Oculus Quest 2

I don't really like VR tried it but felt dizzy after a few minutes. Maybe it is just me.
 
Furious Nerd said:
I was at Target for something and decided to buy it. I'm disappointed tbh, it's very blurry/low-res.. feels like a $300 entry level 1st gen thing you'd expect. This is kind of what putting on the cardboard Google "VR" googles over my smartphone felt like. The headset itself is comfy enough and the controllers are good quality too. But the actual graphics and resolution are just too low. I see now why it's $300 and other headsets are much more expensive.

I also bought a Link cable thinking I could play SteamVR games and my Elite Dangerous in VR over it.. nope. Those are for real VR headsets it turns out like the Index and Rift. So what is even the Link cable useful for??

I haven't played any games on it yet (just seeing how blurry the "home" is makes me not even want to really spend money on games, lol.., but I'll grab the Humble Bundle going on and try it tomorrow). But fully expecting to return it in a week. Thanks gosh USA has such generous return policies.

I'm sorry, I usually don't like to post negative things, just sharing my honest initial impressions and thoughts for others. If you don't care about fidelity & graphics and think you'll be easily wowed by the thought of having a 360 degree view of a smartphone graphics game and won't mind, go for it.

Also, I didn't have a FB account before now, and Facebook literally would not accept my last name during registration, thinking I was putting on a fake name and directed me to send them my driver's license as proof if I wanted to use it LOL 🖕 I just went ahead and used a different last name and registered that way. I'm not sending that company my ID.. gotta be kidding me, sending ID to be able to register to use the thing.
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Eh? I played games over the cable and wireless. Both worked great, but I love the wireless. Onward worked great and everything else. It looks great and I am on a lowly 1080ti.
Not sure on the graphics and res being low. It blows away the Original Rift, and doesn't it have better res than the new Rift?
 
Anyone using Quest 2 for PCVR, update the Rift software and the firmware on your Quest. Then open your Oculus Debug Tool as admin (found in your Oculus folder, Support and oculus diagnostics subfolder) and turn on Link Sharpening. Change it from Auto to Enabled and then restart your Oculus runtimes. Very nice image quality improvement! The downside of Quest has always been that it encodes your image into a 2k video and does quite a poor job at it. No matter how high your render resolution the end result has always been very blurry. The new Link Sharpening toggle fixes this very effectively with next to no artifacting. Personally I do not see any ringing or anything that sharpening filters usually cause, the image is just sharper and cleaner. At worst you may see more temporal aliasing but that is always a problem unless the game has some kind of TAA method to get rid of it.

It obviously does not work for Virtual Desktop, just Link and Airlink.
 
MaZa said:
Anyone using Quest 2 for PCVR, update the Rift software and the firmware on your Quest. Then open your Oculus Debug Tool as admin (found in your Oculus folder, Support and oculus diagnostics subfolder) and turn on Link Sharpening. Change it from Auto to Enabled and then restart your Oculus runtimes. Very nice image quality improvement! The downside of Quest has always been that it encodes your image into a 2k video and does quite a poor job at it. No matter how high your render resolution the end result has always been very blurry. The new Link Sharpening toggle fixes this very effectively with next to no artifacting. Personally I do not see any ringing or anything that sharpening filters usually cause, the image is just sharper and cleaner. At worst you may see more temporal aliasing but that is always a problem unless the game has some kind of TAA method to get rid of it.

It obviously does not work for Virtual Desktop, just Link and Airlink.
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Great info, thanks Maza.
 
well.. son ran into the first major con of Quest 2.... When there is a Facebook outage... ... you know what happens from this point
 
jlbenedict said:
well.. son ran into the first major con of Quest 2.... When there is a Facebook outage... ... you know what happens from this point
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Hah, indeed. We were supposed to play Demeo this night with a friend of mine but nope. 🙈
 
Virtual desktop, air link, and using the cable to play PCVR still works with no internet. So at least you can still play PC VR.
 
sharknice said:
Virtual desktop, air link, and using the cable to play PCVR still works with no internet. So at least you can still play PC VR.
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Yes but the friend of mine only has Quest 2. He also has gaming PC but he is a hardcore Linux user and Oculus does not work with Linux.
 
