Virtual Desktop Update Adds Quest 3 Support & Quest Pro VRChat Face/Eye Tracking

Virtual Update just got a major update to take advantage of Quest 3 and Quest Pro.

Since 2021 Quest headsets have had a built-in feature called Air Link which lets them act as wireless PC VR headsets, but Guy Godin's Virtual Desktop has offered this since the launch of the original Oculus Quest in 2019, and Godin frequently updates his app with new improvements that make it the preferred choice for many PC VR users.

On Quest 3, enabled by its new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, the latest update adds support for the AV1 video codec, up to 200 Mbps with the HEVC codec, the ability to use the Godlike quality setting at 120 Hz, and the ability to use Super Resolution upscaling with any quality setting.

AV1 is only supported by NVIDIA RTX 40-series and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, but provides better image quality at the same bitrate as HEVC. Godin says it also produces more stable frame times, meaning fewer hiccups when locomoting in VR, but is slightly more demanding on your GPU than other codecs.

For normal non-VR monitor streaming, Quest 3 also renders the virtual environments at "much higher resolutions".

Godin also tells UploadVR that his testing has revealed that Quest 3 has improved Wi-Fi performance over all previous standalone headsets, making streaming "smoother in general".

"It’s the best headset for wireless PC VR by far", Godin tells us.

But the update isn't only for Quest 3 users. For Quest Pro, it adds the ability to forward the headset's face and eye tracking into the PC version of VRChat via an integration with VRCFaceTracking, a long requested feature by users of the leading social VR platform. The last major update released in June added support for the headset's local dimming feature, so Virtual Desktop now takes full advantage of Quest Pro's unique capabilities.