Wireless PC VR with Air Link on the Oculus (Meta) Quest 2 !

hey everybody it's lanzibe and we're back with the oculus quest 2 today because i wanted to demo a feature i've been playing around with for the last month or two that's really starting to work quite well and that is the air link feature that allows you to use your oculus quest 2 headset with your gaming pc without a cable so you can get it going on your wi-fi and get a really decent pc vr experience without having to be tethered to a cable and without any additional hardware this works native to the oculus it's a beta feature and just needs a good strong wi-fi signal to work now what you also need for this is a gaming pc of course with an adequate level of horsepower both on the cpu and gpu side and you also should have that computer connected to your network over ethernet because we're going to be pushing a lot of data back and forth from this headset and you'll definitely need to have that pc hardwired for the best results so we're going to do real quick is get this airlink feature configured and then we'll test out a few pc games and see how it works now i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for the oculus quest here with my own funds all the opinions you're about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded so let's get into it now and see how this airlink feature works all right now to configure this you need to go into your settings and then you have to go over to the experimental features and what you want to do is make sure air link here is enabled and once it is this will show up on your regular settings panel so you can access it more quickly and i have already configured the gaming pc on the other side of the room to work with this feature um so to connect to it you'll find any available computer on this oculus air link section here on your settings what you do is click on the clock here and then activate the air link and i'm just going to connect to my pc that pc is currently loaded up and the oculus software is running on it and i'm going to click on launch and that will now put my oculus here into a oculus pc headset and everything that's streaming right now on my headset is coming from this pc over my wi-fi and although i'm screencasting right now from the quest i can tell you looking inside of it it is every bit as good as when i am connected with a cable directly now before we go too much further i want to direct your attention to the settings that you have for this now again we're on the pc side right now and you probably see this thing here that says oculus air link and i'm going to click on this button and you can see the bitrate that we have it set to now i have mine right now on a dynamic bit rate and i set it to go up to a maximum of 200 megabits per second and i'm doing that because i have the bandwidth in my office here to do this amount of speed i have a wi-fi six access point that can easily handle 200 megabits but again my pc is connected over ethernet and the higher the bit rate the better the image quality is going to be by default the dynamic mode here will uh start at a hundred but i think i can handle 200 if it gets jumpy and and laggy then you'll want to kind of adjust this down or get the wi-fi access point closer to where you are you can also set a fixed bit rate if you want and here we could lock it in at 200 all the time but i think it's probably reasonable to go the dynamic route and i haven't found any real noticeable or appreciable lag in this mode and i found it's pretty good at getting things adjusted at this point now if you want to get out of airlink you can quit in this screen also and what this will do is dump you back to your quest interface because right now again we're on the pc side and another thing when you're in pc mode the hand tracking doesn't work on the quest headset at least at the moment it probably will at some point but for now when you are connected to your pc you'll need your controllers in hand now if for some reason your pc is not being detected by your headset go into settings on the pc app go over to beta and make sure that air link is enabled in the settings by flicking this switch i think down the road this detection is going to happen automatically and you don't need to turn it on every time but if it's not getting detected uh check off that button there and if you're still having trouble make sure the computer and your oculus headset are on the same local network so they can find each other one other setting that i think is important is in the devices section we're going to select my quest 2 headset here and i'm going to go over to graphics preferences here and make sure that my frame rate is set at 90 hertz i think that's kind of the sweet spot for pcvr for most configurations you can crank it up to 120 but i think 90 is probably going to be good for most casual users and that of course is better than the default of 72 hertz and that will get you some of the advantages that pcvr can offer a higher frame rate with better graphics but you won't get those unless you switch it manually into one of these higher frame rates because the default is 72. all right so we've got the game vader immortal running right now this game is for the oculus quest but there's also a pc version available and if you buy it for the quest you get it on the pc in the store and when you run it on the pc it's like a whole different game the frame rate is better the graphics are better it just looks amazing and what's so awesome about this is that just like the quest version i have all this room to walk around and i can go as