Hi, I bought the Quest Pro and love it, and develop for both PC VR and Android.
I would like to know if Local Dimming will ever work on PC through OpenXR via Link or AirLink, or if it will be possible to enable it in the runtime somehow, like Link Sharpening is.
I paid good money for this headset and I expect all its features to work on PC. I'm a pro developer and need PC vs Android builds to have visual quality parity and local dimming missing on PC is a glaring oversight, in my opinion. It's simply unacceptable to spend 2000$ and not be able to use local dimming for PC VR games and apps.
If we can't enable it at a platform level on the headset itself, then if could at least consider a way to add it to Link / AirLink options in a similar way that LinkSharpening was, that would be great. If not, allowing us to enable it through OpenXR as it is on Android, would be fine as well.
If this isn't done by my Amazon return window of Jan 31st, 2023, I will be returning the Quest Pro for a full refund as it's not providing access to all its advertised features. I'm kind of surprised it's even enabled this way at all, even on Android. In my opinion, this belongs in the system settings on the device so you can immediately benefit from it, even in older Quest games (or over Link), that will never get updated to support Pro-specific features. Honestly the entire approach is kind of strange. I get that it adds a bit of processing overhead, but that's why users should be able to disable it in a control panel somewhere. But not being able to use it on PC at all is just wrong, and forcing devs to implement it just to turn on a generic contrast enhancing feature seems like a way to guarantee it will hardly ever get any use, even on standalone apps. I honestly don't get it. Pimax implemented local dimming in their new Crystal headset and it "just works" 24/7, no code required.
Please consider fixing this or changing the approach, it seems backwards to me. A better place to put it would be next to the place where you select the headset's colour space (rec 709 or rec 2020), in the experimental section.
I just want to be able to use features I paid good money for, local dimming not working unless it's explicitly coded seems like a drastic mistake to me, I don't think any other HMD will do it this way because it makes no sense, honestly.
Hi all, Local dimming for Meta Quest Link has been released as part of our v51 release - which is now on the Public Test Channel. We are not exposing the API as an OpenXR API but instead enabling it for all Meta Quest Link apps. John
It's pretty clear the whole "we've got our best men working on it. Who? Our "best men"" means this will never get fixed. I gave up and I suggest other PC VR devs do the same and focus on open source alternatives to 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 @MetaQuestSupport 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.
@MetaQuestSupport 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.
The pro line lives on per the last Boz AMA, however, I agree it’s a pain they don’t implement these features, but I plan on being persistent because on the three games that I talked to the devs and they implemented local dimming, the games look better. I’ve seen the halo and it doesn’t bother me, the contrast is worth it. On v49 of Unity or unreal engine plugin, local dimming is enabled by default. But, I plan on going all out to get an answer on local dimming this weekend, even if it takes constant tweeting at Volga Aksoy and Andrew Bosworth, or if @MetaQuestSupport support responds that will save us all some questions and time
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).
