Immersed VR

At the time of this writing, I'm currently somewhere with shelter-in-place orders still active. I'm staying with my family here whose home is not the most spacious place to be in. As a result, there's a limited amount of space that I can work in.

Back in my physical office, I worked with at least 2 monitors, depending on whether my laptop screen is active. Since quarantine began I've been using just the built-in laptop monitor to work in. While it's been sufficient, I was starting to miss having a multi-monitor setup.

That's when I started testing out Immersed VR, an app that connects to your computer and gives you access to virtual monitors inside your Oculus Quest/Go. I held off on it for awhile because they did not yet have a Linux client available, but once they did I went ahead with the trial.

I purchased a Go specifically for this purpose (and because I'd left my Quest back in my apartment in San Francisco) once the prices weren't ridiculously hiked up.

I was pleased to see how easy setting up my Go up with Immersed was on Pop!_OS. It was a matter of installing the app for the Go, and then installing the Immersed agent on my laptop.

My one gripe is that in order to connect your computer to your Oculus Go/Quest you have to enter your email and have a code sent there, and then enter that code on your computer. But honestly, given that I'm not going to do this often it's not too big a deal.

To get the virtual displays working on Intel is fairly straight forward. I used this very useful set of configs and scripts to enable them. Immersed VR doesn't yet officially support the virtual displays, but if you are just using an integrated Intel graphics card then this should work.

Nvidia, however, is a little more involved. I did have to buy dummy HDMI, USB-C, and Mini-DP plugs to "trick" my computer into thinking it has physical monitors plugged in. That has worked pretty well for me so far.

To improve performance I took note of the recommendations that the developers had on using Immersed and bought a USB 3.0 Wi-Fi module. This is to improve latency between the headset and your computer by connecting them directly over Wi-Fi. You use the adapter to connect to your router and then turn your built-in Wi-Fi adapter to a hot spot.

I also decreased the resolution of each of the virtual displays to 1440x900 and lower. My laptop has a 4k screen, and unfortunately Immersed did choke on a high resolution like that. HiDPI isn't something I find useful in VR though, so lowering the resolution wasn't too big a deal for me and it did improve Immersed's performance quite a bit.

Overall, I find this set up very promising. My main issue right now though is the amount of CPU Immersed seems to use on my machine (when running my integrated Intel GPU), and how my Oculus Go overheats after a bit of time in Immersed. I have a powerful laptop and have wifi direct set up, and yet even then it'll hang from time to time.

I'm confident the developers of Immersed will ring out these issues eventually though, and I'm looking forward to continuing to use the app while I continue to lack access to my office.