If you've just got a Quest 2 then here are some of the best life hacks,
tips and tricks that you should be doing for the Oculus Quest to make your life better.
From getting a clearer picture through to getting access to a whole host of free games
and plenty of other hacks in between, all of these are guaranteed to be life-changing! Well,
they should at least make your life a little bit better!
So here are the world's, well, my, top 40. Yes,
40! Best life hacks tips and tricks for the Oculus / Meta Quest 2.
Stop unauthorized people getting access to your Quest headset by locking it. You
can do that by setting a lock pattern. This is available in the settings of the headset itself,
under the security tab. Once you set that, unless you know the pattern you can't use it.
Free money! Who doesn't want free money?! Anybody can get free money from their Quest
headset! This is through the referral link. In the Oculus app on your phone, click on your
avatar logo and there is a referral link. Click on that and you will get a unique url. If you
share that with a friend and they then go and buy a Quest headset both you and your friend will get
$30 of credit in the app store once they've activated their headset. You can do that up
to five times a month so if you know a lot of friends that's a lot of money!
When you're playing on your Quest headset you can get a little bit turned around and not really know
which ways forwards, backwards, left or right. If you hold down the Oculus button on your controller
it will reset the center of the game, or the center of your view, to right in front of you.
It's a great way to centralize and get your bearings back together again.
It is important to look after your eyes because, let's face it, the screen isn't exactly too far
from your eyes itself. So you can enable a night mode if you want to play into the night. This
acts a little bit like a blue filter and reduces the amount of harmful blue rays
that is going to hit your eyes. If you go into the quick settings of your headset
then there is a sun icon. Turn that on and that will enable the blue light night mode. You will
notice the colors change a little bit yellow. That is the consequence of turning that on though.
Still, what's more important? The color, or your eyes?
Flicker-free smooth gameplay is super important and by default the Quest isn't running as fast
as it could. It runs at 90 hertz by default. It can run at 120 hertz. That will give you even
smoother buttery gameplay. It does that though at the detriment of battery life and sometimes in
some games performance will suffer a little bit as well. Still, generally, it is worth turning it on.
So, go into the settings of your headset. Go to the experimental tab and there is a
120 hertz toggle. Make sure you turn that on. If it does make some of your
games go funny then just go back into the menu setting and turn it back off again.
If you want to see the environment around you and get your bearings for where you actually are then
normally you just take off your headset. Now you don't have to because now you can just tap
the side of your headset and the cameras will show you your outside world. This is called
double-tap pass-through. You can turn this on in the settings of your headset.
So go into your settings. Go to the guardians tab and turn on the “double tap pass-through”
and now you can see the world around you. To turn that off again just double
tap the side of your headset again and then you're back in your game.
Show your mates your best move by taking a screenshot.
Hold down the Oculus button and the trigger button of the right
controller for about a second and it will take a screenshot of what you're playing.
Looking after your lenses and making sure they're in the right position are crucial
to making sure you get a clear picture in your games. First up, make sure they're in
the right position. The Quest itself has three different positions for the lenses. One, two,
or three, which equates to 58, 63 or 68mm. That's the distance between both of your
eyes which is called your IPD. Now if you don't know what your ipd is then you can go
and get apps on your phone for instance, like Eye Measure, that will measure your
IPD for you and then just go and select the option that is closest to that measurement.
Another hack you can do is that if your IPD is in between those settings of 1,2 or 3, so the 58, 63,
or 68, then you can actually put it halfway. Now it's a little bit of a jiggle but you can kind of
balance it on that halfway mark. So you might find that actually works really well for you,
and it's not exactly something that Oculus tells you about…or is that ‘Meta’ now? I give up!
Please protect your lenses, and make sure you do that properly. Don't go and clean
your lenses with a woolly jumper! Make sure you use a proper cleaning cloth,
either something that comes with a normal pair of glasses or a camera lens cleaning cloth will do as
well. You can also get lens protectors for your Quest headset as well, so they cover your lenses
and stop them from getting scratched, and a lot of them have blue light filters built into them
as well. You can also get prescription lenses as well so you don't need to wear glasses when you're
on your Quest headset. That can actually be really useful because it actually prevents your lenses,
or your glasses, from scratching the lenses of the headset. Lots of options in that space.
Don't leave your headset in direct sunlight, and that includes inside
the house as much as it does outside. Those lenses can act as magnifying glasses
and burn holes in the LCD screen that's behind it so please put it in a case,
put a cover over the lens, just make sure there's no sun hitting those lenses.
