oculus link review

Oculus Link Beta review: an amazing solution still to be improved

In these days I have given a try to the Oculus Link, the amazing feature announced by Facebook at the Oculus Connect 6 that is able to transform the Oculus Quest into a tethered headset… let’s say an Oculus Rift Q. But is it good as people say? Is it really able to destroy completely the Rift S? Well, let’s see…

Setup

I’m planning to write a dedicated post about full Oculus Link setup and troubleshooting, so I won’t go into many details here. I just say that all you should need to make your Quest work as a Rift is:

  • Update the Oculus runtime both on Quest and PC;
  • Connect the Quest to the PC via a USB C Cable;
  • Activate Link connection on Quest via settings menu or a dedicated popup.

And that’s it. Easy peasy. This is something I loved: you don’t need any complicated setup, strange configurations and such. You just plug the USB cable, click “Confirm” on a popup on the Quest, and you have an Oculus Rift Q! Facebook did a great job in making things easy for its customers.

oculus link how to setup
Just look for your Quest in your device listing on PC, and if you have connected the USB C cable in the right way, you will find it there, ready for the setup
Setup issues

Well, the problem is that all the above awesomeness is a bit ruined by the fact that the Link is still in beta. Actually, you may find various issues:

  • Your graphical card may still not be supported;
  • Your cable may not be good enough;
  • Your USB controller may not be fast enough;
  • Depending on you being in the PTC (Public Test Channel) or not, it may work or not;
  • The audio may not route correctly from your PC to the Quest;
  • Sometimes it doesn’t start for apparently no reason and you have to restart everything;
  • Etc…

These are problems that have all happened to me, that made my setup a bit trickier. And anyway, even when I found a combination of the right cable, right USB port, etc… that made the Oculus Link work, the day after, I turned on the PC and the Oculus Quest just showed some waiting animation (three dots flashing) and it didn’t want to work, even after a reboot.

I can’t blame Oculus because the Link is clearly defined as a “Beta” solution, and Oculus has stated that it is working in improving its compatibility and stability. But you had better know that your setup may not be a straightforward procedure and that the solution may glitch sometimes. It will all depend on the particular combination of runtime versions, cable, USB controller, etc…

Comfort

The Oculus Quest is not the most comfortable headset on the market since it is quite front heavy. Using it for prolonged periods of time leaves red signs on my face, so personally I wouldn’t use it for many consecutive hours. Anyway, for just spending some time in VR it is for sure good.

Oculus Quest red face
Visible red signs on my face after I have played for half an hour at The Wizards with my Oculus Quest

Adding a cable attached to the front doesn’t make this situation better for sure: the cable adds even more weight to the front, and since it is attached to one side of the device, it makes also the Quest unbalanced towards your left.

I have to say that in my tests I have not found this too annoying, but I noticed the additional discomfort for sure.

Image quality
Through the lenses images of Rift S, Rift and Link. See that Link has the worst quality in the end, because of compressions. But while you use it, you don’t notice that that much (Image from Tyriel Wood)

Looking in front of me, I could enjoy my amazing PC VR content. I can tell that this really seemed like a Rift. Yes, probably if I had a Rift S and continuously switched between the two, I could notice some slight difference (because the Quest shows compressed content sent from the PC), but actually just looking through the Quest, I couldn’t spot I was looking at compressed frames. It seemed like a tethered headset. This is Carmack’s black magic.

Only the part of the frames closer to the edges of the lenses had a quite bad quality because the content is compressed using some kind of fixed foveation, so the external parts of the frames are the ones that are degraded the most. Most of the time, this is not a problem, also because the regional parts of the imagery are a problem in almost all VR systems at the moment.

oculus link compression
Zoom of the output of Oculus Link: as you can see, the external area has very mediocre quality (Image from Reddit)
Image latency

Oculus engineers have done an excellent job in reducing latency at minimum, and in fact, when I played with my Rift Q I couldn’t see any latency. This is thanks to a very complicated system of compression and optimized transmission that Oculus has explained on its blog.

Anyway, even if I couldn’t spot any latency, I could perceive it. That is, I had not the impression of the system lagging, but my proprioceptive system understood that something was wrong. While using the Link I had a slight sense of dizziness if I moved my head too much, so I guess that that tiny bit of latency that the system adds is enough to annoy my brain.

For my tests, I have used the Amazon Basics cable, that many people have advised me to use. It is not the recommended cable, not even the official Link cable that Oculus will release soon, so maybe with the official $79-cable this problem is reduced.

Application performances
RoboRecall review of VR game
Playing the PC version of Robo Recall on my Quest was amazing! (Image by Oculus)

My PC VR games run pretty well while using the Link, and I could use all of them as if I was using my Rift. I could just notice some slowing downs sometimes, maybe because of the hard work that my GTX 1080 was doing.

The only moments where I had really big problems have been when I tried to play some 5K VR videos on my PC. It seems that the burden on the graphics card was too much to handle both the decompression of the video and the compression of the frames for the Quest, so the video player had problems in playing the content.

Tracking

The positional tracking didn’t seem super-fluid in my tests. I had the impression it sometimes slightly stuttered, and this problem worsened when I tried some computationally heavy games. Don’t misunderstand me, it was good, but the tracking of my CV1 is much smoother and reliable.

Regarding the controllers, instead, I found the tracking very fluid. Someone says that the 4 cameras of the Quest are not enough to use the controllers in every possible position, but I think that for most applications they are more than enough.

Final impressions
OC6 Oculus Link
Mark Zuckerberg announcing the Oculus Link

I loved using my Quest as a Rift thanks to the Oculus Link. It is a very handy solution, and I think that Oculus has done a great job with it. The Quest now can work as a tethered PC, and when it works, the results are really good.

Anyway, it is still a beta solution, and some problems may arise: it may be unreliable, it may glitch, or it may even not work at all with your PC (e.g. if you have an AMD graphics card). The image quality and the tracking are not exactly like the ones of a Rift, but they are very close. I think that there is still the need of working on the Link to make it even closer to the performances of a real PC VR headset.

I have to say that some people I have spoken with have noticed no one of the problems that I have stated above, and this makes me think that the actual performances may depend on your particular Quest+cable+PC configuration, plus your sensitivity to VR content. So, your mileage may vary, and also this is a problem that Facebook is actively working on.

oculus link rift s damo9000
Damo9000’s point on view on Oculus Link vs Oculus Rift S (Image by Damo9000)

Can the Oculus Link substitute a PC VR headset like the Rift S? From my tests, yes and no. I think it is good if you are an occasional user of PC VR content: if you mostly use the Quest as a standalone, and sometimes you think to attach it to play a Rift game like Asgard’s Wrath, then it is perfect. But if you use a lot of PC VR content, I’d personally still stick to a PC VR headset, for more stability, comfort, and performances.

As a professional, for instance, I can’t afford to have a PC headset that “sometimes doesn’t work” because of the glitches of the Beta. Or having a device that is uncomfortable to use for many hours. So I will keep the Quest and at the same time a PC VR headset.

But if you just need to play games for like 1 hour each day, I think that the Quest is good for you both as a PC and standalone headset.

As always, it depends on the case. For now, I just compliment Oculus for the impressive job done 🙂


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