SideQuest is an amazing tool for unlocking a bunch of VR content and tools for Quest, and we really suggest setting it up if you own a Quest 2. Now the creators behind the unofficial sideloading library have made it so you can browse the SideQuest Store and download stuff directly without having to leave VR.
SideQuest’s new Easy PC Installer allows you to download the executable to your PC, connect up your Quest 2, and then enable you to sideload content directly to your headset, just like accessing the official Quest Store.
Here’s a handy explainer guide on how to setup the Easy PC Installer and get sideloading:
There’s loads of free games and demos on SideQuest, but it also features App Lab content, which is hidden from the official Store. It also features a library of custom Home spaces, so you can finally have anything from Minecraft Village background to the command center from Friday Night at Freddy’s.
In addition, with SideQuest activated on your Quest 2 you can change some of the headset’s settings including disabling the proximity sensor, changing the capture resolution, forcing higher refresh rates, and changing the texture resolution size for games to increase visual quality.
If you need a more in-depth explanation, or want to activate SideQuest by using your Android phone and skip the PC installer all together, head over to our step-by-step guide on How to Sideload Games with SideQuest.
SideQuest’s new in-headset app for Quest 2 and Quest streamlines the installation of custom home environments and popular community-made VR ports of classics like the original Doom, Quake, and Half-Life games.
The new app even makes it easier to find experimental App Lab projects that are also listed on SideQuest. You still need a PC to install SideQuest onto a Quest headset and sign up as a developer to get that access in the first place, but the SideQuest app now walks Quest owners through that process directly.
SideQuest has been available as a PC and Mac app almost as long as the first Quest headset, giving users a way to connect their Quest to a computer and sideload content that isn’t officially approved for the Quest Store. SideQuest is taking this a step further today by launching a new app that installs the platform directly onto Quest 2 and gives users an easier way to browse and install content entirely in-headset.
Previously, it was possible to install the Android mobile version of SideQuest onto a Quest headset for similar results. However, the interface wasn’t designed for VR and things didn’t always work. With this new version specifically designed for VR, SideQuest can be used in-headset with much less friction.
A computer is still required for first-time installation via USB and to install the core files for classic PC games, like the doom.wad file for the original Doom game from 1993. Once the SideQuest app is installed on Quest it can be launched from the Unknown Sources tab and used to browse and download content like QuestZDoom directly to the headset’s internal storage without using the SideQuest PC app.
There’s also a section in the app for custom home environments. Users can browse from a selection of community-made home environments, download them and swap them out for the default Meta options. SideQuest is also launching new guides and presets for creating custom homes, which should streamline the process of creating and exporting custom environments.
SideQuest can even run with multitasking in Quest 2 if you move it to the side. In the below screenshot I’ve got it running alongside the official Oculus Store after using it to install the Star Trek: The Next Generation bridge as my custom home.
If you are a new Quest owner, it may come as a surprise to you that the official Oculus store is not the only place where you can get new VR titles for your headset. For Quest owners, SideQuest may be the most important discovery they can make to elevate their VR gaming experience.
So, what is SideQuest, exactly?
SideQuest is a VR content platform for standalone headsets like Quest and Quest 2 where users can explore a vast collection of VR titles ranging from experimental games, tech demos, and game ports to full-scale games listed on the official Oculus store and on App Lab. This community-driven platform establishes a meaningful connection between users and developers, and encourages innovation and experimentation when it comes to VR apps. That’s why some of the most creative and out-of-the-box titles are often found on SideQuest! Games like Gorilla Tag, Pavlov, Puzzling Places, Ancient Dungeon, Gun Raiders, Quest3Doom and QuestCraft have become real sensations in the VR community accumulating hundreds of thousands of downloads, and they all found their beginnings on SideQuest.
In addition, SideQuest is packed with secret features and tools that help users unlock hidden properties to customize their VR gaming experience. SideQuest allows users to access different settings, such as texture resolution and refresh rate settings, video recording dimensions, triggering cloud backup, unlocking proximity sensors, and much more.
Is SideQuest Safe To Use?
SideQuest vets all content that gets published and they take steps to protect their users from malware and harmful content. SideQuest is trusted by thousands of developers and millions of users and has collaborated with Oculus almost from day one.
Here is something you may not know: SideQuest launched only two days after the release of Oculus Quest in May 2019, and they have been a growing part of the VR community ever since. Each month, more than 2 million users visit SideQuest to explore new VR content, discover experimental titles, and help developers play-test their games.
