the dongle USB VR Air Bridge had already been leaked last April (see article) when a software engineer had found code referring to it in the PC drivers ofOculus. Now, here is that said dongle is about to officially release.
Let’s start from the beginning. L’Air Link existing is a (free) feature of the Meta Quest allowing us to transform our devices into PC headsets VR wirelessly through your Wi-Fi network. Although updated regularly since the first quarter of 2021, Air Link struggling to achieve unanimityespecially next to paid solutions like Virtual Desktop or even free solutions like ALVRboth released well before 2019.
The use of your Wi-Fi network compared to a dongle dedicated can present several problems. The signal can be degraded by the distance to the router (called Internet box by us) or obstacles like solid walls, and the images rendered in our helmets can be either lost, or delivered late if too many other devices clutter the network, which causes frame skipping or latency respectively. The promise of VR Air Bridge is therefore to offer you better streaming quality for your PC gaming sessions VR.
Even before the announcement ofAir Linkthe Consulting CTO John Carmack had launched the idea of a dongle Wi-Fi running a firmware custom for pc VR wireless, it’s now done. Datasheet shows that the VR Air Bridge connects to Meta Quest 2 over Wi-Fi 6 and to PC via USB 3.2 Gen 1. The latter creates a “high-speed, low-latency, dedicated point-to-point Wi-Fi link”, thus avoiding the problems of network congestion and signal propagation.
Outside of dongle and in a more global approach, D-Link went directly to Virtual Desktopwith a comparative image representing a poor quality signal with DV and a very good signal from a router D-Link. Chance doing things well…
The developer of Virtual DesktopGuy Godin, stung, answered on Twitter pointing out that its application “has shown that wireless PC VR [Meta] was viable from the start.
We translate his tweet here:
The fact that @MetaQuestVR and @Dlink need to c*** about the developer who showed them wireless PC VR was viable in the first place is worth gold.
No price or launch date has been announced for the donglebut the annual event AR/VR of Meta which takes place on October 11 (Connect 2022) could potentially tell us more.
If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, you can treat yourself to a Meta Quest 2 to the Fnac, Darty or Amazon for €449.99. You can also find good PCs for gamers there.