Steam Link for Quest now lets you play flatscreen PC games in a window.
Since launching in late 2023 the Steam Link app for Quest has supported flatscreen PC gaming in addition to PC VR, but doing so required launching into SteamVR and using its Theater Screen mode. Your PC was running and streaming a VR environment as well as the flatscreen game.
With the new update the Steam Link app for Quest can now connect to the same Big Picture Mode interface you'd find when using Steam Link on other devices, instead of launching into SteamVR.
This matters because it means issues with the connection won't affect the perception of head tracking, and you can use passthrough as your background. It also means you can multitask, running Steam Link alongside other Quest panels and apps including web browser windows.
The new mode also passes through input from gamepads connected to your headset, and doesn't require Touch controllers to operate since you can interact with the window using hand tracking. Beforehand, you'd still need to use Touch controllers and the gamepad had to be connected to the PC.
Henry Stockdale
With this update there are now three flatscreen gaming platforms officially available on Meta's mixed reality platform, as Microsoft brought Xbox Cloud Gaming to Quest in 2023 and Nvidia brought GeForce Now support to the Horizon OS web browser in January.