On top of having strong ties with the VR community, SideQuest collaborates closely with Meta. During Connect 2021, Mark Zuckerberg openly expressed his intention to “continue supporting sideloading and linking Quest to PC to allow more flexibility for consumers and developers.” In addition, in 2021 SideQuest partnered with Meta (formerly Oculus) while it was building App Lab. App Lab is a method of distribution that makes it easier for users to download experimental VR apps that are not yet launched on the official store. Chris Pruett, Director of Content Ecosystem at Meta, also reiterated their partnership with SideQuest on day one of App Lab and emphasized the importance of this collaboration for App Lab’s development. Since you cannot browse through those games on the official store, SideQuest is essentially the primary discovery platform for App Lab games. It is hard to imagine App Lab existing without SideQuest.
Starting With SideQuest
Although SideQuest is well-known for being the home of experimental titles and games in early stages of development, quite a few VR apps have reached popularity that helped bring them to the official Oculus store! Games like Puzzling Places, Gun Raiders, Ancient Dungeon, Hyper Dash, Deisim, Warplanes, and several other games started on SideQuest. The SideQuest community has always been active in supporting the developers and helping them improve their apps, and the platform helped them with discovery. Ultimately, those games became popular enough to be invited to the Official store and the support they received from SideQuest played a key part! These stories reinforce the importance of the SideQuest community which supports developers and allows our users to be the first to try cutting edge content.
Where To Begin?
Starting out with SideQuest is easy due to the detailed steps outlined on the SideQuest website. Users need to have a Windows, Linux or Mac computer to setup sideloading. We also have an Android app to set up the SideQuest app and sideload VR games from your phone. Users can also visit https://applab.games , which takes you right to the App Lab section of SideQuest. From there, users can browse through App Lab games which do not require sideloading and can be installed directly from the browser. You can even use it inside the headset to download games.
SideQuest is a growing platform in the VR community, and it is shaping the future of the VR market by building a strong and passionate community, providing a trusted way for users to discover VR content, and supplying developers with means to promote their work and build communities. Visit https://sidequestvr.com and start exploring everything SideQuest has to offer!
This is sponsored content which has been provided by SideQuest.
Das Team Beef bringt mit Quake 3 Arena einen weitern Klassiker auf die Meta Quest. Ab sofort könnt ihr die aktuelle Beta kostenlos herunterladen und spielen.
Quake 3 Arena VR für Meta Quest veröffentlicht
Quake 3 Arena ist ein sehr schneller Shooter und auch in der Virtual Reality wird das Tempo nicht reduziert. Die kostenlose Portierung von Team Beef beinhaltet bereits die komplette Quake 3 Arena Demo, mit welcher ihr auch in den Multiplayer-Modus hineinschnuppern könnt. Wenn ihr die Vollversion von Quake 3 besitzt, könnt ihr das Spiel auch vollständig auf der Quest spielbar machen. Hierfür müsst ihr nur ein paar Dateien vom PC auf die Quest transferieren. Leider ist das Spiel in Deutschland nicht über Steam erwerbbar.
Auf dem Discord von Team Beef findet ihr eine detaillierte Anleitung für die Installation und die entsprechende APK zum kostenlosen Download. Unseren Langzeittest zur Meta Quest 2 findet ihr hier. Wir sehen uns in der VR!
SideQuest, the popular sideloading platform for Oculus Quest, has raised a fresh $3 million seed round, something its creators say will be used to help developers publish their apps across multiple platforms via OpenXR integration. The news was first reported in an UploadVR exclusive.
Founded by Belfast-based team Shane and Orla Harris in 2019, SideQuest has over the years become the leading sideloading platform for Oculus Quest and Quest 2 standalone headsets, and also its de facto unofficial app store. Much like gaming consoles, Quest’s official app store is directly moderated by the platform holder, which in this case is Facebook.
SideQuest now boasts over one million monthly active users, who use the platform to sideload apps which haven’t been (or won’t be) approved for the official Oculus Store or Quest’s less-moderated App Lab distribution channel.
The $3 million seed funding round was led by London-based VC firm PROfounders, and includes participation by Ada Ventures, Connect Ventures, Ascension, and SCNE.
The team’s first big raise came in early 2020 from Boost VC and Oculus VR founder Palmer Lucky, amounting to $650,000. According to The Irish Times, the most recent round puts the company’s current valuation is now around $10 million.
