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Oculus Link will let you plug your Quest headset into a gaming PC to play Rift games

Oculus Link will let you plug your Quest headset into a gaming PC to play Rift games

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Coming via a software update in November

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Facebook-owned Oculus VR is launching an update in November for its standalone Quest headset that will allow it to be plugged into any virtual reality-ready gaming PC to access the entire Rift library. The feature is called Oculus Link, and it was announced today by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Oculus Connect developer conference in San Jose, California. “Your Quest is basically a Rift now, too,” Zuckerberg told the crowd during the conference’s keynote address.

The Quest launched back in May as a proper cordless VR headset, meaning it contains the lenses, sensors, processor, battery, and other components necessary for playing VR games and experiences without requiring any external hardware whatsoever. Zuckerberg says Oculus is selling Quest “as fast as we can make them,” and he also mentioned that Quest accounts for 20 percent of the $100 million in lifetime VR software sales the Oculus platform has generated since its 2016 launch.

But one big limitation of the Quest is that its lower-end processor and battery-dependent power source limit the types of VR experiences it can run. That should change with Oculus Link. Zuckerberg says the feature will support most USB-C cables, so you can use the cable that comes bundled with the Quest to charge it for instance. So long as you have a gaming PC with the minimum spec requirements, outlined here on Oculus’ website, you’ll then be able to access the most graphics-intensive VR titles.

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