While it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the countless VR worlds at our fingertips, sometimes we just need to access the desktop and get things done in Windows. Thanks to a few innovative apps, this is possible without removing your headset.
With the beta launch of Oculus Rift Core 2.0, which introduces ‘Dash’, a new universal menu with a new way to access your Windows desktop, it’s time to take a fresh look at the current virtual desktop solutions available for Vive and Rift. As, the original Rift menu system has been completely overhauled, resulting in a more capable interface with powerful functionality.
Oculus Home has become a customisable living space with obvious similarities to SteamVR Home, and will eventually support social interaction. Oculus Dash is a replacement for the old Universal Menu, but feels considerably more integrated, as it is no longer a separate blank space, but rather a three-dimensional, transparent overlay that can run inside any Oculus app. Oculus Desktop (built into ‘Dash’) Supported Platforms: Oculus (Rift – in beta via ‘‘) Part of the new Dash interface is Oculus Desktop, which allows direct access to your Windows Desktop.
Unlike SteamVR’s Desktop shortcut, which still feels like an afterthought (it continues to exhibit poor performance and is confused by my secondary display connections that aren’t even enabled), Oculus Desktop feels pretty seamless, with crisp image quality and smooth performance. The most impressive feature is the ability to grab any window or app on the main desktop view and pull it into the virtual space, repositioning and resizing it as you see fit. This was a key feature of the now-defunct Envelop, but Oculus Desktop does it even better,, they’ve “built true virtual displays at the hardware level” meaning that performance is maintained even when surrounded by desktop apps.
Free Vr Desktop For Pc
A new app from developer Cindori called VR Desktop for Mac provides a virtual reality experience of macOS using the popular VR headset Oculus Rift. The main idea of the project is to allow for a virtual multi-monitor workspace, meaning users can create virtual screens and interact with macOS using an entirely VR desktop. Mac VR support is more confusing than you think. What Apple's new High Sierra OS brings is full support for GPU docks in its graphics API. But I don't want a traditional desktop or an iMac.
YouTube 60fps videos, for example, play flawlessly in these virtual displays, as do non-VR PC games. Accessing the Dash while in Oculus Home makes it appear as if Dash is part of the Home space, but this is not the case—Dash can be brought up anywhere, while using any VR app (although developers need to make some tweaks to allow it to pop up inside of their app, rather than taking users to a blank room). Image courtesy Oculus If you start repositioning desktop windows in interesting ways while Home is active, it can appear similar to Microsoft’s ‘Cliff House’ for Windows Mixed Reality, whose apps lock to the virtual environment—Microsoft’s solution is positioned as a place to get work done, allowing apps to float in completely different areas of the virtual environment, but this is limited to ‘Universal Windows Platform’ apps.
Oculus Desktop is potentially more powerful, as it supports the repositioning of any desktop PC app, but it doesn’t allow apps to lock to the environment, instead always appearing relative to the user’s central position. In theory, independent virtual displays is a neat idea, but in practice it can be awkward at times. Oculus’ implementation, while slick, isn’t fundamentally more intuitive than what we’ve seen before, and I still find myself stumbling over simple tasks.
This is partly because moving windows independently in space while still seeing them in the main desktop display is confusing, partly because it’s a beta and certain things don’t work quite right (the ‘show hidden icons’ of the system tray didn’t seem to function, certain dialog boxes are problematic, mouse support isn’t the best, etc.), and partly because we’re still limited by first-generation headset resolution. Oculus Desktop produces the clearest image I’ve seen from a virtual desktop solution, but it is still not practical as a monitor replacement, requiring excessively large virtual windows to comfortably read text, or to effectively use creative apps that require high precision input Virtual Desktop Supported Platforms: (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), (Rift) Experimenting with desktop interaction since 2014, Virtual Desktop has established itself as one of the leading apps in this category.
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