The guardian sets the boundary of your gameplay on your Quest headset,
and you can actually change the color and the sensitivity of it.
So if you're color blind, or you want the guardian to stand out more or less,
then that's a good option. So in the settings on your Quest headset there is a ‘Guardian’ tab.
Inside there you can change the color to blue, which is what it is by default, and you can
also change it to purple and yellow. You can also change the sensitivity of it. This is incredibly
useful in fast paced games where you might not want it showing as often as it normally does.
Even with the guardian turned on there's no guarantee you're not going to punch someone
in the face as they walk past you. So in order to help with that there
is ‘Space Sense’. This will show an outline of anyone that invades your guardian space
whilst you're playing. This is super useful because I've got kids and
dogs and cats and they all have a habit of trying to walk through my feet as I'm playing.
And adding on top of that, you can even add your furniture into your VR space as well. So in the
‘Experimental’ tab in your settings there's an ‘add sofa into VR’ option that allows you to
then draw out your sofa in real life, and then that sofa then appears in your virtual life. Now
whilst you're not going to use that for every single game, for things like sitting back and
watching a movie it's a really cool addition to start adding your real life into your virtual one.
If you don't have a third party controller grip cover like this one
then you can change the default wrist strap that comes with the Quest 2 out-of-the-box
into a makeshift hand grip. Simply take the strap off the base. Wrap it around
the ring at the top. Attach it to the base again. Voila! Makeshift grip strap.
And you don't even need controllers because you can control the home screen and some games with
your hands! You can do this by enabling hand tracking. Go into the settings. Go
into the ‘Hands and Controllers’ section and turn on ‘hand tracking’. You can also
enable ‘auto tracking’ and it will then switch between the controllers
and your hands because it knows whether you put your controllers down or not.
Doesn't work in all games, but in the games it does work in it's pretty cool.
You can install games from your phone! So if you've got the Oculus app on your phone then
you can browse the Oculus store on there, find what you want, and then once you've found the
game that you want simply click on ‘install to headset’ or ‘install to Oculus Quest 2’.
It will then make sure that the game is installed on the headset
because it's often easier to browse the store on your phone than it is on the headset.
And if you've bought a game and you don't like it then you can get your money back. If you have
owned a game for less than 14 days and played it for less than two hours then you can get a refund.
‘App Lab’ games are experimental games that haven't quite made it onto the main Quest
store yet but are available in the Quest store, which sounds a little bit confusing. But what it
means is you can't find them in the main page but you can find them if you search for them.
Which isn't really helpful because if you're trying to find experimental games then you
can't find them unless you know the name, which means you know the name of the game so
what was the point in trying to search for it in the first place?!
Go to the SideQuest website where you can find a tab which will show you all the ‘App Lab’ games
are available. Then you can just browse that to your heart's content. Find one that you like,
and when you click on the link. It will send you
to the main Oculus store where you can then install the game on your headset.
And when you are looking at games make sure that you pay attention to the comfort rating.
So this is a rating from ‘Comfortable’ to ‘Intense’ that tells you how, well,
comfortable a game is. So the more intense games are going to make you feel maybe more
slightly nauseous and motion sickness than if you had a more sedentary game where you just
sat down. Echo VR is probably a great example of a game that makes you feel nauseatingly sick
because you're in a Zero-G environment, where if you sat down and played Cubism, not so
much. So just make sure you pick a game that's suited to how much VR experience you've had.
You can share your apps and games with up to three other people on your headset so they
don't have to go and buy the game, they can just use your copy because you've gone and bought it
already. So in the settings on the headset go into ‘Accounts’ and go on ‘App Sharing’ and turn
that on. That will then take you through a process to go and add someone else's account.
That person, when they log in, will then also have access to all the games that you've got.
So if you're a group of close friends, or family, it's a great way where one person can buy the game
and many people can play. Bear in mind though that it is a one-way street so only the people
that have been added can use the games of the master account holder. The master account holder,
or the first user of the Quest headset, can't use the games of the people that you add later.
If however, rather than share a game, you'd rather buy a game for a friend? Well you can do that too.
When you're in the App Store, and on the game page of the game you want to buy for your friend,
click on the three dots and there's a ‘Buy for a Friend’ option.
When you fill that out it will send a unique code to the email address that you enter.
