5139

How crap am I a nerd. I got the Quest 2 today and got it setup. I did the ‘First Steps’ tutorial and was grinning like a goober. I had such a blast just throwing the paper airplanes, flying the remote controlled blimp, punching the speed bag. My 13 year old son thought it was pretty cool too. My wife was like, “how much longer do I need to do this? Give me something fun.”

I’m installing The Room VR and Half-Life Alyx on Steam now. I hope I don’t have trouble getting that stuff to work.

Do I only need to install Seam VR and run it if I play over a USB-C cable?

5140

No, you also need to install the Oculus software.

5141

Wouldn’t that already be installed if he played first steps?

5142

It installed right onto the headset, no pc needed.

5143

Thanks!

5144

Nope, since First Steps is a Quest app and not a PC app.

edit: beaten to it! :D

@robc04 In case it’s not clear, you want the ‘download software’ button underneath ‘Quest 2/Oculus Link’ section.

5145

I just played The Room VR and it was awesome. I think I started feeling just a little queasy at the end, but I had been using the headset for around 4 hours with a charging break of an hour or so.

5146

And you need to select an option that says something about allow unknown apps.

5147

I want to make sure I understand this right. The VR headset (Quest 2 for me) has a relatively small sweet spot where things look its best, looking straight ahead.Things get a little blurry outside this sweet spot. Both in Quest menus and Steam, I don’t have trouble reading text at all, but it isn’t sharp. I don’t think this is due to the screen effect. I’ve played with the IPD and moving the headset around on my head. I’ve closed one eye to see how good that is.

This is to be expected, right? Or, are there settings that can improve things? When I play The Room VR through Steam VR, the textures seem a bit muddy or lower res. Sometimes if I get close to something and look at it right in front of me it improves some. It’s playing at a 72 Hz refresh rate. Movement is fine and turning my head is fine, not choppy.

I guess what I’m asking is are there things I can do to improve how crisp things look? If not, it’s not a huge deal as The Room VR is very cool.

5148

This is to be expected even if all the variables under your control are set correctly (IPD, texture settings, hardware requirements, eye piece distance, headset positioning) so first verify they are all correct. Any of these can cause blurriness but even with the perfect setup the lenses of any VR setup have a tricky balancing act with the shape and segmentation of the lenses. I don’t have a Quest 2 but the basics apply to most units - simply put, you are likely turning your eye such that you are looking at the outer limits of its optimal area. Unfortunately, if the designers adjust it such that it widens the “sharp image” area, it will suffer in other areas. I’ve found that my brain is getting better at interpreting that data but more importantly, it has learned to execute more minor head adjustments to optimize image sharpness instead of relying on eye movements for everything.

5149

Pretty much, it’s why making sure the fit is spot on is important. All current headsets get a bit blurry if you move your eyes instead of your head. You soon adjust to mainly moving your head.

It’s hard to know exactly what you are seeing/perceiving but generally yeah, things in the distance can appear low res, muddy, or aliased, as there is still just not enough resolution.

But objects should look really nice if you bring them right up to your face. Try studying the gravity gloves in HL: Alyx for example.

5150

Thanks guys. The Room did have a couple graphics options that added some visual features to the game, which improved the overall look a little. Overall I am very happy with how it looks and it is so cool to be right in the middle of it. I’ll gladly give up some of the graphical detail for an experience like this. I think it may be even cooler than I was expecting. I had tried Beat Saber at a demo and it was a lot of fun, but a game like The Room where you really benefit from being there is on a whole new level. I have Half Life Alyx, The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners, Skyrim, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and Dirt Rally 2 that I have yet to try.

I think I’m pushing how much my brain can handle VR at a time as after a session I do feel a little off. I had the coolest experience in the room though. There was a part where I activated a puzzle and the next thing I knew I was standing on a little platform up in the air and my reaction was just like it would have been in real life. I kind of bent my knees to steady my balance.

So the VR playthroughs on Youtube, are they showing what they see through their headset or what it would display on their monitor? Because the textures and stuff seem a little more crisp then what I see on my headset.

5151

Keep in mind that native Q2 games have been downscaled to fit inside the storage footprint, not to mention the compute footprint. The same game simply has more definition coming from PC despite the headset’s resolution, to an extent.

5152

All my games are Steam games at the moment

5153

Ah, then ignore, didn’t realize you were on full corded mode. The ones I installed that were cross-buy were fitting into maybe 1/4 the storage space, so I have to assume (and do notice) that textures, etc. are definitely downgraded.

5154

This is normal, after a week or two you should be fully acclimatised.

Haha yeah the brain is easy to fool it seems, it’s easy to trigger fear of heights in particular. This is why something like Richie’s Plank Experience (using a real bit of wood under your feet) is so compelling for most people.

Those would be showing a mirror of one of the headset eyes (you can turn a mirror on so other people can see on a monitor what you are doing VR). That image it will look crisper on a small flat screen than it does when blown up through a lens right in front of your face and wrapped around you.

5155

For those using Voice Attack for a flight sim or mil sim… what did you end up binding to voice? Complicated stuff, or really simple stuff like flaps?

5156

Check Steam VR supersampling and turn it off (or 100%) globally for now.

Then check the Link Render Resolution in the Oculus Desktop software, is your system able to set it to 1.7 and still run the games smoothly?

If you can’t run 1.7 smoothly, back that down to 1.6 or 1.5 or whatever you can and leave Steam on 100%. If you can CAN run 1.7 smoothly you can try turning UP Steam VR supersampling past 100, though 1.7 at 100% should be pretty sharp.

I didn’t really test leaving it at 1.7 and turning down Steam supersampling, in theory that might look better in some scenarios where your video encoding isn’t the bottleneck.

5157

Good point, I keep forgetting that Link has extra settings that control image quality! Supersampling can definitely improve things if you have the horsepower.

I’d be a bit wary of advising new users to start setting resolution in multiple places though, since Link Render Resolution and SteamVR supersampling both do the same thing and their settings are multiplied together.

@robc04 Apart from the render resolution, you also have the Encode Bitrate which could be contributing to a lower quality image.

You can set this in the Oculus Debug Tool (which would have been installed alongside the main Oculus software).

image

Increasing this can lower performance and add latency, but improve image quality by reducing compression artefacts.

I think it defaults to 150. Going beyond 250 is discouraged. You may notice improvements up to 350 or so. 500 is the maximum.

5158

I’m not sure but I think the Link effects not just the render resolution of the original image, but also the resolution of the video being sent to the Quest itself, which is why it’s the thing you want to try to max out first. Or maybe it just happens to line up with the encode resolution at 1.7?

Virtual Desktop works this way for sure, which is why you sometimes want to max out the resolution in VD, but then subsample in Steam. In any case 1.7 looks really good!

In my experience Nvidia cards in general look a lot cleaner in Quest, especially the 2000 and 3000 cards with the latest NVENC.

In v23 of Oculus Link, the new app-resolution slider maxes out @ 5408x2736 (combined-eyes). This isn’t a random number we picked for Quest 2. It is the number that achieves 1:1 app-to-display pixel ratio at the center of the displays assuming the encode & display is 3664x1920.

So while the slider achieves similar results as the “pixel density” override in ODT, it doesn’t go into the “super-sampling” range as many folks think it does. The higher you can push the slider, the crisper the app visuals will get, assuming your GPU can keep up w/ the perf hit.