Today, we’re gonna be going over how to get Half Life Alyx working with your Quest
2 using Virtual Desktop and Oculus Air Link. We’ll give you an updated step by step guide,
as well give you our opinion on which streamer works best.
Thankfully, if you immediately got spooked by all the old steps of developer mode,
patching, and any other nonsense we had to do to make this work in
our last video - good news - none of that matters anymore.
To play Alyx on your Meta Quest 2, you now have a couple of easy options to choose
from. Before we keep going, it’s important to note that Virtual Desktop does cost $20,
while Air Link is free, but we’ll compare the two and see which one works better.
First up - let’s go over our original hero - Virtual Desktop.
The process to get it going is much easier now.
On your computer side, you’ll want to make sure that you install the Virtual
Desktop PC streamer app, Steam and it’s VR companion, as well as the Oculus App.
If you haven’t already, you also want to be sure to run the SteamVR Performance Test. This
is a free way of checking if your PC is VR ready. We’ll put links to all of these in the description
Open up the Virtual Desktop streamer app, type in your Oculus username and we recommend using the
H.264 codec. Log into steam and also make sure you’ve connected to the Oculus App on your PC.
Now onto the headset, strap that bad boy on and you’ll want to buy and install the
Virtual Desktop app in the Oculus store - and that’s it - as long as your headset and computer
are on the same network, you should be able to connect to your computer via Virtual Desktop,
open up Steam VR and run Half Life Alyx or any other SteamVR game you own.
Now onto Oculus Air Link - First - go into the Oculus PC app
and go to the settings. Open up the Beta tab and quickly check that Air Link is enabled.
In your headset, open up the settings menu and go to Experimental Features. Toggle Air Link
to open up the pairing menu and you should see your PC. Confirm the link on your PC
and you should be brought to the Oculus Air Link home environment.
There you can lounge around in your digital apartment, or jump right into some games.
In case you are not seeing SteamVR in your list of
applications in Air Link - just be sure to show Unknown Sources in your filter list.
Alright, so now that we have both streamers installed and running,
let’s see how their experience compares with each of them.
For reference, the PC that we are connecting to is an Alpha MSI 15. It’s nothing crazy or top
of the line, but it does a good job running Alyx at decent settings. We’ve listed our specs here,
but if you’re interested in streaming powerful VR games with no PC, there are services that allow
you to do so - let us know in the comments if you’d want to see a video about that!
Side by side - both Virtual Desktop and Air Link stream games from your PC pretty well. We didn’t
notice any difference in quality or latency between the two, for the most part - though it
is important to note that we did experience a couple of crashes when using Air Link.
If you do experience any latency issues, both streamers do allow you to change
refresh rate and bitrate settings in their menus - though we much prefer
the amount of control that Virtual Desktop gives you.
Remember - higher bitrate means higher quality, but may mean more latency issues. Of course,
you can also adjust Half Life Alyx’s settings in game to improve your experience as well.
So which one is better? For us, we’d go with Virtual Desktop. Aside from the fact that Oculus
Air Link is still an “experimental feature” and that we did experience a nauseating crash with it,
Virtual Desktop put in the original hard work to get PC Streaming onto the Oculus
and those developers deserve every dime that they charge for this software.
There’s no more tedious steps to get it running, and everything operates well once it’s installed.
But of course - if you’re looking to save some money,
give Air Link a try first and see how it works for you!
Alright that’s it for now, let us know if you have any questions in the comments and which other
PC VR games you’ll be launching up on your Meta Quest. We want to know what you’re playing in VR.
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