far as my boundary allows but you're in a pcvr game and it's kind of nice now to have a pc vr game that i can play without having a cable attached to me getting all tangled up which happens constantly so you can see just how much better the experience can be all right so now we're going to play some steam games on here and in order to get steam games to work you have to load steamvr and the best tip that i found on this and some of you may have better ideas is to go over to the desktop to pull up your windows desktop and then just load steamvr from the desktop interface here and this will eventually get its way into your oculus library so you don't have to jump into the desktop every time you want to run a new game so what i'm going to do here is just double tap if i can do it quick enough here double tap on the steamvr game if it will start for me here and let's just open it there we go and what will happen now is the steamvr loader is going to become our new interface so we've basically loaded steam from oculus and oculus wants you to buy games from them and not from steam so they don't make it terribly easy but now i'm in the steam environment and if i pull up my library here i have access now to the steam games and i can browse what's on my system and then go to browse all for the rest of my library so i can pull down additional games that i want to play i can even buy games from here too i can launch the steam environment so i can jump into my little home thing in that section if i want so it's good now i have access to this and what i can do is if i go back to the oculus home screen in the library now you'll see steam vr so i can just load steam vr when i jump into oculus and now i've got quick access to all of my steam titles all right this is half-life alex and i'm right now in this creepy subway car just kind of walking around and if you've played this on the pc with the traditional headset or even with the quest when it's wired um the freedom of walking around without a tether is just amazing it just feels like it just feels a lot more immersive without having to have this cable that you keep getting tangled up around right i'm going to move around here a little bit with the controller check out some of the level of detail here let me get rid of my weapon for a second look at this bottle you can see the liquid sloshing around in it it's really cool i can just throw it against the wall here and break it um now we've got a bunch of bad guys over here and these are like zombie creatures that have been taken over by stuff so what i'm going to do here is just kind of sneak around this pillar and see if i can get him before he sees me all right and he's going to come after me but he's he's hurt now oh i have to reload how do i reload oh i forgot how to reload the stupid gun um yeah and can i hit him with it nope never mind um so yeah so you gotta remember how to reload the gun which i forgot how to do but you got an idea as to how this works it's pretty amazing here what uh what the level of immersion is especially with one of these aaa pc titles i have to say this is probably the most involved probably the best example of what modern pc vr can be it's just an outstanding work the graphics are amazing the texture detail everything about this is just remarkably good so i am really pleased with it this is one of those things where you quickly get immersed in a way that um just is just amazing i haven't played this game in a while my kids my kids keep like like jump scaring me whenever i'm playing this because this is like a real spooky kind of game um but you can see just how this works i mean it it's so so natural of of a a gameplay experience where you're just hiding behind things and trying not to be spotted and the whole game is like this but it's just everything about it just is amazing so if you have a pc you owe it to yourself to get half-life alex and you just figure out how to change the ammo on it all right now i look kind of ridiculous playing this game but this is beat saber and if you're going to have any issues with latency this is the kind of game where you're going to see it and i'm not great at beat saber but i'm i'm okay and i have to say i am not detecting any real noticeable lag over how this game functions with a cable attached versus over the air link if there is any latency it's very very minimal so it has been really a solid experience and you can see here it's just playing great now it looks of course better in the display than you see on screen but something like beatsaber is really where you're going to notice some issues with latency and i'm not seeing any here i think if you're one of these really uh skilled beat saver players unlike me this might be something where you might feel a bit off on songs that you're familiar with at least versus a hardwired thing but i'll tell you what it's so awesome to play this game without the restriction of a cable attached to me now in fairness this game is available on the quest natively so you don't need a pc to play this but it looks better all right so now we're playing no man's sky this is an awesome game where you can explore this procedurally generated universe right now i'm in the spaceship we are flying into a planet here i am noticing a little bit of artifacts coming through on the image right now um but it it so far has been pretty good here and this game is a bit challenging from a performance perspective you're going to probably need a pretty powerful pc to get a good experience out of this one it's not well optimized for vr because this game was originally designed just as your