Riftcat Improves Support for Oculus Go Streaming

We’ve recently talked quite a bit about VR Game Streaming. We’ve covered both the ALVR system and TPCAST for the HTC Vive. Today we are going to talk about another popular VR Streaming Company. Riftcat is well-known for enabling VR Streaming for the Gear VR. Today’s update adds support for the Oculus Go.

How does it work?

Riftcat operates through a two-part system. You install the Riftcat App on your Gaming PC, and then you install their Vridge App on your VR Headset. The PC App integrates with SteamVR and makes your headset appear to be a native PC VR Headset. From there you can play many VR Games through Steam. It’s all Streaming-based, so you need a good network and PC to have a quality experience.

Support for Oculus Go

Vridge 2.2 includes official support for the Oculus Go headset. Although Riftcat plans to eventually make it easier to install Vridge on the Oculus Go, for now you’ll need to install it through ADB. With that said, today is your lucky day because we’ve made an easy sideloading tutorial for the Oculus Go. Riftcat also has an article that provides some specific tips for installing Vridge on the Oculus Go.

For the most part, the Oculus Go will be compatible with PC VR Games that can be played with a gamepad. There is currently limited support for the Oculus Go motion controller. This limitation should diminish in the future when Riftcat adds support for 3rd Party controller systems such as Nolo VR and Drive4vr. These 3rd Party systems are already supported for other headsets through Riftcat.

Vridge 2.2 Beta Improvements

Vridge 2.2 brings a slew of improvements for both the Oculus Go and other VR headsets. In the past, several headsets suffered from Jitter while using Vridge. Jitter introduces instability to the stream and increases the chance of experiencing VR sickness. Riftcat recommends enabling Reliable Streaming Mode if you experience any artifacting while using the latest version of Vridge. This mode can be enabled in the Advanced Streaming Settings section of the Riftcat PC App.

The latest version of Vridge also introduces automatic FPS adjustments. This feature is intended to ensure that your stream is sent at the native refresh rate of your headset. This is an important detail because each supported headset tends to use a different native refresh rate. The Gear VR operates at 60 fps while the Oculus Go can handle 72 fps.

Lastly there were some quick tweaks that improve a range of different metrics:

• FOV (field of view) should correctly be adjusted to match your headset’s aspect ratio
• Vridge’s CPU load has been reduced by up to 40% when using Nvidia’s NVENC technology
• Lobby Text (“Connected, waiting for SteamVR”) should no longer become displayed on top of the streaming window
• The Mobile App should no longer crash while reconnecting to a session

Opportunities for Feedback

With all of these changes and enhancements, there is the potential for something to be less than perfect. Riftcat’s developers welcome reports of any bugs that you encounter while using Vridge. You can contact them through Reddit and you can email them at support@riftcat.com

Originally published at Flickstiq.