Oculus Quest Review – Standalone VR Unit

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It’s been two and a half years since I tried the Google Daydream, which I felt was a disappointment. Since then, there had been nothing that sounded like it was much better. Everything was either wired into a PC, or just an incredibly entry level experience with very little reason to bother.

That was, until I heard about the Oculus Quest. A standalone device, but with ‘proper’ controls like the PC connected Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or any of the various Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets. I started to read up on it, and the more I read – the more it sounded like a winner. It had only just launched in the US, and people were raving about it online.

After a lot of consideration, I decided to order the 64gb Oculus Quest unit for $649AU (there’s a 128GB version for $799 which has no difference beyond the amount of storage doubled). That price point was probably the top I was willing to pay – $700+ just felt too expensive. There was also nowhere in Australia I could go to buy this device or check it out – Oculus has an online store, or via Amazon AU – I had to make the call to buy it unseen and untested.

I am really glad that I did. There’s not much to this – a headset, two controllers, 2 AA batteries and a very long USB-C cable for charging the headset.

What’s in the Oculus Quest box?

This is the first ‘proper’ VR device that really is consumer friendly to the masses. You take the headset and controllers out, put the batteries in, turn on the headset and you’re ready to start setting it up.

The quick tutorials shown are easy to understand – you’ll need to use your phone to set up the Oculus Quest once (like pointing it to a wifi network) but after that, you never have to use your phone again.

Like older VR units, you’ll need to set up your ‘boundary’ – that is, the area you map out in your physical space where you’ll use VR without hitting anything. Older headsets needed you to walk a controller around the room, but the Quest (and I believe the new Oculus Rift S) improves on this greatly.

First, you’re able to see the outside world with the headset on, when it’s in passthrough mode. It will show a black and white live footage of what you’re looking at/ In this passthrough mode, you can draw on the ground where your play area is, which then creates a grid wall. The wall only shows up when you get too close to it, and the closer you are, the thicker the grids are.

You can also just set a boundary for sitting experiences, which just creates a circle around you.

Passthrough also kicks in if you go outside the boundary you’ve set up which I think is a great safety feature (or if you just want to go get a drink and can’t be bothered taking the headset off, either way).

Setting up your Oculus Quest

Once set up, there’s the ‘First Steps’ tutorial for using your device. It teaches you how to use the controls, while giving you a sandbox to play around and experiment with what’s possible. This is the app to show anyone who hasn’t used VR properly before – it’s immersive, easy, and actually fun.

The graphics on the Oculus Quest are not going to match what’s possible from a PC, but they are good enough to be immersed and not think the visuals are lacking. If you came from PC VR you’d notice the downgrade in quality of course, but that’s the cost of portability.

Check out this comparison of Robo Recall as an example. It’s quite a fun game and I was more than happy with the graphics:

Most games also support streaming via Chromecast to a TV, so others can see what the headset wearer is doing – I can see this as a great small party device where people take turns, especially with a game like Beat Saber:

The controller quality in my opinion, is great. I’ve seen some online discussion around the magnet-secured battery clips falling off, but I’ve experienced no issues at all. They’re the same controllers that come with the PC powered Oculus Rift S, and have touch-sensitive controllers to know when you’re pressing certain buttons or not – allowing your virtual hand to move around a bit.

The tracking is also great – the 4 cameras on the device are enough to work out where your controllers are and what they’re doing, with a very high level of accuracy and low latency. I don’t notice any lag at all when moving my hands around in a virtual world – it’s as good as instant, while being incredibly smooth.

The biggest negative is the cost. The headset isn’t crazy expensive, but the games are. They’re generally between $20AU and $50AU per game, which is going to make you think long and hard about what you buy. It might not sound that bad, but a lot of the games don’t have huge replayability – you’ll finish once after 1-2 hours then move on. Beat Saber for example is $46.99, but at least that’s the sort of game you’ll want to play again and again while improving. There are some free games, and the store is highly curated so there’s no rubbish apps, but it’s worth being aware of.

Being the tinkerer that I am, I wanted to see what else was possible for free on the Oculus Quest, and wrote up a separate post around some utilities I’ve been using – check it out if you want to sideload apps (including custom Beat Saber songs), stream PC games to the Oculus Quest via Wifi and making Steam think it’s a supported plugged in device, or mirror everything you do on the Quest to a computer, rather than just certain in-game support.

