream to Skybox (my favorite). I'm not sure if that's a thing or not.
Of course, there are also Netflix/Amazon/etc apps. So if you're talking pure streaming, there are lots of apps that make things simple. This is about streaming your own media that's been ripped.
I don't get why Plex doesn't support it officially with their VR app. Would seem like a no-brainer to me. It's available for the Go and Gear VR as well after all...
Not really.
Direct connection to your GPU and input device is always going to be a better solution than streaming, even if the streaming is done over USB-C.
The video signal is being compressed on the PC and decompressed on the headset. you can't avoid that latency.
the Rift is getting video direct from the GPU. Quest's mobile chipset doesn't support this.
Yeah, really sucks that Oculus didn't add an adapter port to the device that bypassed the chipset so it could hook up to video direct. They really wanted two product lines I guess.
Yeah, saw that. That's really unfortunate.
Gonna wait for impressions on the final quality of the stream.
To be frank, if their over cable compression is as quality as the Displaylink/Intel/HTC combo, the visual IQ will be very close to a native feed (save for some minor color/white balance differences - No YT style compression artifacting under normal operating conditions) and would be a HUGE improvement over the current wireless quest streaming quality. The algorithm's latency impact will be the big issue, followed by performance cost. You'd think there wouldn't be a latency problem at all using a cable, what with 802.11ad wireless latency being a solved quantity for over 2 years.
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Dont see why not. Steam VR works perfectly with the Oculus Rift and S.
