Control Room launched on Oculus App Lab and SideQuest less than a week ago. We've already received a ton of feedback, and here we're going to discuss one of the top features people requested - the ability to use your mouse and keyboard in Control Room.
One of the main goals of Control Room is to make you more productive. Working in a virtual environment of your choice, or having access to a big screen (or multiple screens - coming soon!) is great, but for most tasks people still need a physical mouse and keyboard. Great news! Oculus Quest has some unofficial features that you can use to create what is called a "Passthrough Portal".
As the name suggests, it allows you to define a portion of your Guardian as a passthrough area, or a see-through portal in other words. Passthrough Portal could be an amazing use case for something like a keyboard overlay. We're happy to say that this feature works great with Control Room, allowing you to use your PC mouse and keyboard while in VR! Check out Control Room in combination with Passthrough Portal:
Let's unpack this short video:
We are using a 3rd party tool called vrLauncher to define a Passthrough overlay on a desk. If you wish to get detailed instructions on how this is done, you can check out this video by The Mysticle. After the portal is created, simply launch Control Room and voilà - you can see your desk. How awesome is that! Oh, and by the way - when you view the Passthrough Portal in VR it's not purple! It's grayscale as any other passthrough video.
What work are you getting done in Virtual Reality, and would you like to see Passthrough Portal become an official feature? Let us know in the comment section below.
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Passthrough Portal is an unofficial feature of the Oculus Quest. QuarkXR is not a developer of this passthrough functionality, and we can't provide any help or support regarding it. If Passthrough Portal becomes an official feature of the Quest/Quest 2, it would be a great use case for Control Room. In the meantime, we advise you to tread with caution when it comes to any unofficial VR features.