With all of the above in mind, I still strongly recommend the Oculus Quest, as long as you don’t have a PC powered VR unit already. It’s a great all-round experience, with good-enough graphics and a lot of fun to be had. It’s the sort of thing I want to go back and play again and again because it is so different to other gaming experiences. Playing in a virtual world where you need to actually look around and react will both give you a bit of a workout, and make you forget where you are in the real world.

Oculus Quest Free Utilities Guide

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’ve reviewed the Oculus Quest separately, but in short it’s a really impressive piece of technology that’s ‘good enough’ graphics wise, and great at everything else.

If you’re a tinkerer however, you’ll want to do more than just use whatever is on offer via the Oculus Quest store. Here’s some free 3rd party utilities to get more out of your VR device:

SideQuest – This is an app to install on your PC which lets you sideload (install) apps outside of the Oculus Quest store. As the device is running on Android, if you’ve played around in that space before you’ll be fairly comfortable with this. Follow the Guide to set this up, you can’t break or brick your device but you could make things a bit messy; worst case is a factory reset.

At a very high level, you’re creating an Oculus Quest developer account (incredibly easy), and allowing 3rd party app installs to your device. Any app loaded via SideQuest won’t appear with a nice giant picture in the main screen, they’re found under Library > Unknown Sources.

There’s a bunch of specially built games and apps for the Oculus Quest already, as well as free betas of games that will launch later. If you’re looking for more free content for your device, this is the easiest way to get it installed.

SideQuest also has detailed Beat Saber integration where you can download and sync custom songs to play using bsaber.com as well as the ability to manage existing apps installed on the device – uninstall, clear data etc.

Scrcpy– This is a utility to run on a computer, that lets you mirror the view from inside the headset. Natively, the Oculus Quest can do some screen sharing via Chromecast, or mirroring to a mobile device, but it’s app dependent, and in beta.

Scrcpy has the ‘negative’ point of giving you the actual view from the headset, as in two giant round circles of graphics rather than a single rectangle view, but it’ll work in all scenarios. It’s really handy when you are trying to talk someone else through how to do something. You can reduce the view to a single circle with certain parameters when running (more below).

It’s possible to do this wirelessly and works quite well. Here’s a batch file you can run that’ll connect the Oculus Quest and launch the viewer. Note you will just see a black screen in the program until the Quest’s sensor starts displaying something.

Questview.txt (download, rename to Questview.Bat, and place in your folder where scrcpy is installed)
Download

@echo off
echo Plug in the Oculus Quest via USB-C
pause
for /f "tokens=9" %%a in ('adb shell ip route') do (echo IP of Oculus GO: %%a&set ipaddr=%%a)
adb tcpip 5678
echo Unplug the Oculus Quest's USB-C Cable
pause
adb connect %ipaddr%:5679
echo Connected! Launching scrcpy...
scrcpy.exe -c 1440:1600:0:0

ALVR (Air Light VR)- This is a utility to run on a computer to be able to use the Oculus Quest like any other VR device that would be plugged directly in (such as an Oculus Rift S).

This opens up a huge library of games and programs to run. You can play any Steam VR game this way – but really fast moving games like Beat Saber can be a bit sensitive to the latency added by wireless – but another game like Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality works perfectly. A 5GHz router is recommended for this for higher throughput, and the Oculus Quest supports this too.

You’ll need to install the ALVR APK onto your headset (SideQuest can do that!), and install the ALVR Server software on the PC and run the ‘alvr.exe’ program.

Side note: Virtual Desktop does the same as ALVR, but it’s a paid product. Early on they were about the same, but Virtual Desktop seems to be a better and smoother experience now, so could be worth considering if you like ALVR.

With these three free solutions, you can get a lot more out of your Oculus Quest. Opening up the Steam library, being able to see what the wearer of the headset is seeing, and being able to add apps outside the Oculus ecosystem all add a lot of extra value to this already impressive (in my opinion) device.

How To Check What Files Are In Use On A Remote Windows Computer

Posted on by Adam Fowler

This one had me stumped for a while, and I even asked on Twitter with a large amount of replies (thanks everyone who did!) but none that I could get to work, or that weren’t overly complicated requiring the compiling of code.

