Category: cloud gaming

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How To Play Stadia Games Like Cyberpunk 2077 On Oculus Quest

Cyberpunk 2077 is out now and even though it doesn’t have official VR support for the game itself you can still play it using your VR headset — specifically if you use an Oculus Quest 2 with Google Stadia.

We’ll have a separate article on how to do it with the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 coming soon (there are a few different options) so this article only covers the Stadia version of the game.

Since the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077 is on Stadia that means you can play the game without the need for a game console or gaming PC at all. You can stream it to any compatible web browser, a compatible Chromecast device, or to the Stadia mobile app. And now thanks to this special hacked version of Chromium that works with Android devices that aren’t officially support, such as the Oculus Quest, you can even play it on your Quest or Quest 2.

I was able to get it working, so you know it’s dead simple. Here’s what you do:

  1. Download SideQuest and reference our SideQuest guide on setting that up.
  2. Connect your Quest or Quest 2 to a PC running SideQuest.
  3. Sideload this APK to install ‘Chromium-For-Stadia’ on your Quest.
  4. Connect a game controller via Bluetooth to your Quest in the ‘Experimental Features’ section of the Settings menu. Games on Stadia work with any bluetooth controller usually, but the Stadia controller buttons are mapped like an Xbox controller so that’s what the UI will show. That means A-B-Y-X instead of X-O-triangle-square.
  5. Launch the Oculus TV app inside the headset.
  6. Launch the Chromium channel.
  7. Visit the Stadia home page: stadia.google.com
  8. Switch to desktop mode by clicking the settings in the top right corner.
  9. If it doesn’t let you login due to being an “untrusted” browser, switch out of desktop mode, login, and then switch back and reload the page.
  10. Launch a game and enjoy!

I’ve tested it out playing both Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and Cyberpunk 2077 just now and everything works well. There is an ever-so-slight bit of added latency it seems that’s barely noticeable, I could only tell because I literally played Cyberpunk 2077 from Stadia on my 4K TV using Chromecast and then immediately went in the headset and launched it to compare. It’s absolutely playable and feels similar to playing non-VR PS4 games on PSVR using Cinematic Mode.

Unfortunately you cannot adjust the size of the window as far as I know, it just floats in front of you inside your Oculus Home environment.

If you want to give it a try without buying a game like Cyberpunk 2077, you can sign up for a free Stadia account and instantly play games like Destiny 2 for free. Or if you sign up for a free trial with Pro you get a ton of other games to try as well before it ever charges you the $10/mo membership.

Let us know if you try this out too and what you think!

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Jason Rubin: Oculus Cloud Rendering More Than 5 Years Out

In an interview with Protocol, Facebook gaming VP Jason Rubin suggested that cloud streamed Oculus VR is more than 5 years out.

Ultimately we’ll throw those processors in a server farm somewhere and stream to your headset. And a lot of people are going to say, “Oh my god, that’s a million years away.” It’s not a million. It’s not five. It’s somewhere between.

The Goal & Challenge Of Cloud VR

Standalone VR headsets such as Oculus Quest open up room scale VR to beyond those lucky enough to own a gaming PC. However, mobile chips are significantly less powerful than PC GPUs, limiting the amount of detail possible and the types of games these headsets can play.

Oculus Link lets the Quest act as a PC VR headset of course, but this requires a gaming PC.

Virtual Desktop wireless streaming supports cloud PCs like Shadow VR, and some are using this already to play PC VR’s biggest hits. However, the latency makes most people feel sick, and the $15/month base tier’s CPU struggles in more taxing games. NVIDIA’s CloudXR platform streamlines VR streaming for enterprise by supporting NVIDIA servers natively.

Shadow and CloudXR use the same fundamental approach as Oculus Link. When a frame is rendered, it is compressed by the GPU’s video encoder and sent to the headset, where it is decoded and displayed. Encoding and decoding takes time, and this adds latency on top of the time it takes for the frame to reach the device.

Back in December, Facebook acquired Spanish cloud gaming startup PlayGiga, which was taking a similar approach to Shadow and NVIDIA.

To reduce the apparent latency visually, the frame is warped in the direction the user’s head has rotated since the frame started rendering. None of the current systems do this for positional latency however, which is why moving around and using controllers often feels much less solid.

When using a server within the same city as the headset under ideal network conditions, these services can just about reach the kind of latency VR requires. To get latency low enough to fully trick the human perceptual system however, a different approach could be needed.

Rubin: Mobile Chips May Never Do AAA Graphics

According to Rubin, standalone headsets won’t be able to render virtual environments with AAA quality graphics “anytime soon”, due to both thermal and power limitations inherent in the form factor.

That’s not happening on a local headset, for the same reason that people can’t get those games to run on phones and anything else that’s battery powered and needs to dissipate heat. You can plug it into a wall, and you can put a liquid-cooled or fan-cooled graphics card in it, and sure. But you can’t do that on somebody’s face.

In the long run, Rubin suggested AAA-quality graphics will arrive through cloud rendering.

In the past, Rubin has spoken of the potential need for a new rendering architecture to solve this. In such a hypothetical system, the server would do the most intensive workloads to somehow make rendering fairly easy on the headset, without just crudely transferring raw frames.

If cloud VR can one day bring the power of PC to fully standalone headsets, it would represent a revolution in the value such headsets offer consumers- but as Rubin warns, don’t expect that any time soon.

The post Jason Rubin: Oculus Cloud Rendering More Than 5 Years Out appeared first on UploadVR.