Meta announced at Connect 2023 that Xbox Cloud Gaming is heading to Quest in December, meaning you’ll be able to play all of your favorite flatscreen games on offer through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
Meta’s full unveiling of Quest 3 yesterday came with a fair bit of news, including specs, price, pre-orders and shipping dates; long story short, you can get Meta’s $500 consumer mixed reality headset starting October 10th, with pre-orders now live.
Sometime in December, Meta says we’ll also get support for Xbox Cloud Gaming on Quest too, which users will be able to use on a virtual screen that can be adjusted and resized.
There’s no specific date yet for when to expect Xbox Cloud Gaming to the Quest platform. On stage, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg only mentioned that it’s “coming to Quest in December,” so it’s possible we’ll see even Quest 2 included in the list of supported hardware in addition to Quest 3 and (presumably) Quest Pro.
As it stands, there are a few standard caveats. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription and a supported controller (sold separately) is required. Meta says in a blogpost that some streaming limitations may apply as well, including variable server availability and wait times, and geographical restrictions.
Want to know if Quest 3 is worth it? We haven’t gone in for our deep dive review yet, although we got a full hands-on with the headset right before Connect 2023 this week that goes into everything from confort to clarity.
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Microsoft announced it’s released a public preview of Azure Remote Rendering support for Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro, something that promises to allow devs to render complex 3D content in the cloud and stream it to those VR headsets in real-time.
Azure Remote Rendering, which already supports desktop and the company’s AR headset HoloLens 2, notably uses a hybrid rendering approach to combine remotely rendered content with locally rendered content.
Now supporting Quest 2 and Quest Pro, developers are able to integrate Microsoft’s Azure cloud rendering capabilities to do things like view large and complex models on Quest.
Microsoft says in a developer blog post that one such developer Fracture Reality has already integrated Azure Remote Rendering into its JoinXR platform, enhancing its CAD review and workflows for engineering clients.
Image courtesy Microsoft, Fracture Reality
The JoinXR model above was said to take 3.5 minutes to upload and contains 12.6 million polygons and 8K images.
While streaming XR content from the cloud isn’t a new phenomenon—Nvidia initially released its own CloudXR integration for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in 2021—Microsoft offering direct integration is a hopeful sign that the company hasn’t given up on VR, and is actively looking to bring enterprise deeper into the fold.
If you’re looking to integrate Azure’s cloud rendering tech into your project, check out Microsoft’s step-by-step guide here.