MaZa said:
Yes but the friend of mine only has Quest 2. He also has gaming PC but he is a hardcore Linux user and Oculus does not work with Linux.
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While it is annoying, this holds up for every platform. Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Network even Steam to an extent. Not a Quest 2 exclusive problem.
 
Koldur said:
While it is annoying, this holds up for every platform. Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Network even Steam to an extent. Not a Quest 2 exclusive problem.
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To be fair you can load steam in offline mode and play the games that dont have to check in, which I have a few VR games like that I believe.
 
Ripskin said:
To be fair you can load steam in offline mode and play the games that dont have to check in, which I have a few VR games like that I believe.
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You could still play the games offline on the Quest 2 as well. Hence my remark to an extent. So, Steam would practically be the same, except for games that run their own servers for online play.
 
I played a few quest games, but for the money you can't get a better PCVR headset, I do MSFS and DCS exclusively and the Q2 is an awesome display for those titles.
 
I just bought this for my son (will be an xmas present). He has been using one at a friends house during parties and apparently it's the bees knees.

How much of a headache would it be to hook up to my 3090 rig and play some of the non occulus games?
 
oldmanbal said:
How much of a headache would it be to hook up to my 3090 rig and play some of the non occulus games?
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For the most part, not an big issue. You can get their branded link cable, or the cheaper anker alternative, and plug it in with minimal issues. Just make sure the cable is sufficiently long. Alternatively you can use wifi6 or what ever and go that route.

https://support.oculus.com/articles/headsets-and-accessories/oculus-link/oculus-link-compatibility/
https://www.androidcentral.com/best-link-cable-alternative-oculus-quest-2


 
oldmanbal said:
I just bought this for my son (will be an xmas present). He has been using one at a friends house during parties and apparently it's the bees knees.

How much of a headache would it be to hook up to my 3090 rig and play some of the non occulus games?
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It's super easy with a cable or wirelessly.

I use the Virtual Desktop app to do it because it has a feature called SSW which has the quest 2 hardware do interpolation if the PC's frame rate drops below your refresh rate.

Pretty easy, you just run the app on your quest 2 and pc, connect them to the same network, and you're playing PC VR.
 
Looks like Virtual Desktop just had a pretty awesome update.

• Added Contrast Adaptive Sharpening on Quest 1 & 2: this improves image quality of VR games considerably
• You can control the amount of sharpening via a slider in the Streaming tab
• Improved foveation quality at the edges of the display

Options for AMD's open source contrast adaptive sharpening but it's done on the Quest 2 hardware so you don't lose any performance on the PC. Pretty awesome.
 
sharknice said:
Looks like Virtual Desktop just had a pretty awesome update.

• Added Contrast Adaptive Sharpening on Quest 1 & 2: this improves image quality of VR games considerably
• You can control the amount of sharpening via a slider in the Streaming tab
• Improved foveation quality at the edges of the display

Options for AMD's open source contrast adaptive sharpening but it's done on the Quest 2 hardware so you don't lose any performance on the PC. Pretty awesome.
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Sweet! Oculus Links sharpening update was really effective in countering the inherent blur that video compression and streaming caused. Good to know the feature is now available in Virtual Desktop too. 👍
 
oldmanbal said:
I just bought this for my son (will be an xmas present). He has been using one at a friends house during parties and apparently it's the bees knees.

How much of a headache would it be to hook up to my 3090 rig and play some of the non occulus games?
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It's super easy - if you have a decent router (or your PC has built in wireless with hotspot ability), just try out wireless. Mine works fine via either my fairly cheap 5ghz router or directly connected to my laptop's wifi card set to 5ghz hotspot mode. For games I'd suggest Alyx or, if you like racing or flying, MS flight sim or iRacing. Those are the standout experiences on PC vs. what the Quest 2 can do standalone.
 
I think what I'm gonna end up doing is opening up my sons xmas gift early and loading his pc with a dozen of the big games prior to xmas so that he can go down the wormhole of VR day 1.
 
Sad trombone. That FB Connect was a waste of time. I mean, it is cool that Metaverse is becoming a thing and Ready Player One is becoming reality and I am looking forward to GTA San Andreas VR version, but no new hardware release. Just a little hints and mentions of new lenses and eye tracking but then said that further information comes sometime next year. The leaked videos that were going around were not for this Connect.

