xesite/blog/convoluted-vrchat-gchat-setup-2021-02-24.markdown

title	date	tags
My Convoluted VRChat Google Meet Setup	2021-02-24	oculusquest2 vr vrchat

My Convoluted VRChat Google Meet Setup

Recently the place I work for sent us all VR headsets. I decided to see what it would take to use that headset to make my camera show a virtual avatar instead of my meat body face. This is the story of my journey through chaining things together to make work meetings a bit more fun by using a 3D avatar instead of myself in some of them.

This post uses SVG for diagrams to help explain what's going on here. You may need to use a browser with SVG support in order to get the best experience with this article. All the diagrams will be explained after the fact so that people using screen readers are not left out.

Working at @Tailscale is great. They sent us all an Oculus Quest 2! pic.twitter.com/dDhbwO9cFd

— Cadey A. Ratio (@theprincessxena) February 19, 2021

So, let's cover the basics from a high level. At a high level a webcam is just a video source that may or may not have a microphone attached to it. So in order to get my avatar to show up in a video call, I need some way to make some window on my computer act as a webcam. This will make the overall dependency list look like this (for those of you using screen readers I will describe this diagram below):

VRChat renders to the Desktop which is picked up by OBS which has the ability to pretend to be a webcam, which is finally picked up by Google Meet.

If the VR headset that I got from work was a tethered to the PC kind of VR headset like the Valve Index or HTC Vive, the next steps would involve full body tracking or something so that I could have my movements in real life transfer into movements that my avatar makes.

However, the VR headset we got sent was an Oculus Quest 2. This is a standalone VR headset that is basically an Android tablet that you strap to your face. This makes things a bit more technically challenging because now you need some way to get the video to the headset and the motion tracking data from the headset and to the computer at 90 times per second. This requires a bit more cleverness.

The Oculus desktop software ships with a feature called Oculus Link that allows you to use a gaming PC to render the VR data to your headset by sending the video streams over USB. I had to dig around for a compatible cable (It needs to be a specific kind of USB-3 to USB-C-3 cable with at least 5 gigabits per second of transfer capacity) since the ones that Oculus sells are both at least CAD$110 and out of stock anywhere I can find them in Canada. The 0.75 meter long cable I had been using was good enough to get me through the first couple days of experimenting with VR, but it was clear that a better solution was needed.

I did some digging and found a bit of software called ALVR that claimed to let me do VR from my computer wirelessly.