What you need to know
- Oculus Air Link is getting a new experimental feature called Air Link Framerate Insurance (AFI) with firmware v38.
- Framerate Insurance is designed to smooth out gameplay when playing PC VR games over Wi-Fi on Quest 2.
- This is a replacement for Oculus Asynchronous Spacewarp and will need to be enabled manually, for now.
If you're a Quest 2 gamer who loves to play PC VR games via Oculus Air Link, your experience is about to get a whole lot better. A new technology called Air Link Framerate Insurance — AFI for short — is designed to use your Quest 2's machine learning abilities to help smooth out those little stutters and hiccups that can happen while playing PC VR games over Wi-Fi.
AFI was outlined in a recent Oculus Blog post where Oculus engineers explain its origins and how it works differently from previous similar Oculus technologies. Like Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) — a sort of precursor to this new tech — AFI is designed to smooth out gameplay when things get rocky. While ASW is designed to guess what happens in-between frames when performance drops, AFI tries to guess what happens when your Wi-Fi signal gets a bit choppy.
We've seen a similar type of technology added to Virtual Desktop — our favorite way of playing PC VR games wirelessly on Quest 2 — and now Meta is debuting an official solution for their own wireless PC VR platform. Playing PC VR games on a Quest 2 is particularly great because it doesn't matter of you chose a 128GB or 256GB Quest 2 since the games are all stored on your PC.
Earlier this year, Oculus also debuted Application Space Warp, another similar technology that helps developers create more detailed games that can run at lower framerates without making gamers sick. As a rule of thumb, VR gaming is extremely reliant on both high framerates and consistent framerates to keep gamers from getting motion sick, otherwise, the human brain isn't properly fooled into thinking what it sees is actual reality.
If you're interested in trying out this new streaming solution, head on over to the Oculus Blog link above and follow the instructions. You'll need to be on Oculus PC software v38 and Quest 2 firmware v38 to use the feature. Just be sure to disable ASW when you enable AFI, otherwise, you might run into issues.