Oh, and Facebooks (as a company) new name is now Meta. Get used it. It is supposed to signify how much they are going to invest in VR/AR and Metaverse but I think it sounds silly like it is missing something. Just "Meta" sounds so barren.

*Edit* It could still be possible that a new headset gets revealed as there was that mystery black box with unknown content. It would be weird because most of the people only watch the first part of this connect. But I am off to sleep, if something interesting gets revealed then I'll know about it in the morning.
 
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MaZa said:
Sad trombone. That FB Connect was a waste of time. I mean, it is cool that Metaverse is becoming a thing and Ready Player One is becoming reality and I am looking forward to GTA San Andreas VR version, but no new hardware release. Just a little hints and mentions of new lenses and eye tracking but then said that further information comes sometime next year. The leaked videos that were going around were not for this Connect.

Oh, and Facebooks (as a company) new name is now Meta. Get used it. It is supposed to signify how much they are going to invest in VR/AR and Metaverse but I think it sounds silly like it is missing something. Just "Meta" sounds so barren.

*Edit* It could still be possible that a new headset gets revealed as there was that mystery black box with unknown content. It would be weird because most of the people only watch the first part of this connect. But I am off to sleep, if something interesting gets revealed then I'll know about it in the morning.
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They blue balled the VR community.

They didn't say anything about the rumored "Quest 2+" and they said they'll announce more on the new high end "Quest Pro" headset they're calling Cambria at next years Connect.
 
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saw some news the oculus name is dead. will be meta quest, meta blah blah blah. one positive note is that facebook login may no longer be required.
 
aliaskary77 said:
saw some news the oculus name is dead. will be meta quest, meta blah blah blah. one positive note is that facebook login may no longer be required.
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I really hope so. As in, really unlinking my VR profile from the Facebook social media and not just smoke and mirrors "hey it does not require Facebook account anymore, it now requires Meta social media account!"
 
ng4ever said:
I don't really like VR tried it but felt dizzy after a few minutes. Maybe it is just me.
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I totally expected to get dizzy, as I'm prone to motion sickness, but was surprised by the original Quest as I didn't get dizzy really, even using joystick movement. There was a few things that kinda made me uncomfortable, and playing Quake in VR for more than 10 minutes kinda made me a little woozy but that's an extreme example moving around at like 64mph or whatever quake dude runs at. there was also one kinda indie game, forgot what it was, but it totally wasn't working well, like the rendering made everything blurry, maybe it wasn't taking into account my wide ipd or something, I dunno.

I hope you give it another go sometime, try some other things, the 90Hz and higher ones may be all you need to feel comfortable
 
Youn said:
I totally expected to get dizzy, as I'm prone to motion sickness, but was surprised by the original Quest as I didn't get dizzy really, even using joystick movement. There was a few things that kinda made me uncomfortable, and playing Quake in VR for more than 10 minutes kinda made me a little woozy but that's an extreme example moving around at like 64mph or whatever quake dude runs at. there was also one kinda indie game, forgot what it was, but it totally wasn't working well, like the rendering made everything blurry, maybe it wasn't taking into account my wide ipd or something, I dunno.

I hope you give it another go sometime, try some other things, the 90Hz and higher ones may be all you need to feel comfortable
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You may be right.

Which ones are 90Hz please?

What is the Facebook one in Hz ?
 
Anyone that had a CV1 and Quest 2 give me some idea of visual improvements, tracking etc. I am still a bit unsure how they compare without sensors, as well as the wireless PC mode for fps etc.
Thanks.
 
aliaskary77 said:
Anyone that had a CV1 and Quest 2 give me some idea of visual improvements, tracking etc.
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going from CV1 to Quest 2 visuals are like going from EGA 640×350 w/16 colors up to SVGA 800x600 8-bit colors. a pretty big obvious jump but you're looking at a few more jumps like this before it's retina-level resolution
sensors are a non-issue IME, inside-out-tracking is good enough now, and way easier to set up ofc
control wise, maybe like going from track-ball to roller-ball mouse, not a huge improvement but stuff is more comfortble
I dunno about wireless PC stuff, only heard some folks have some success with it, it's not super reliable. If I had a quest 2 the only games I'd want to go PC mode for is Alyx, Echo, or sit-down sims, of which I'd be fine dealing with tethered. if you were into competitive shooter games in VR the wireless stuff will give you an advantage for sure, something more chill like Rec Room I dunno if I'd be annoyed too much by the chord
 