So your friend essentially gets that game for free because you bought it for them.
So as well as games off the main Quest store, and also the App Lab games, you can also sideload
games onto your Quest headset as well using SideQuest. This gives you access to a whole
wealth of games outside of the Oculus Quest Meta ecosystem that you otherwise wouldn't
have access to. Now in order to set this up you will need to go and create a developer account,
install some games, and the step-by-step process for this is outside the length of this video.
However. I and plenty of other people have done step-by-step guides. So if you want to go and
check that out then make sure you check the link in the video I'll put in the description
down below. It's definitely worth checking out because there's some awesome games over there.
If you want to take playing extra games to a next level then you can play PC
VR games wirelessly on your Quest headset. Now you will need a 5GHz wi-fi router, preferably wi-fi 6,
and a VR capable PC in order for this to work. But if you've got that then you can
use ‘Air Link’ on your Quest headset to play the games on the PC, and view them and play them on
your Quest headset. You have access to some of the best VR games available. ‘Half-life:
Alyx’ is awesome. I do have some videos taking you through some quick setup guides of that,
so again I'll put those in the description down below for you.
If you don't want to do any of that but still want access to more games then I thoroughly recommend
checking out WebVR games. Just go into the browser on your Quest headset and type in ‘webvr’ and you
will find some webvr amalgamation sites such as ‘webvr.directories’ which shows you all the webvr
games that are available. These games run in your browser and there are actually some pretty good
games out there. I thoroughly recommend checking out ‘Moonrider’ which is kind of a bit like
Beat Saber and a little bit like ‘FitXR’. There's a punch mode and there's like a
saber mode as well. There’s some really cool games out there and definitely worth checking
out. It is actually amazing how well they run considering they're running in your browser.
And with all these games on your Quest headset you can eventually run out of memory. Now you
can go into the store and delete one game at a time but that's a little bit cumbersome. You
can delete lots of games all in one go. So, in the settings on your headset, go into ‘Storage’.
That lists out all the games that are installed. Simply click on all the ones you want to delete.
Click on ‘Done’, and then all of those games are deleted in one go.
You can change the virtual environment of the home screen really easily. Simply go into ‘settings’
and ‘system and personalization’ and you will have a list of home environments you can select.
Simply choose which one you want which will then get installed and then set
by default. Then, the next time you go back to your home screen it will change
the home environment to the new environment you selected. There are some really cool ones
in there so I'd say install them all and have a bit of a play and see which one you like best.
And whilst you're on that home screen you can also move the home menu. So if you find the home menu,
or the home bar, too far down or too far up on your screen, if you get your controller and you
point it at the base of the home bar there is a line across the middle of it in the bottom.
Hold your trigger finger down on that and then move your controller around the screen
and it will move the entire home bar around so you can put it in the best place for you.
You can also create your own custom avatar which will then appear in some games.
So on that main home screen click on your profile image, then click on ‘edit avatar’.
You will then have a whole screen where you can go and change your avatar to whatever you want.
Your height. Your weight. The color of your hair. Your clothes. Whatever.
If you want to track your fitness in VR, you can do that now with the Oculus Move app.
Install that from the app store and then you can set things like your maximum number of steps,
maximum amount of activity, or target amount of activity.
It will track that and you can set an overlay as well so it will appear over the home screen
and over games to show how you're tracking. Think of it like an apple watch in VR.
There are a number of settings that are just easier to use in the mobile app rather than
the headset. First up, factory reset. Super easy to do in the app. Go into the app. Click on the
‘Devices’. Click on your device. In the ‘advanced settings’ there is a ‘factory reset’ option.
Click on that and it will factory reset your device. Something that
we all hope we never have to do, but let's face it, at sometime we all probably will.
You can sync all the media files from your headset to your phone, which is super useful
if you want to share your media then on social media or with friends or family,
because let's face it it's just a little bit easier from your phone. In order to do that
though you will have to go into the ‘files’ app on your headset first. Once in there make
sure you enable sharing. There's a cloud icon in the top right-hand corner. Make sure that it is
enabled and turned on. Once that's toggled on, if you then go into the app it will eventually show
you all of your synced media from your headset to your phone. If you do want to disable it at
any point you can do that by going into the files app on the headset again. Click on the cloud icon
in the top right-hand corner and there'll be a line going through it which means it's disabled.
