Anyone using Oculus Desktop or any another app for multiple monitors in VR?

[AirBear]

I have a 3 monitor setup and I love wearing my Rift for dogfighting. But many other times it's a PITA. ED runs on the Ultra Wide 32" center monitor, Teamspeak, Voice Attack, EDDiscovery and EDProfiler run on the left hand monitor, and Chrome runs on the right hand usually with numerous pages open from Inara and EDDB. To complicate things I don't wear my glasses with the Rift but generally need to put them on to do anything on the other 2 monitors.

I'm looking at Oculus Desktop ($14): https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/911715622255585/

It sounds like it may let me access the other monitors with the Rift with ED running. I'm wondering if anyone is doing this and can confirm it works, or if there's another way to do this.

Thanks,

AirBear

 

[TorTorden_VR]

Oculus desktop usually refer to the dash desktop view.
This 'Virtual Desktop' is a completely separate program and if you don't do stuff to trick oculus it will shut down elite if you attempt to start another VR application.

I would rather recommend activating dash and setup a desktop view.
And make it huge in dash.
That way you have it just a button push away.

And you can pin windows to remain open while you play as well.

And it is already installed most likely.
Bigscreen is another virtual desktop software that is also free. But for some reason oculus think we shouldn't multitask VR applications.

EDIT:

What I did before was use voice attack to launch the Bigscreen .EXE directly, and I was able to use VA commands to switch between the game's process and the virtual desktop.
This was rather iffy, usually crashed one, or both processes every one in sixth of the times I switched between them.

Dash completely removed the need for doing this, just leave your right hand controller near your stick and click the button.

 

[AirBear]

Thanks for the info. I did some research about dash and found out how to enable it. Then I had to update my Nvidia drivers. I've had Bigscreen since last year but gave up on it, the only way to use it with ED running was a very complex work around someone came up with. Now I get to lose what little hair I have left trying to figure out dash, although maybe the tech gods will be kind to me and make it easy

 

[Micha]

I just started using my Oculus for ED again (my desktop speakers are in for repair) and found the following when using Dash with ED in v1.31 of Oculus (the current one):

1. You must enable the "Desktop Panel Pull-out" experimental feature (from the Dash Panel -> Settings -> Experiments) in order to pin individual windows

- If this is "greyed out" you probably have too many monitors plugged into your graphics card. Doesn't seem to matter what ports they are plugged into (I had 3 plugged into Displayports, reddit seemed to think it was limited to HDMI/DVI ports. Unplugging any one of these let me enable this feature. I have since plugged one of my secondary monitors into the onboard GPU; still have 3 screens + Oculus now).


2. If pull-out panels are blank with an exclamation mark on them, then try setting the "NVidia-VR" (ie, Oculus) screen as the "primary monitor".


3. To pull out individual windows, you have to press & hold either the "A" button or the trigger button, and -then- "grab" the window. Once it's pulled out of the screen and placed somewhere, you just have to "grab" it to move it. Remember to "pin" the window(s) you want visible in your cockpit.


4. You can also enable the "Hide Panel Controls" to remove the gubbins around pinned windows.


5. In order to place windows in "seamless mode" (that is, the Elite Dangerous environment is displayed while you muck about in Dash) you MUST run Elite Dangerous from Oculus. Otherwise the Dash will open in an empty space and you have to guess where you want to pin the windows.
(There's a workaround to use the Oculus launcher for Elite but you can research that yourself).


Transparent windows don't seem to work

 

[Sierra_Hotel]

Great tips Micha. I was having issues with Dash working correctly on my previous setup but figured I'd give it a try again on my new build. Think you just answered every concern I had about using it.