The 1.6 update to the Oculus Rift’s online software platform, Oculus Home, is bringing two significant new features to the platform: automatic app updates and bandwidth limits.
The first, and perhaps most sorely desired new feature, is the addition of automatic app updates. Developers are constantly patching and improving the experiences they create and – as anyone with a smartphone knows – these changes can really stack up over time.
It used to be that Oculus Rift users had to manually check for updates in Oculus Home and implement the necessary downloads themselves. This would be especially cumbersome if you tried to dive into an experience by simply putting your headset on, only to find that a necessary update is required before you can enjoy the experience.
After this update is active, you should be able to flip one switch in the Oculus Home settings and the system will automatically keep your games, apps, and experiences fresh and ready to launch. This could be a problem for users concerned with overloading their Internet however, and that’s what makes the update’s second big feature so important.
Bandwidth limits don’t sound like a good thing since limited bandwidth usually means a slower download or upload. The problem is that your computer understands this as well and will devour any and all available bandwidth when you tell it to start a download. By setting a bandwidth cap in Oculus Home you can keep the software from demanding too much of your Internet real estate while your experiences download or update.
These changes were first noticed by Reality Check VR on Twitter.
‘Automatic App Updates & Bandwidth Limit’ Are Coming To Oculus Home! @oculus @vrspies #oculushomeupdate pic.twitter.com/lFnuvK9Hpj
— RealityCheckVR (@RealityCheckVR) July 14, 2016
These updates are also two features the Steam digital distribution platform is known for, which means Oculus Home is slowly trying to bring its store up to feature parity one step at a time.
