Virtual Desktop, the program that allows us to manage the PC from our Oculus Rift by showing our Windows desktop, has been updated to the Oculus SDK 0.5 and includes a few new features.
Virtual Desktop is a free and tremendously useful tool that allows us to visualize the Windows desktop on the Oculus Rift, showing it before us as a gigantic curved screen. We can zoom in, zoom out, change the zoom, the distance that separates us from the screen and run any window application. In addition to this, it allows you to play some games that have the option of working in windowed or fullscreen windowed mode, such as Diablo 3, World of Warcraft and many more, in fact most Moderna offer that option. The good thing is that it is compatible with TriDef3D in side-by-side 3D mode, so we can play these same games in 3D on a giant screen, which is not the same as playing them in virtual reality, but it is a good option for games in isometric perspective such as strategy and also side-scrolling titles in pseudo 3D. And of course, we can view 2D and 3D videos side by side and 360º.
But the utilities do not end here, since we will also be able to use Virtual Desktop to launch applications compatible with Oculus Rift natively, and therefore we will no longer have to take off and put on the DK2 between application and application to look at our monitor. And speaking of the monitor, it also offers the option to clone the contents of the DK2 on the screen automatically. Version 0.9.25 incorporates the following improvements:
- New user interface
- New installer
- Voice commands
- The mirror to monitor option is now a global option
- Option to always show the desktop when playing a video
- Performance improvement on Intel graphics chips
- Bug fixes
To run Virtual Desktop it is strongly recommended to use Windows 8 or higher, since although it is also compatible with Windows 7, it does not offer the API that allows capturing the screen incorporated in Windows 8, with which the performance will be slower since it must be done based on brute force with the CPU. You can download it for free here.