You can also use the mobile phone to connect your headset to your wi-fi because it's easier
to put your wi-fi password in using your phone than it is using the controller on your headset.
So if you've forgotten your wi-fi password, your headsets become disconnected from your wi-fi,
for whatever reason, this is really useful. In the app, click on the ‘Devices’ tab.
Click on your device and then click on the ‘wi-fi’ option. Then just select the wi-fi of choice and
it will ask you to enter your password. It will then go and connect your headset to the wi-fi.
Who doesn't want a little bit of privacy on the web? Well, there are some privacy settings in
the Quest that helps with that. So, inside the settings there's a ‘privacy’ tab. Click on that
and you can choose how much visibility people have of what you're doing. So it will show you
whether you or your friends or anybody can see whether you're logged on, what you're playing,
and who your friends are. Now it's not a massive range of privacy settings but it
is better than nothing. I'd like a little bit of control over how much Facebook tracks you
given that it's Mark Zuckerberg doing his Facebook thing at the moment.
But, we'll see where we go with that. For now though, something is better than nothing.
And on the subject of privacy, please don't leave your headset on. Now there is the obvious thing
of if you leave it on it's going to drain power. You need to go and recharge it more
often which means the battery won't last as long, so that kind of preserves that side of things.
The other side of it is, do you want a device that has four cameras and a mic
array sitting on standby in the middle of your lounge? I would say “probably not”.
So for that aspect, and the power saving aspect as well, turn it off when you're not using it.
Here's a tip… Make sure your Quest 2 doesn't blow up! So a number of people have reported
the charging port on their Quest 2 melting. Now this is largely down to using third-party charges.
So my recommendation is to use the official charger that came with the Quest 2 out-of-the-box
where you can. If you must use a third-party charger, or a third-party charging cable,
make sure that you use one from a known brand.
If you're a power user and would like to use multiple screens on your Quest headset
at any one time, you now can! So there is a multitasking mode. Inside the settings,
the experimental tab, there's a ‘enable multitasking mode’
that allows you to have up to three screens side-by-side. So for browsing on youtube,
or whatever, you can have them all side-by-side and do them all at once, if that's your thing.
Now, playing in VR is all well and good, but if you're playing and your friend’s around and
they can't see what you're doing, well it all gets a bit boring for everybody else.
Fortunately you can show what you're playing on a TV screen so
everybody can see how bad you are at playing Beat Saber. In order to do that you can cast
from your headset to any cast compatible device. So that can be a TV, could be a laptop, a
tablet, could be anything. To enable this from the main menu, click on the ‘sharing’ icon
and then select ‘cast’. It will then give you a list of compatible devices that it can cast too.
Select whichever one you want. It will then cast your screen to that device. It's a great way of
sharing game play with your friends and family when they've come around for a bit of a laugh.
So, the speakers in the Quest headset are okay. They're not exactly screaming audiophile quality
though. So in order to get the best sound, well, get a pair of headphones! I know that sounds kind
of obvious, but I don't mean go out and buy a pair of headphones. Because you can get Logitech G333’s
and the G Pro’s which Logitech make as well as have a Quest 2 variant. However, you don't need
to do that because the Quest 2 is compatible with any pair of headphones with a 3.5mm jack,
which is pretty much any pair of wired headphones. So really, the best pair of headphones you can use
are probably the pair you already have. And if you've got a pair of headphones like the Logitech
G Pro’s that have a detachable cable then you can replace the really long cable with a super short
one. I will put a link in the description down below for some short cables that you can go and
buy. It really does up the immersive gameplay and is definitely worth having a look at.
Various tips and tricks can only take you so far because at the end of the day you are limited by
the hardware of the Quest headset itself. So I would say here's another tip…accessorize!
Look at the wealth of third-party accessories that are available in the market. So if we look
at my headset here I've got a third-party head strap. I've got another facial interface on
here. The controllers I've got have controller grips on them as well,
and they really do make a difference to your gameplay. I've reviewed a wealth of them so if
you're going to have a look at my channel there's definitely things that are worth having a look at.
Which leads me to tip number 40. Subscribe to my channel! If you have enjoyed the video and
you'd like to see more videos like this then yes, please subscribe to my channel. It really
helps this channel and hopefully gives you more videos that you enjoy and find helpful.
So if after doing all these tips and tricks you want to pimp your Quest even further
then be sure to check out my video up here for some great Quest 2 accessory ideas.
Thanks for watching, and as always…
See you in the next one!