It’s easy locally to find out what files are open, and here’s a great article covering several free ways: https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/find-process-locked-file-openfiles-utility/

None of those worked remotely for me in a Windows 10 environment – but I thought Handle from the SysInternals Suite would be the best bet. Running locally, it did exactly what I wanted – a giant list of every file open, and say what process had it open (like WinWord.exe).

Using PSExec with Handle however, causes it to forever wait for something. On the remote PC, it definitely launches handle.exe and handle64.exe, but they have no activity. I thought it might be the EULA prompt getting stuck somewhere, but there’s a registry setting that will autoaccept that prompt, and putting that in place didn’t help (but I did check locally and it was skipping the EULA agree prompt. Thanks to this blog post explaining the reg key required https://peter.hahndorf.eu/blog/post/2010/03/07/WorkAroundSysinternalsLicensePopups which was:

reg.exe ADD HKCU\Software\Sysinternals /v EulaAccepted /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

I added this to the remote machine under both the user logged on to the remote device, and the user I was connecting as, with no luck.

After a bunch of Googling and trying solutions, I ended up finding this thread on stackoverflow. One of the answers with 0 votes (which can be easily overlooked) was a PowerShell script, invoking the command remotely, from a user called A.D – thank you A.D!

I’ve barely modified it for my purposes, but if this helps you please go vote his post up on stackoverflow (I did but don’t have enough rep for it to show):

$computerName = 'computername'
 $stringtoCheck = 'test' # String you want to search for, can be blank by removing text between '' quotes
 $pathtoHandle = 'c:\temp\handle.exe' #location of handle.exe on the remote server.
 Invoke-command -ComputerName $computerName -Scriptblock {
     param(
     [string]$handles,
     [string]$stringToCheck
     )
      "$handles /accepteula $stringToCheck" | Invoke-Expression 
     } -ArgumentList $pathtoHandle,$stringtoCheck

The script requires handle.exe to be on the remote computer under C:\Temp, and that of course you have admin rights to the remote PC with the account this script is being run. Beyond that, it’ll show back all open files that match the variable set in $stringtocheck across any of the results – it could be the path, the process that has the file open etc.

Why would you want to do this remotely at all? You might be troubleshooting something to do with open files and not want to interrupt the user. You might have a reason to see what files the user has open, or maybe it’s a locked PC and the user left.

Hope this helps others as it was a much harder task to accomplish than I assumed.

Converting a user mailbox to shared in Exchange Online Hybrid

Posted on by Adam Fowler

This is a useful process a lot of companies follow when an employee departs: Instead of deleting the mailbox, or continue to leave the mailbox in place and pay for licensing, it’s possible to instead set it as a shared mailbox and keep the data there for free.

There are some catches to this, such as the maximum amount of data is 50gb. You also can’t delete the user’s account, but it can be disabled and moved.

Setting the mailbox from User to Shared in Exchange Online is easy (from docs.microsoft.com):

In the admin center, go to the Users > Active users page.

Choose the user whose mailbox you want to convert.

In the right pane, choose Mail. Under More actions, choose Convert to shared mailbox.

…but there’s two tricks I’ve found when doing this in a hybrid environment. First, docs.microsoft.com says to update the status of the mailbox for Exchange On-Premises:

If this shared mailbox is in a hybrid environment, we strongly recommend (almost require!) that you move the user mailbox back to on-premises, convert the user mailbox to a shared mailbox, and then move the shared mailbox back to the cloud.

That’s a tedious process to do just to make it shared. As they point out, you can change some AD attributes locally to get around this, but there’s still some scenarios where it might get set back as a user, have no license, and end up getting deleted.

This other article on support.microsoft.com however, mentions the main way of getting around this: by setting the account’s msExchRemoteRecipientType and msExchRemoteRecipientTypeDetails attributes to the corresponding values that would match it’s state in Exchange Online:

Set-ADUser -Identity ((Get-Recipient PrimarySmtpAddress).samaccountname) -Replace @{msExchRemoteRecipientType=100;msExchRecipientTypeDetails=34359738368}

This 1 line command will set the attributes correctly, you can check via PowerShell or the Exchange Management Console to see that the mailbox will now show as ‘Shared’.

