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Quest Techie: A Night With Oculus Link
Quest Techie is a series of articles to cater to the Oculus Quest “power user” that wants to get more from their device and has a bit of technical savvy to do it.
Since it was announced at OC6, the future Quest Link feature has easily been the most talked about and sought after functionality for the Oculus Quest. The community has been practically rabid for more information, cable specifications and of course, the inevitable release date.
On November 18th, 2019 — Oculus Link was released as a beta product to the Quest community.
What is The Oculus Link?
Before the Oculus Quest, mainstream virtual reality headsets (those not powered by a clip-in phone or device) required a powerful PC and a physical cable tether to that PC; making the VR headset more of a “remote TV for your head” than any sort of stand alone device. Along with that tethered headset, sensors could have been required (up to four) meaning that if you wanted a true, dedicated VR experience you pretty much needed a dedicated room with lots of cabling, cable management and more.
In May 2019, the Oculus Quest became the first dedicated virtual reality headset that required nothing external to play — no sensors, no cables … no nonsense.
Of course, the Oculus Quest is really built around mobile technology which means that instead of the PC carrying the load and the headset just being the “screen”, the Quest had to provide all the CPU/GPU and screen display in a single unit.
As you can imagine, that limits the “graphics and processing power” available for gaming. This required all software released for the unit to be heavily optimized and built for the limited resources.
Meanwhile, Rift/Vive/Index and other WMR headsets were getting essentially AAA games like Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland; playing favorites like Skyrim VR, Fallout and No Man’s Sky.
Those with excellent 5ghz networks and some blood, sweat and tears could actually play these PC VR games by streaming compressed video using tools like Virtual Desktop — but high delta games that needed precision input like Beat Saber simply didn’t fare well as a wifi streaming solution. Most users don’t have ideal infrastructure for high…
