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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Rift S is being discontinued, if you want a dedicated PC headset now you'll want to look at an Index or an HP Reverb G2.

But you can plug the Quest into a PC and use it as a PCVR headset. Oculus sells a 16 ft fiber optic cable for $80, but it works well over any good quality USB 3 cable (and even works over USB 2 now).

The downside of this is that it's more front heavy than a PC headset without all the standalone guts, and I'm sure there's non-zero latency for running the video stream over a USB connection rather than a standard video cable. It works pretty well though, I think the trade-offs are absolutely worth the benefits of having a standalone headset.

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Also check out https://www.vrdesktop.net/ for PC streaming, this option works wirelessly and performs very well as long as you have a fast and stable wifi connection.

The version on the Oculus Store doesn't do SteamVR streaming though, you have to buy it and then sideload an alternate version (which still checks for a license from the store).

There's supposed to be some sort of easier sideloading system coming (currently you need to sign up for a developer account and enable developer mode), but no new info since that was announced a few months ago.

This is interesting, though I'm ready to move past the limitations of emulating real world single-screen setups. I want a virtual window manager where I can move and organize windows just like the desktop, but in 3D around me.

https://mspoweruser.com/facebook-infinite-office-virtual-off...

Pixel density isn't as high as what you'll get on a real monitor, but having lots of them ought to help make up for it.

Carmack brought this up in his talk last night, apparently with the higher pixel count in the Quest 2 the quality is now limited by the fresnel lens optics, and they won't be able to just keep bumping the pixel count up to improve visuals. So it's not clear what the path is to higher quality VR is for them. People have made headsets with more exotic multi-element glass optical setups, but there are trade-offs for cost, weight, and likelihood of things breaking if you knock it off a table.

This was demo'd in the Facebook event today as something they are actively working on and making progress with. Seamlessly switch from VR (with browser or application window floating in a VR game/app) to passthrough camera into the real world (with the browser or application windows still floating in the exact same position in space.

I too want a 50k x 10x virtual desktop.

You can also just use ALVR, which is free and works very well too:

https://github.com/JackD83/ALVR

There is latency and in VR latency is more noticeable to begin with than it is with normal gaming.

Also, there is a good amount of compression involved so the graphical fidelity takes a massive hit.

They claim that they are going to be improving both of these issues, but given that they still exist in largely the same state as they did with the Oculus Link Beta with the V1 Quest, people should be skeptical about how much improvement they are going to be able to accomplish. Carmack talked about some ideas on how it can be made better, but I don't know if he's still assisting them with anything at all.

I'm very happy with my v1 Quest, but its PC support has some significant drawbacks.

Replying to my comment because its too old to edit. Apparently Carmack is still somewhat involved and spoke at a recent Facebook event. He talked a bit about working on this problem. I'm hoping we see the results of Oculus' effort soon. I already like using it tethered to my PC, but if it can get significantly better that would be awesome.

He also mentioned he hopes they can eventually get an official wireless solution out to the public.

Yes, but with 30 ms additional latency on top of base latency for doing the same with a normal head mounted display. You can see confused questions about this all over the oculusvr forums.

So now you're tethered, your tether is more fragile, and you have significant extra latency.

Yes, serious PC VR gamers will probably want to look elsewhere, for me my gaming computer is mostly running flatscreen games and being able to enjoy games like HL: Alyx via Link is a bonus.

Standalone headsets are so much more convenient, and are affordable to people without a high powered gaming computer, so I see why Facebook is going in this direction.

Yeah I'm surprised they're not using USB-C's DisplayPort alternate mode. Why is that?

Hell, it works fine over wifi.

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