Quest Pro OpenXR extension: XR_META_local_dimming. Will this ever work over Link/AirLink?

This is also a major annoyance for me, as it was one of the reasons we upgraded. How are we supposed to develop when we won't know what the final image will look like? And why are we locked out of features that were advertised. 

The Quest Pro seems rushed and unfinished, and I fear we may be forgotten as it's a niche product. Usually, the support from Oculus post-launch is amazing.

That's a very good point, and IMO likely the main reason why they would bother implementing local dimming over Link / AirLink: because of standalone devs' needs to be able to get the same visuals. So everything is about standalone, not PC VR which they seem to not care (or care much less) about. I was told this by a Meta rep a couple years ago, the main reason Link is even still being developed is because it helps Android iteration times for standalone games. 

Anyway, Meta has a couple weeks left to make an announcement or respond here that it will be fixed at some point (not that it must actually be), for me to decide whether to refund my Quest Pro. I didn't pay 2300$ to not be able to use all its features. I can't use the generic OpenXR extension for eye-tracked foveated rendering over Link, either, and that's an even bigger dealbreaker for me. I really need that for my game, otherwise I'll just go back to working on Quest 1 / 2 instead.

TBH, I don't think local dimming on Quest Pro is all that great or effective anyway. I can toggle it on/off in  CloudXR and when I'm playing SkyrimVR in dark dungeons, it barely changes anything. I can see the halo / glowing around brighter objects in the foreground on top of a black background, but in mixed content it seems to make virtually no difference to the final image contrast. My Quest 1 still looks much better to me than Quest Pro in terms of dark dungeon scenes with mixed-in bright zones.

Refunded my Quest Pro already and advising all my fellow devs to not bother with it. Quest 3 won't even have eye tracking or local dimming or even Touch Pro controllers so practically nothing of "early access" dev value is even on offer here that would trickle down to Quest 3. Quest 4 maybe but by then who knows what the market will be like.

Ok so where is the Meta developer moderator or response team? When can we activate local dimming via link? Why should we have to rely on virtual desktop or ALXR to use this feature? 

Your comment isn’t showing up BattleAxe, but I read it through the email. 

We shouldn’t have to ask for these features to be implemented if they are advertised. But here we are. I think after 6 months MetaStoreHelp is obligated to respond and provide a sufficient answer. If it’s not coming, I request it be removed as an advertised feature from the website, if it is, I want to know. I shouldn’t have to feel the headset needs to be jailbroken to access these features. I shouldn’t have to try to deep dive into a backdoor way into implementing this feature. 

MetaStoreHelp Hi do you mind commenting on this thread too? Let’s make sure to keep these all active and at the top of the priority list, we should encourage positive features to be accessible and more importantly, let’s have a productive forum in which we are all on the same page regarding the devices 

Lance, I already reached out to them directly over Twitter and email, and it's clear they don't care / won't fix this. Local dimming doesn't even work that well on Quest Pro standalone anyway, I tested it several times and except for super dark scenes, it's hard to tell if it's even on, and even in dark scenes with bright foreground objects, it just adds crazy blooming / haloing which tells me their LD algorithm or dimming zone count is very low, too low to make it a meaningful feature anyway. I agree that it's basically false advertising, but I wouldn't bother with any type of legal remedy because Meta tends to win court cases even when they're clearly misbehaving. Pro seems to be abandoned anyway, I think they will stop making it. No point in devs coding eye-tracking or face-tracking if only a handful of people can use it. Pro would've been a good tool to build those features on if Quest 3 had eye- or face-tracking, but it won't. I am more p-o'd that both hand and body tracking won't work over Link unless you activate Dev mode. There is absolutely no excuse for that, hand tracking has been a non-beta feature on Quest 1/2 for years now, on the standalone side. They truly seem to not care about PC VR, at all, and their actions speak very loud on this topic. The only way I see any of these features taking off is through a SteamVR OpenXR plugin that actually lets you access them through OpenXR on PC. Anything else is a non-starter. And that will never happen with Virtual Desktop since it's built on the ancient OVR API. ALXR might be interesting too, I haven't tried it. Last I asked around about it, it was still choppy during frame drops and good luck replicating ASW with only a handful of hobbyist programmers working part-time on it. 

I strongly doubt that Meta will ever, ever release Pro features to work on PC games. It's been years people asking for hand tracking to work in non-dev builds on PC and nothing. They want PC VR to die, clearly.

I tried Red Matter 2 on Pro and it did look good but I wasn't able to A/B it. However, I did A/B LD on various PC VR games through CloudXR (I implemented LD myself in C++ on Pro via this OpenXR extension, in standalone), including SkyrimVR dungeons, and I could toggle it on/off in realtime and I mainly saw that it was the peripheral / masked areas that would become black, the center of the screen was only barely imperceptibly higher in-scene contrast. I was, needless to say, very disappointed. So I've been able to play LD for months on PC and that's why I gave up on it. Also because Pro is only 90 Hz and I believe it can do 120 Hz but they just aren't enabling it, for some reason. Their excuse that 120 is dimmer than 90 and they couldn't ship 120 due to the new pancake lenses inefficiencies is totally bogus, too, 120 Hz is either 33% brighter at the same 1ms persistence as 90 Hz, or the same brightness but 33% less blurry (and less choppy) than 90 Hz at the same duty cycle (and thus lower  persistence). 

I managed to get Meta to fix body tracking poses returning errors on PC over Link/AirLink, via their github issues reporter, but until / unless they make it a non-dev feature, it's still DOA for me to rely on it (I was using body tracking to get the waist pose to do waist-oriented locomotion but now I must find a better way that doesn't depend on Meta at all. Simple IK isn't the same as what Meta's body tracking provides, sadly).

That's great news John. I saw the videos comparing LD on and off and it looks pretty good.

It's a bit too late for me though, as I refunded my Quest Pro in january. I might consider repurchasing it if eye-, body-, hand- and face tracking, all the other OpenXR features that already work on PC over Link/AirLink, would actually work without Dev mode. I can't ask end-users or consumers to make an Oculus dev account and jump through such hoops to use those features.

Until that happens I don't even see any point in developing for these features on PC using any of the Quests, really. There's no point until they can be used for shipping games and so far, none of use PC VR devs have any reason to hope that this will change. People have been waiting for hand tracking to be useable on PC for years now, to no avail. To say we're frustrated is an understatement. I've been an Oculus PC VR  developer since Day 1 when the Rift came out at Felix and Paul and never would I imagine how bad things would get for us. Are you aware how much we need dev mode requirement gone? Many people have asked for this in the forums and elsewhere, just look around you'll see. It's a show-stopper and feels like a slap in the face.