How to Connect Your Oculus Quest 2 to the Virtual World of Second Life

What you're watching above is a pretty cool hack of classic virtual world and new VR technology: Oculus Quest 2 running Second Life. While the venerable sandbox MMO wasn't originally architected to run in VR, its user community has created a number of unsupported viewers that are compatible with leading virtual reality platforms, while the world itself boasts tens of thousands of excellent locations to explore -- not to mention as many users online 24/7.

Setting up your Quest 2 to run with Second Life, to be sure, does require some extra patience and tinkering. Fortunately, the Redditor who shot and sent me this demo video, "IDontUseAnimeAvatars", also sent me highly detailed instructions on doing just that; read those below. As with any unsupported third party software, user beware -- and seeing as Second Life isn't optimized for VR, also beware vertigo:  

"I highly encourage that you DO NOT try to walk around in first person," as they put it to me, "controlling your vision with your head and mouse is a first-class ticket to puke city."

Full tutorial after the break:

First you need to install the VR Firestorm viewer from here. 

Then you need to connect your Quest 2 to your PC using a link cable. Alternatively, you could use the Virtual Desktop app to stream it wirelessly, that's what I did. Once connected you open up the VR viewer and log in like normal.

Once you have loaded into a [Second Life] sim, open up steam and click the VR icon in the upper-righthand corner of the Steam window, this will bring you into the SteamVR home environment.

At this point you want to put on your headset and get into a comfy position that you can stay put in. Taking off the headset is enough to discombobulate the camera position in SL, so you want your head to start in a good position.

Once [the] headset is on and a comfortable position has been found, press CTRL+TAB to start the connection to SteamVR, this should change the view inside the headset. Once you see a purple box that says "Firestorm-P3-VRMOD", simply press TAB once again and you should be in the game.

At this point you probably see one of two things, the first being a pretty cool view of your character and the world you're inhabiting.

The second might be a super close-up of a part of the screen that is almost impossible to look at or understand the first time you see it. You see, in order to control the many boxes and menus you need in SL VR, the developer has made it so moving your mouse around the edges of the screen will zoom into those areas making it easier to click on things. If you're not expecting it you can easily mistake it for some kind of glitch. All you need to do is keep your mouse pointer in the middle of the screen and vision will return to normal.

Now once you're in the world you can take a look around and it might look pretty wonky; part of the reason is we haven't set the IPD properly yet. To do this, with the headset on, press F5 to open up a VR settings menu. IPD will be the first thing selected and what you need to set it to depends on the IPD setting you use on your quest 2. F6 increases the value and F7 decreases. If your eye spacers are set to 1, put 58. If they are set to 2, put 63. If they're set to 3, 68.

Keep pressing F5 until the menu goes away once that has been done.

At this point you should be all ready to go and explore. I highly encourage that you DO NOT try to walk around in first person; controlling your vision with your head and mouse is a first-class ticket to puke city. I recommend walking around in third person and stopping to go into first person if you want to look around your environment.

Another note, you need a full boundary, not just the stationary one.

If you have a powerful PC or a monitor with a resolution greater than 1080p, here are some more tips:

By default, opening up SteamVR will put your desktop into 1080p resolution. If your monitor has a resolution greater than 1080p (mine is 1440p) right click on your desktop>Display Settings>display resolution and set it to the largest resolution. More pixels equal better graphics, just make sure you fullscreen the game after you do this. If your monitor is already 1080p then you cannot increase the resolution of the game as far as I know.

As you can guess, doing all of this is not for everyone. Its not a mind-blowing experience either, but if you're somebody who's always wanted to know what the world looked like through your avatar's eyes, this is it baby, this is the future.

Troubleshooting:

If everything is working but you aren't properly following your avatar (you press forward, avatar moves left etc.) open the camera control menu under Avatar>Camera Controls and press the two arrow buttons on the bottom of the window to rotate the camera position.

Also setting the view distance down really helps with framerate.

If your first person camera goes whack because you moved the mouse just exit first person and re-enter to reset it.

Via /SecondLife. Much thanks again to u/IDontUseAnimeAvatars for the video and detailed instructions.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Wake me up when other people can see you waving your arms around...

[Skate Foss]

At this point all we can do is hope Linden Labs’ new overlords kick their asses into making SL VR ready. I know theres a lot involved, but all the time and money wasted on Sansar could have been spent on bringing SL somewhat into the present. All these VR hacks we’re seeing is proof it can be done.

[Fionalein]

I won't link SL to Steam of Facebook. Come back once there is a non-exhibitionist solution. Until then I will stay happy with Kirsten's Anaglyph 3D option for SL.

[David Cheney]

This is a lot of fun and works pretty well!

On my cabled Quest 2 I had to take a couple of steps I found at the VR Firestorm viewer page:
- to fix a black HMD display I created a profile for the viewer in your graphic card settings and enable FXAA. Other types of Anti-aliasing can be disabled.
- to get the stereo images to align I followed these directions using F5, F6, and F7: Set IPD to 0 (zero), adjust Texture Shift until image is sharp and focused (I ended up with 15.0 on a 4k display and 30.0 on a 1k display); adjust IPD to get a good 3D effect.
- on a 4k display the visuals are gorgeous but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are not aligned and so operation is really tough; on a 1k display the visuals are lower rez and aliased but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are aligned and operation is practical.

