How to Set Up Meta Quest 3 for Vizard and SightLab VR
February 21, 2024
Meta’s newest XR headset, the Meta Quest 3, provides high quality passthrough, sharp visuals and hand tracking. This tutorial will guide you through setting up your Meta Quest 3 with Vizard and SightLab VR Pro, two powerful software tools for VR development, which when combined can greatly simplify the process of creating a XR application for research experiments.
Install the Meta Application on Phone and PC and Do Initial Set Up
Download and install the Meta application on both your phone and PC.
Make sure the headset and controllers are charged.
Put on the headset and follow the instructions in the headset to set up the Meta Quest 3.
Enable Developer Mode
In order to utilize all of the features of the Meta Quest 3, you need to enable developer mode. Enable Developer mode in phone app under Menu- Devices- Headset Settings- Developer Mode.(NOTE: Sometimes the app will disable developer mode when it updates and it must be manually toggled back on. If this happens the headset will stop working through OpenXR).
Enable Developer mode in the PC Meta Link Application as well.
Toggle on Hand and Body Tracking in VR Headset
In the Quest Home environment, go to settings- movement tracking- and toggle on hand and body tracking (passthrough should be enabled to be toggled on in the PC app).
Configure Meta Quest Link PC Application for OpenXR and Tracking
Since the Meta Quest 3 connects using OpenXR, make sure to set Oculus as the active OpenXR runtime (note you can also run without OpenXR, but then will not have the passthrough feature).
Under “Beta” toggle on the various tracking you are using.
To connect with Vizard and SightLab you can use the Meta Link connection (cable or wireless). You will need either the official Meta Quest link cable (or a fast USB-C cable) or a fast internet connection (at least 5Ghz). Note that it is recommended for the best performance to use the cable (especially for getting good framerates on the Mixed Reality).
Enable Quest Link.
Connecting with SIghtLab
In SightLab you can select the “Meta Quest 3” preset. This will automatically set up a hardware configuration for the Meta Quest 3 with navigation. It will also enable passthrough and hand tracking as an option to any script. Body tracking can be enabled by adding the line “from utils import body_tracking” to the top of your script (which you can then select from any downloaded full body avatars from ReadyPlayerMe, Mixamo, Rocketbox or Reallusion). There are examples for Mixed Reality under the “ExampleScripts- Mixed Reality” folder, as well as examples for using the hand tracking to grab and interact with objects or see tracked hands, upper body tracking and more. See here for more details https://help.worldviz.com/sightlab/openxr/ .
Connecting with Vizard
In Vizard a collection of sample scripts showing how to use various OpenXR features can be found in the \examples\openxr\ folder.
You can also manually create a vizconnect file by selecting OpenXR for tracking, display and input.
See “OpenXR” in the Vizard Documentation for more information.
For more information on how Worldviz can help you to connect your various hardware, set up a VR lab or provide research tools for VR contact sales@worldviz.com.