“This raise gives us the runway needed to focus on driving more engagement in our communities, more support for developers and more innovation in VR. We are excited to be able to provide discovery and community for the next generation of content creators,” Shane Harris told UploadVR. “We are excited to focus our energies on building tools and services to help developers target multiple platforms with OpenXR whilst leveraging the SideQuest community to grow their audience.”
“We are really excited about this next phase of growth. We want to continue to drive engagement within the VR community,” Ora Harris told The Irish Times. “It has always been our goal to help developers and the bonus is that the really enthusiastic VR community of streamers, reviewers and players makes that job so much fun for us.”
SideQuest is leveling up from an initial $650K investment last year to a $3 million seed round as its founders look to build tools to aid VR developers.
The sideloading platform launched in 2019 two days after Oculus Quest release and, now, SideQuest sees more than one million monthly active users, according to husband-and-wife founders Shane Harris and Orla Harris.
While Facebook implemented a strict console-like curation policy for Quest content on the Oculus Store, SideQuest immediately offered VR developers a route to list any VR software publicly for people to try out on Facebook’s headset. In the process, SideQuest made it super easy for adventurous Quest owners to test experimental software long before Facebook officially supported that kind of distribution with its App Lab system.
The VR headset market is poised for change as competitors seem to be ramping up efforts for more portable and powerful VR headsets and the widely supported OpenXR standard is expected to make it easier for developers to build VR apps that run on a wide range of hardware. With its pre-seed money last year, SideQuest representatives said the funding would help them build a testing service and other tools to help VR developers. SideQuest can accelerate and expand plans now with the additional $3 million coming from investment round leaders PROfounders and participation from Ada Ventures, Connect Ventures, Ascension, SCNE as well as several strategic angel investors.
“As the ecosystem opens up and more hardware enters the space we hope to help developers port to more platforms,” Orla Harris told UploadVR.
Games like Puzzling Places, Hyper Dash, and Cubism have used SideQuest to get feedback about their in-development software, effectively using the platform as a springboard to move toward store release on various platforms. Earlier this year, SideQuest released an Android app which enabled sideloading onto Quest without the need for a PC.
“This raise gives us the runway needed to focus on driving more engagement in our communities, more support for developers and more innovation in VR. We are excited to be able to provide discovery and community for the next generation of content creators,” Shane Harris told UploadVR. “We are excited to focus our energies on building tools and services to help developers target multiple platforms with OpenXR whilst leveraging the SideQuest community to grow their audience.”
SideQuest has been an essential part of the Oculus Quest indie community ever since its debut in 2019, allowing players to access early projects by developers. Continuing to foster that community SideQuest has partnered up with cross-game avatar creation platform Ready Player Me so that users can keep a consistent player appearance across support apps.
Ready Player Me is a fairly simple solution for the creation of 3D avatars and it’s completely free to use. Built by Wolf3D and released earlier this year, Ready Player Me can create an avatar from a selfie, after which you can then further tweak your look, or start completely from scratch, no pic required.
Its inclusion into SideQuest means that users can use the system for their profile avatar and then in the future use the avatar in supported titles. There’s an ever-growing selection of apps that use Ready Player Me including VRChat, LIV, MeetinVR, Somnium Space and vSpatial to name a few.
“Working with Ready Player Me will not only help bring SideQuest players into the metaverse but also allow for a highly customisable form of self-expression for all our community,” says SideQuest CEO, Shane Harris. “The VR space is rapidly becoming the creative outlet for developers and players alike to discover, experiment and play, and here at SideQuest we couldn’t be happier to be a driving force behind that. We have so many exciting plans for our work with Ready Player Me, and look forward to supporting our community with integration in the future.”
“SideQuest is empowering smaller developers to build VR games and share them with the platform’s vast community of players,” said Timmu Tõke, Wolf3D’s CEO. “Our partnership is a big step in making the dream of the open metaverse a reality. We will work together to connect hundreds of the virtual worlds available on SideQuest and let anyone travel between them with their Ready Player Me avatars.”
Oculus Developer Hub 1.8.0 adds the ability to remotely launch URLs in Oculus Browser, including for WebXR experiences.
If you don’t know what Oculus Developer Hub (ODH) is: it’s a Windows & macOS app designed to make it easier to manage & develop for Oculus Quests.
ODH lets you see the headset’s view, access screenshots & recordings, track performance metrics, view device logs, sideload apps, download Oculus SDKs, disable the proximity sensor, and more. While ODH is aimed at developers, we consider it a must-have for power users too.