Kudos to the developers!

[Ryan Schultz]

Everyone who keeps expecting SL to be modified to support VR are dreaming. They will have to rebuild Second Life from scratch from the ground up.

That’s WHY Sansar was started, to be that social VR platform.

[Anonymous]

Since the OP didn't bother writing this via step-by-step process guide, here you go.

Still won't work though, since it started off with both images way off axis and it is 100% incorrectable.

1. Make sure you have Stormfire VR, Steam, SteamVR and Oculus (Link)Software Installed.
2. Plug in your Oculus Link Cable AND launch Oculus Link
3. Launch Stormfire VR on your PC and log in.
2. Go to your PC and launch Steam.
3. Click on SteamVR in the top right corner.
4. Wait for a minute, and then hit Control+Tab. When "Next: Stormfire VR" shows, hit Tab.
5. It will look wonky.
6. Hit F5 once to bring up the PID menu.
7. The menu has numerous options; you navitage up and down via F5.
8. You increase or decrease a selected option with F6 and f7.
9. You close again with F5 after cycling through the options.
10. The Defaults are unknown for 1080p/PID 1/2/3 and can't really be corrected.
IPD ???
Focus Distance ???
Texture Shift ???
Texture Zoom ???
FOV

[Anonymous]

Also, when it launches, the left view is off by inches in one random direction and the right is off by centimeters in another direction. None of the settings provided change this. This is sad since programming left and right alignment via different video input on an X and Y axis is something that is nearly 30 years old. It's just astounding how poorly this was smacked together.

[Isabella]

If SLVR or Sansar is/wasn't a reality is because most people can't access to a goo VR set, or don't want to connect to it using social media.
For me it would be a dream..... years dreaming about a virtual world that can interact like "I'm there" but talking about SL only... it would be like virtual VR shopping because that is what SL is all about it seems...

[Resident]

Linden Labs need to jump on this train, badly. Users will forgive them the lowered quality of the experience, because of the old tech used to build the existing world. But that world is the reality we all share and like. And we want to keep this world. While shopping there (= providing their income) we also want to see some progress towards new options for users. They do not have to rewrite everything but they need to start to build on top of the current state. Second Life is a very unique realm, when you think of it - a living history, a legend. It has survived the dreams about Sansar - those money would help us a lot..., people picked NOT to switch. People want to keep what they have and they want better Second Life. It was a pretty expensive lesson. There always can be more. It is easier to build something from scratch and it is harder to improve something what is not ideal. Still they need to value their current users and have a vision of future for them. It is a strong and thriving community waiting for new horizons to appear. Most of us are frustrated because we have to wait years on things easily implemented in other games or projects long ago. In the meantime they spend somewhere else. The way they get paid is also wrong. Nowadays, holding users back by "prim limits" is just silly to do. The creativity is not increasing as much as it could. Give people some new vision, Linden Labs..

[Kev]

At the beginning of this year I upgraded my PC to embrace VR. I was restricted by the nonsense that is still rumbling on regarding GPU's. I'm running a Ryzen 7 with a RTX 2080ti founders. Back in the day Second life was an amazing experience and I still slip back in now and then to check out how it has changed. But yeah I long for the opportunity to roam some of my favourite sims. Will it ever happen on a consumer level, I have no idea but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[Jupiter]

İ see so much hype being created for metaverse these days especially in crypto related videos as if secondlife doesn't exist. These new metaverse Wana be companies completely ignore secondlife. İt's been around for over a decade. Linden labs had such an edge over all these new metaverse companies and yet they sleeping and not trying hard enough to work on VR. Sad.

[Rune]

Second Life is in a good position to get ahead of the competition if their company keeps the current formula and makes it VR compatible.

I havent tried Samsar yet, but if users dont have a market to make and sell unique items, then theyre missing the point of what made it stand out from VRChat even to this day.

[Maxwell Rodgers]

Okay, cards on the table, this works-ish, and thats a BIG ish, HOWEVER, LL is working on actually updating the rendering model on SL, which means 60fps will be the standard, not 15, yes, let me be clear, the standard for the FPS on SL is "15" VR needs AT LEAST 30 to not see the "jellos" as they say. Also they are working on arm and head tracking, sounds good for VR, no? Well all and all, give it time and VR WILL come to SL naturally.

[Charles Gregoire (in SL)]

Someone should also consider creating an App running the SL viewer natively inside the Apple Vision Pro — its fast enough to run a real SL viewer for each eye, no compromises, and future (cheaper) versions of this headset will be affordable enough to grow a market.

Right now this awesome headset is not really useful since there aren’t any compelling Apps or Worlds to explore, so Apple might even help a developer build this.

I can help anyone who needs help, I know Unity, the Apple ecosystem, basic AVP stuff, and was a script writer and active SL resident 2005-2009.

[email protected]