There’s MORE To This Quest 2 Update Than You Think!

There’s more to the Quest 2 v38 update than I first thought. Next to a handful of small changes, it adds something called Air Link Frame Rate Insurance, which can make Air Link smoother, but only if you turn it on. Here’s what’s in version 38, how to enable that feature, and the other Quest news from March 2022.

Warning: account bugs

Before you update, you should know about the bugs. People reported issues ranging from being locked out to accounts that looked fully reset, with no access to their games and apps. Meta had been working on it for a week. The latest status, from 16 March 2022, was that most account issues were resolved but some remained.

So it might be worth waiting until everything’s fixed before you let your Quest update. If you’re already affected, you can follow the fixes on the Meta Quest support account on Twitter. I’d been using v38 for about a week without any problems, so it’s up to you.

The small changes in the Quest 2 v38 update

• Easier multiplayer. People you recently met in VR now show up in the People tab, in VR and in the Oculus mobile app. That makes it easier to find nice people again, or to block them. When you start a party, games that support the enhanced multiplayer features are highlighted.
• Better settings page. It’s easier to find things now, and there’s a search bar. As an interaction design graduate, I love small design improvements like these.
• Moved settings. The couch and desk options moved from Experimental to Guardian settings. Tracked keyboard and Bluetooth settings are now in Device settings.
• Guardian redo. You may need to set up your Guardian again because the tracking system was improved. I lose tracking all the time when I wake my headset, so I hope this fixes it.
• Tooltips. Hovering over an option in the quick actions menu with hand tracking now shows a tip.
• Not so nice: the Oculus startup logo is now permanently the Meta logo. I’m sad.

These small updates seem to prepare for a big one: Horizon Home, which will replace the current home. There’s no release date yet, but it will bring new social features, like inviting people into a home you can fully customize.

Air Link Frame Rate Insurance

The bigger change is for Air Link users. When your stream degrades, for example on a crowded Wi-Fi network with the whole family online, you can get frame drops and lag. Meta’s experimental fix is called AFI, short for Air Link Frame Rate Insurance.

It uses techniques similar to Asynchronous Spacewarp 1.0, but on demand and on the Quest itself. It fills in dropped frames by predicting what comes next from previous frames, which should smooth over visual artifacts caused by network interference. If your connection is good enough you’ll never see it kick in, and when it does, it helps. So unless you plan to kick your family out of the house because VR is more important, there’s no harm in leaving it on. It’s off by default.

How to turn it on

1. Make sure your PC software and your Quest are on version 38 or higher. It doesn’t work on Quest 1, so you need a Quest 2.
2. On your PC, open your Oculus install folder.
3. Go to Support, then oculus-diagnostics, and double-click the Oculus Debug Tool.
4. At Mobile ASW, open the drop-down menu and select the enabled frame rate insurance option. Auto means the default setting, and by default it’s off.
5. The next time you use your Quest 2 with Link or Air Link, AFI is active.

One bug for now: you can’t use 120Hz together with AFI. Meta said it would fix that in a future release.

Parental supervision tools

For parents, Meta is rolling out VR parental supervision tools over the coming months:

• An unlock pattern to lock specific apps, set right from VR.
• From May, teens are blocked from downloading inappropriate apps by default. They can request an override, and parents approve or deny it.
• A parent dashboard where parents link their teen’s account.
• Purchase notifications, so you see when your kid has bought something with your credit card.

More tools are coming. VR, and social VR especially, is hard to moderate. I don’t have kids myself, but I can imagine needing this if a young child uses your headset.

Should you update?

Version 38 has been rolling out since 7 March 2022, and as always Quest updates arrive gradually, so you’ll get it eventually. Given the account bugs, I’d be in no rush. Once you have it, though, turn on Air Link Frame Rate Insurance: if you play over Air Link, there’s no reason not to.