Oculus Air Link is one of the most important updates ever made to a Virtual Reality headset. The function is still in beta, but it will allow you to wirelessly stream PC games to your Oculus Quest 2 glasses, and in this article we are going to tell you what you have to do to enable this functionality.
One of the things that bothers users of Virtual Reality systems the most is that the connection cables restrict movement, and in the past we have even seen PCs with the shape of a backpack to be able to solve this problem in some way. Being able to enable Oculus Air Link in the Oculus Quest 2 means that from now on you can play titles like Half-Life: Alyx completely wirelessly (assuming you have it on PC and that it is powerful enough to run the game, something we take for granted if you have a virtual reality system).
How to enable Oculus Air
At this point, some fans of a virtual reality system on PC will say that the excellent Virtual Desktop application has been offering this possibility for quite some time, although it is true that some tweaks are still needed to make it work perfectly and the game experience can be considered as good. In any case, having a wireless solution integrated directly into the virtual reality system makes perfect sense, and having multiple options to choose from is never a bad thing.
Note that this feature is still in beta at the time of this writing, so it might not work as well as you might expect. However, below we are going to tell you what you must do to enable it and once done you will not have to do anything else for when they launch the final version that should already work perfectly.
At the time of writing this article, the version of the application is v28 that Air Link already enables as an experimental function in your system, and you will precisely need to have this version or a newer one to be able to use it since in the previous ones it does not yet exist the funcionality.
Install the Oculus PC app
If you own an Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality system but haven’t connected it to your PC via Oculus Link to play Virtual Reality games on PC, you may not have yet downloaded and installed the official app to make it work correctly. So, the first thing you should do is logically download and install Oculus Link PC on your computer since this application will act as a conduit between the Virtual Reality system and your game collection.
Once you have downloaded and installed the application, you must connect your Oculus Quest 2 through USB 3.0 (the charging cable that comes standard with the device is sufficient, you do not need a special cable but you do need your PC to have USB 3.0) to then open the application and follow the instructions to synchronize the device with the PC. If when opening the application it does not automatically detect your device, first make sure that it is correctly connected to the PC and second click on Devices within the application to search for it manually.
When you are in the Devices section of the application you will know if the device is connected correctly because you will see that it has a green circle next to it with the notification “Connected”.
With this you already have the device connected and working on your PC, so we can move on to the next section that involves enabling Oculus Air to be able to use it wirelessly.
Enable Oculus Air
In the Oculus Link application, access the Settings section located on the left, and then go to the Beta tab at the top. There you will see that, at the bottom, you can activate the Air Link functionality.
The next step you must take is to put on the Virtual Reality device and make sure that you have version v28 or higher installed (you can see that in Settings -> About). If you do not have version v28 or higher yet, a message should appear informing you that there are updates available for the software, from where you can have the application automatically update to the latest version available.
Once this is done, you must access Settings -> Experimental characteristics and you will see that there you have the option to activate Air Link again (if you have just updated the software and it does not come out, you will probably have to turn the Oculus Quest 2 off and on so that appears or even restart the PC completely).
After enabling the feature in this section there is one more thing you need to do; Go to Settings -> Quick Actions -> Oculus Air link and follow the instructions to wirelessly pair your device with the PC. After completing the setup wizard, you can disconnect the cable and use your device wirelessly.
Once these steps are done, you should be able to disconnect the cable from your Oculus Quest 2 to be able to use it wirelessly through the 5 GHz wireless connection they have.
You must remember, however, that as we explained at the beginning, this functionality is in Beta phase and you may run into problems. This also means that the functionality is in constant development and that they are working to fully integrate it into the software, so it is always advisable to check for updates to the application to see if they have implemented improvements to make it work better.
With Oculus Air, the company aims to provide a more immersive full Virtual Reality experience, but remember that alternatives such as Virtual Desktop are also available if you encounter issues that prevent you from making this work, at least until they release a final version that works without problems and that you can use it continuously without fear of failure at some point.