standard pc and console game but the vr adds like a whole new level of realism to the mix and a sense of scale that you don't appreciate until you actually play the game here so i've got a base down here this is all in 3d so i feel like i'm in this cockpit i can feel the motion going here if you get a little motion sickness you might want to be careful with games like this but i'm going to slow down here and just land my spaceship real quick and we're going to hop out of the ship and explore this world and this is a a planet my daughter and i discovered that has bubbles all over the place and what i'm going to do now is grab my thing here and just step out of my spaceship and explore this planet one issue with this game is that they don't let you walk around too much you get a warning that you're stepping outside the boundary so you have to use the controller to walk around but you've got like things like your your mining laser here and you know all this stuff that you would normally play in the regular desktop version with a controller you have now in this world that you can interact with and it's just really amazing to play this in virtual reality it's totally playable it's the same exact game in vr as it is on the regular pc mode but you get a sense of scale here that you won't get looking at a flat two-dimensional monitor and this is another one that is not available for the quest so you've got to play it on the pc and be able to do so wirelessly is pretty awesome all right this one is called crisis brigade and this is a duck and cover arcade shoot-em-up game where you've got these people trying to rob a bank with hostages and everything and as you can see here it's pretty frantic and fast-paced you got to keep your cover here and now that i've cleared out the bag this one guy left over here now that i've cleared out the bad guys we have to go inside the bank here it's a pretty challenging game this is another one that really uses the virtual environment and you really feel like you're there you've got to kind of lean around your cover here and get these guys tons of fun you got to keep reloading there are other weapons that you can acquire so those will appear at different times but it requires a lot of movement to play it's really pretty pretty fun um so this is another one that's really a lot of real blast if you will to play now i think this one's available on the quest as well but again the pc version faster frame rate better graphics more immersive and it runs great on the air link here now as far as pc compatibility is concerned you do have to make sure you've got the right cpu and gpu combo on your computer and one thing to note here is that not all gpus that would normally work with vr will work with oculus link either through the cable or over air link so there is a document on the oculus support page that gets updated fairly frequently if you are using a card below the rtx 20 series you'll want to investigate this document closely so for example the gtx 1060 which normally is a good entry level vr card won't work if it has three gigabytes of ram but will work if it has six so you'll probably need to just double check and make sure that your computer whether it's a desktop or a laptop has one of these gpus and a relatively recent amd or intel processor from the support document here though it looks like all the current 20 and 30 series cards are compatible and you can also see what amd gpus are compatible with it as well and of course this is a beta feature so things are going to change and improve over time it's definitely improved since i started playing with it and i do think the airlink feature itself is mature enough now that if you were looking for a wireless pc headset solution i think this one is definitely the one to get because not only can it work on its own it can now link up with your pc without a cable battery life i found about the same in air link as it is when you're running native quest software so you'll probably get you know two hours ish of constant game play before the battery needs to be charged you could of course hook up a battery pack to it while you are wireless to extend the life of the battery so that's one way to go about it or you could plug yourself in i guess but that kind of defeats the purpose so you do have some of the same battery limitations here but my eyes get tired when i'm in this thing for two and a half hours anyhow so i always need to take a break so all in i think a really good solution again just make sure you've got a good wi-fi access point wi-fi six is probably the best way to go if you've got a lot of wi-fi traffic in your house but ac wi-fi works as well i've got one of those upstairs and if there's nobody else on the access point i'm able to do 200 megabits without any issues that i can detect and it's a very good experience overall and again remember just get that gaming pc connected to ethernet so you have the best performance out of this setup and that's going to do it for this look at airlink on the oculus quest and we'll revisit it if things improve but i'll tell you what this is pretty much how i am doing pcvr these days it is really really good until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and 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Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 54,842

Keywords: Oculus Quest, Meta Quest, Oculus Quest 2, Meta Quest 2, Air Link, airlink, PC VR, VR, PC, wireless VR, Steam VR, overview, how to, review, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: hRkJnZgzpd4

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021