Update 3rd March 2020: Last time I tried the above, it didn’t work. The good news is that as long as you’re on Exchange 2013 CU21 or later and Exchange 2016 CU10 or later, you can just use the command:

Set-RemoteMailbox -Identity user -Type Regular

This fixed the on-premises status of the mailbox, even though I’d already moved it online. So, worth trying first before doing anything, as it should correctly do both if you Thanks Arttu Astila for the tip! /End of update

The other problem I’ve seen is if a mailbox is Unified Messaging (UM) Enabled, and converted to Shared. You’d think that it would either just lose it’s UM status, or let you configure the UM settings after the fact; but neither are correct. If it’s holding onto an extension number as part of UM, even in it’s Shared Mailbox state it will continue to hold it, and block any other account from using the extension in the future.

To get around this issue, the account will need to both be changed back to a user account from shared, and given a license that supports UM. If you try to disable UM on the account with either of these requirements, you’ll see an error like these:

User [email protected] is already disabled for Unified Messaging.

License validation error: the action ‘Disable-UMMailbox’, ‘Identity’, can’t be performed on the user ‘Test User’ with license ‘BPOS_S_Standard’.

With all of the above, changing a user to a departed mailbox in a hybrid environment with Unified Messaging should be:

  1. Disable Unified Messaging on the user
  2. Set the attributes of the AD account as shared
  3. Set the Exchange Online mailbox as shared

It should work well if you do things in the right order, but it’s easy to not be aware of this and get things into a mess.

There’s also the scenario where you might create an account, give it Office 365 licenses and have a mailbox automatically created before you did it on-premises, or used Exchange On-premises to create the mailbox remotely.

You can fix that by using this script from Adaxes (doesn’t need their software!) which will tell on-premises Exchange about the mailbox and create the record.

I’ve come across another blog that goes into some of this http://jetzemellema.blogspot.com/2016/02/convert-user-mailbox-to-shared-in.html but I haven’t needed to change the license status, but it’s worth mentioning in case there’s a scenario you hit where you do.

Outlook has Blank Emails in the PersonMetadata Folder

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Update 4th June 2020

This is a known issue with Microsoft’s guidance on it available here

Original post

If you use the Outlook client and have a mailbox located in Exchange Online, you might discover mystery blank emails located in a folder called ‘PersonMetadata’. They’re unread, with a blank from/to/subject field and no contents visible, with a size of 2KB. Trying to open them results in opening a blank new email.

They don’t turn up in a normal Outlook search, but will show if you create a Search Folder, and you’ll see a lot of them. The folder itself is hidden by default, and you could use MFCMapi to see the folder in someone’s mailbox.

According to this Microsoft Support article, they’re objects used for Outlook Customer Manager, which actually sounds like a pretty useful set of features around tracking customer relationships and sharing contacts.

I logged a case with Microsoft to try and find out more, and see if this could be disabled. I was told that Outlook Customer Manager is actually enabled in all tenants and mailboxes, regardless if the feature is being used or even ‘on’. There are some forums talking about turning this feature off, but the licensing option is only in some tenants (from what I can tell, Business customers) and not an option at all for Enterprise customers. Too bad if you don’t want this feature!

It’s also recommended by support to not delete these items – and more will just turn up anyway don’t waste your time doing that.

There is also possibly a future patch to Outlook to hide these results, but at the time of writing it was only stated as a possibility with no confirmation or ETA.

I did work out a workaround though – adding an extra filter to the Search Folder:

  • Find the Search Folder in Outlook and right click > ‘Customize this search folder’
  • Click the Criteria button.
  • Click the ‘Advanced’ tab and from the ‘Field’ dropdown menu, choose ‘Frequently-used fields’ and then ‘To’.
  • Type ‘@’ into the Value field and press the ‘Add to List’ button.

Your screen should look like this, and press OK. Because the empty looking mail objects have no To or From field, but any normal email will have to have an ‘@’ in the email address, the results you now see for the Search Folder won’t include the blank objects.

For those who use Search Folders, this is a reasonable workaround but let’s hope it gets fixed properly.

Update 7th May 2020

I’ve had a lot of people visit this blog recently, so I’m guessing something more drastic has broken. If you’re using an inbuilt Search Folder, then the ‘Criteria’ button may be greyed out. You can instead create a new Search Folder by right clicking ‘Search Folders’ and choosing ‘New Search Folder’:

From this New Search Folder window, scroll to the bottom and choose ‘Create a custom Search Folder’. Then press the ‘Choose’ button, which should have the ‘Criteria’ button available.