The flagship new feature is the ability to launch URLs on your headset from your PC. This can be regular websites, a 360 YouTube video, or even full fledged WebXR experiences – SideQuest has a section for these. That’s a lot more convenient than using the in-VR keyboard to manually find the URL you want. For WebXR developers, it could even be a game changer.
The update also adds the ability to upload builds directly to App Lab & Oculus Store. That was already possible from the Oculus developer dashboard in a browser, but now you won’t need to leave the Developer Hub app.
It also adds Metrics Recording, meaning OVRMetrics performance data is saved to files which you can open to see detailed data & graphs.
Dash League runs competitive 5v5 tournaments for the game in a league format and it’s teamed up with SideQuest and Logitech for this weekend’s tournament matches as part of the Side Dash Tournament. All the matches will be broadcast online and it kicks off at 12pm PDT on May 22.
Tournament registration was previously open to existing Dash League members but all spots have now been filled. Those who registered, of which there are currently 70, are placed into five-person teams to compete with throughout the tournament. You can see a list of all the currently registered players here.
While Dash League is running the tournament organization, it’s also being run in partnership with SideQuest and Logitech.
“SideQuest are excited about the potential of Esports in VR and how we can take the action of traditional sports married with the convenience of Esports and create really fun and engaging events in VR,” said SideQuest COO and Co-Found Orla Harris in a prepared statement. “We welcome spectators to Side Dash. We are gathering feedback on the tournament from both participants and spectators with the hope of creating further Esports possibilities for the SideQuest community.”
Logitech’s support is coming in the form of prizing and the use of its tournament management platform, Challonge. First place in the tournament receives $400 ($80/player), second gets $250 ($50/player) and third place $150 ($30/player).
The Side Dash Tournament begins at 12pm PDT / 8pm BST on May 22 and will be available to watch at www.side.quest/sidedash.
Oculus Quest owners can now sideload SideQuest itself onto the headset, opening up the ability to install content in standalone mode that hasn’t been reviewed by Facebook in any way.
Reddit user ballfun used the newly launched SideQuest Android app to prove it was possible to sideload content onto Oculus Quest using another Oculus Quest. UploadVR was able to verify that it was possible to take the process a couple steps further. Barring changes by Facebook which block this process, it is possible at the time of this writing to use a PC (or presumably a phone) to install SideQuest on the headset and install APKs directly from the cloud. That means you can install apps onto Quest that weren’t reviewed by Facebook in any way, and you don’t need a phone or PC involved in the process beyond enabling a wireless ADB mode.
I reached out to SideQuest to ask whether this feature was intended or officially supported, and CEO Shane Harris replied over direct message: “We are surprised this could work as we never tested this internally. We cannot endorse this method because it violates the Oculus app policy and could put your developer account at risk. We will not be able to offer support to users using this method.”
Take that into consideration before trying the steps we followed to make this possible.
Step 1: Sideload SideQuest
You can grab the Android package (.APK) for SideQuest via a site like apkmirror.com, available at this link.
You’ll also want the desktop version of SideQuest which can be found on the official SideQuest site at this link.
If you’re unfamiliar with sideloading content onto Quest using the existing process, we’ve got a full guide you’ll want to read first before going to the next steps. The initial steps in that guide will prepare your Quest for sideloading over a USB connection.
Now, with your Quest or Quest 2 connected to your PC over USB and recognized by SideQuest, you’ll want to use the desktop version of SideQuest and find the button in the top bar that says “Install APK from folder on computer” when you hover over it with your mouse. Select the SideQuest APK.
Step 2: Open SideQuest On Your Quest
Keep your Quest connected to your PC via USB. Put on your Quest and navigate to “Unknown Sources” in your app library and open up SideQuest in VR.
Back on your PC, select the WiFi icon near the top right-hand of SideQuest and click “Connect” in the window that pops up.
After up to 10 seconds, you should hear a sound from your PC. You can now disconnect the wire from your Quest.
Step 3: Connect SideQuest To Itself
In your Quest, select the WiFi icon in the bottom left-hand corner of the SideQuest Android app and type in the following address in the field at the bottom: 127.0.0.1.
Select “Connect”.
That’s it. You can now install apps on SideQuest on the headset. If you reboot the Quest, you’ll have to repeat steps 2 and 3 above.
Keep in mind this process won’t work for content that requires additional game files, like Team Beef’s Doom 3 port.
