How to activate AR in your Oculus Quest Home Menu

Today I was reading Upload VR, and I’ve found a very interesting article by David Heaney stating that now it is possible to use your real environment as your Oculus Quest Home environment. I immediately got excited, because this meant that the Oculus Quest has now some augmented reality functionalities! I tried this new feature, and I’ve also prepared for you a tutorial to explain to you how to activate it and some of its possible uses!

AR in Oculus Quest Home is available only on Runtime v16

If you want to activate this feature, you have to run Oculus Quest runtime version 16. If your Quest has not version 16 installed, follow this link and discover how you can update it. If the system doesn’t trigger any update, probably the update has still to roll out to your region, and you have to wait some days.

How to use passthrough in your Oculus Quest Home – Video Tutorial

I made a fancy video where I show you how to activate this feature, and some nice experiments I conducted with it. You can find it here below. Have a nice vision!

How to use passthrough in your Oculus Quest Home – Textual Tutorial

Activating the AR feature of the Oculus Quest menu is overly simple. You have just to:

• Open your Settings menu in the Quest UI
• Head to the “Virtual Environment” tab
• In this tab, you can find all the environments that you can use as your Oculus Home environment. Select “Passthrough”.

And this is it! After that, you will see all the 2D elements of the Oculus Home floating around your real environment. Your Oculus Quest is an augmented reality device now! :O

What can it be used for?

If you play around with this feature, you soon discover that only the applications that run in 2D inside the home environment actually run in AR. If you trigger a VR 3D app, it will just run in VR as before.

Anyway, considering that there are some 2D applications for Quest (like Oculus Browser) and that it is also possible to use a hack to run some 2D Android apps, this feature can become interesting.

For instance, you could run Netflix 2D, and see the movies on your ceiling while you lie on the bed. That’s useful if you don’t want to isolate yourself from the surroundings, maybe because you have to care about your baby. In this case, AR is better than VR.

You can do some meta stuff. For instance, I have played a 2D video of the passthrough of the Oculus that I recorded beforehand, so I could see a video of the passthrough of the Quest while I was in the passthrough of the Quest. Passthrough-ception.

I opened a session of my VR browser while I was on the balcony of my house. I could browse information while I was breathing fresh air and seeing all the plants around me. It was cool.

Maybe the most useful thing that I did has been using this AR feature to write Chinese characters. You know that I study Chinese, and one of the most difficult parts is studying the various strokes associated with every character. So I opened the Oculus Browser and looked for a Chinese word on the dictionary, and while looking at the big virtual screen with the stroke order, I could write the character in real life with a marker. I could that also with a PC, but on the Quest, I had a bigger screen that could react to my gestures!

MR controls

If you use passthrough-vision, Oculus doesn’t show you the 3D model of the Oculus Touch controllers in the menu, but you just see the images of their real visuals. The reason is that you would see a slight mismatch of the real and virtual version, and so Oculus preferred to get rid of the virtual model.

If you use hands, everything is cool and feels very natural, but the problem is that the hands fall behind all the virtual elements, and this kills a bit the magic. Probably Oculus should use the depth of the hands calculated by the hands tracking of the device to put the hands always in front of the UI.

What about mixed reality apps?

Unluckily Oculus has not allowed mixed reality in the Oculus SDK yet, so it is not possible for us developers to create MR content. That’s a pity because we would love to port our mixed reality fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded to the Oculus Quest.

The reasons for this are probably that Oculus is afraid of the privacy concerns of letting people access the camera stream (especially because of the fear that people have of Facebook accessing the cameras), or that Facebook wants to fix the passthrough removing the remaining distortions before unlocking it.

Why is this relevant?

I think this new feature is overly important because it shows all Oculus’s efforts in adding features to the passthrough of the Quest. It started as a rough distorted vision, and now it is a well-made b/w passthrough that is an important part of your Oculus Experience: it helps your safety, you can trigger it whenever you want to have a pause, or you can use it as your home environment.

This makes us hope that Facebook will finally pull the trigger, and transform the Oculus Quest in a fully mixed reality headset. In the end, this is what it promised us two years ago during the Oculus Connect. But to do this, they will have to open the feature to the developers.

Either they do this for the Quest, or they are preparing the ground for the future Oculus Del Mar headset, that for sure will have mixed reality functionalities…

I hope has been useful for you, and if it has been the case, plase subscribe to my newsletter or sustain my efforts on Patreon! See you in the metaverse.