I couldn't find visual comparison between cv1 and quest 2, but here is quest 1 vs quest 2, and I'd say there's a similar jump between cv1 and quest 2:

https://www.groovejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Quest1and2-Bigger-768x432.jpg
https://i.redd.it/w6kvns70odo51.jpg
https://arvrtips.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/vrchat-oculus-quest-2-vs-quest-1-1.png
https://www.threesixtycameras.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/n32tfmeiwip51.jpg

I still see the pixels in quest 2, it's still noticeably blurry, and ofc the FOV is not great
 
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The Quest 2 was the first headset with high enough resolution not to bother me. I can see the pixels and the screen door effect if I look for it, but I forget about it when I'm playing a game. On lower resolution headsets it bothers me too much to get immersed. It's a pretty big upgrade over the CV1.
 
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I went from CV1 to Quest 2. The jump was HUGE. Not only is the resolution higher but the spaces between pixels are tighter thanks to RGB pixel structure instead of pentile. CV1 felt like I was looking the world through insect net, Quest 2 has next to no SDE unless you look for it against a solid color.

Only downside is that there is a slight blur because the image is encoded into video (can be greatly reduced by forcing on the image sharpening filter in Oculus Debug Tools) and that encoding also takes extra GPU power away from rendering. So go easy with the supersampling, especially if you have AMD GPU because they are worse at encoding than Nvidia.
 
MaZa said:
I went from CV1 to Quest 2. The jump was HUGE. Not only is the resolution higher but the spaces between pixels are tighter thanks to RGB pixel structure instead of pentile. CV1 felt like I was looking the world through insect net, Quest 2 has next to no SDE unless you look for it against a solid color.

Only downside is that there is a slight blur because the image is encoded into video (can be greatly reduced by forcing on the image sharpening filter in Oculus Debug Tools) and that encoding also takes extra GPU power away from rendering. So go easy with the supersampling, especially if you have AMD GPU because they are worse at encoding than Nvidia.
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Can you encode with the CPU?
 
thanks for all the feedback on q2 vs cv1. i honestly thought the next one I would change to would be something like the clarity of the varjo aero + fov of the pimax (I would settle for 120-145 deg fov). think that is ways away. q2 does seem interesting as i usually setup the sensors and take them down each time i play. wife factor. thus i rarely get get them out. not having to do that would make it easier.
 
MaZa said:
No. And that would be even worse option as far as I know.
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If you can't do it, then how would anyone know it is a worst solution? Kalston indicating latency actually makes sense also. So you are probably right as well. Would be nice if some data on this was available but if not possible then that is the end of that.
 
noko said:
If you can't do it, then how would anyone know it is a worst solution? Kalston indicating latency actually makes sense also. So you are probably right as well. Would be nice if some data on this was available but if not possible then that is the end of that.
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We know very well GPU encoding performance and that has been done on GPU for very long time simply because they are so good at it. IIRC Oculus Link is encoded in HEVC.
 
MaZa said:
We know very well GPU encoding performance and that has been done on GPU for very long time simply because they are so good at it. IIRC Oculus Link is encoded in HEVC.
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You can get better quality via CPU is my thinking, having a 3960x with 24 cores would be a non-issue for the CPU to handle but latency would indeed become an issue if terrible. Just my thinking. If it cannot be tested or done, a mute point.
 
You can maybe still get better quality with a CPU, but that's only with much slower encoding profiles, not suitable for VR or cloud gaming. No matter how much CPU horsepower you throw at it, it will be very high latency, don't forget we're talking high framerates here too (up to 120fps with Quest 2).

Meanwhile GPUs (esp nvidia) can do super low latency x264/265 encoding with really decent quality (and in the case of VR streamed over a local network - you can crank the bitrate really high so even the lowest and fastest encoding looks pretty good).
 
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