I know to some this will appear a bonkers idea, but to me it makes sense. I've tried every possible combination of settings for my Quest 2 and I am underwhelmed. Even at highest settings the image is fuzzy, washed out, too little FOV, flakey, sub-standard and frankly a pain. 

So instead I am trying to set up the quest to deliver a 2D image with heading tracking. It won't let me do it!

On my 32 inch monitor I am getting a fantastic image - clean, beautiful, crisp and with a great frame rate despite "only" having a 1080TI GPU. It occured to me that if I could get the Quest to behave in 2d I could get the same great image but immersed inside the headset with proper tracking - as with Track IR. Yes it isn't 3d but frankly I prefer the 2d quality.

YET....my Steam version Fs2020 will not tolerate 2 apps running at the same time. If I run Virtual Desktop to get the large curved "screen" and OpenTrack for head tracking, Steam attempts to shut down one of them down, or crashes the sim, or the oculus software insists I want 3d, but I don't. If I force it into 2d it just presents a revolving hour glass and refuses to go to 2d mode.

There must be some kind of app through which I can get a large, slightly curved "desktop" image with 2d tracking. I have seen examples of others doing this on YouTube but they are clearly using the MS version of Fs2020 which does allow more than one app to run at a time. Steam just will not allow it.

Any suggestions to make this work would be most gratefully received.

 

If you look at your „2D Screen“ with your VR headset, it is actually still VR with the same graphics power requirements and resolution limits as within the simulator. You may also run the simulator on this virtual curved screen, but if you are not satisfied with the in-sim-performance, you might not like this mode either.

Edited June 10, 20214 yr by Flyfox

It should be possible if enough people were interested. I believe I have a memory of P3D providing a similar VR mode.

 

53 minutes ago, Flyfox said:

If you look at your „2D Screen“ with your VR headset, it is actually still VR with the same graphics power requirements and resolution limits as within the simulator. You may also run the simulator on this virtual curved screen, but if you are not satisfied with the in-sim-performance, you might not like this mode either.

Thanks but this doesn't appear to be as you describe. If you have the MS version (not Steam version) of FS2020 you can run virtual desktop and FS at the same time. When doing so you can run a head tracker app like OpenTrack and then use your headset as a 2d tracking device. The resolution is the same as or similar to your monitor/screen so the picture is sharp. There are quite a few YT videos demonstrating exactly this, and this is where the immersion competes quite well with 3d given that the latter is so washed out, jittery and poor resolution compared to the 2d screen.

The problem is that I have tried this set up and because I have the Steam version of FS, Steam will not allow virtual desktop to run at the same time as the sim. This can be seen clearly as Steam switches in quick succession between the two apps, or force-closes either the sim or the Virtual Desktop. You need the virtual desktop app in order to widen and curve the screen with tracking.

The other alternative is to run OpenTrack with either a webcam or a phone app that tracks your head with the phone's own video camera. This works but there is still the problem of showing all this as a complete image inside the Oculus headset.

It seems the Quest 2/Oculus software just won't easily switch to 2d as it "assumes" you always want VR in 3d. Somewhere, somehow, there must be an app or setting which forces the Quest to render the image in 2d and not auto select 3d. But where?