Meta’s long-in-development ‘Avalanche’ PC VR cloud streaming system appeared on a French outlet’s Quest 3.
The “Activate Avalanche (Alpha)” option appeared in the Experimental section of the settings of one of GamerGen’s Quest 3 headsets, as demonstrated during a recent livestream.
Clip from GamerGen’s livestream.
The description of the setting translates to “Launch an Avalanche session using the cloud gaming endpoint”. When activating it GamerGen was offered to play Lone Echo, a blockbuster Oculus Rift game from 2017 that hasn’t been ported to Quest.
However, actually attempting to launch it resulted in an error that translates to “Unable to launch the Avalanche session”, with a description of “An error occurred while launching the Avalanche session, please check your network and try again. “
Project Avalanche
The existence of Avalanche was first revealed in April 2022 when Quest firmware dataminer Samulia found a flag AVALANCHE_CLOUD_GAMING_INFRA_ENABLED, added in v24. Version 24 was released in late 2020. This means that Avalanche’s development has lasted for four years. For about 15 seconds, it was really decent framerate, but with a little bit of lag, then a spinning ring came up and stayed like that.
Anyone else got this working?
YouTuber Brad Lynch [PC] that the redditor directly contacted him about their experience, saying “they were able to get into a totally remote game of Asgards Wrath via a UK Wifi5 session”. The original
was another flagship Rift game, shipped in 2019, that also hasn’t been ported to Quest – though of course it did get an even bigger scale
.claimed on XBetween 2016 and 2021 Facebook invested Asgard’s Wrath to ship sequel of PC Oculus Rift blockbusters like Lone Echo and Asgard’s Wrath. Avalanche will allow Quest players to play these games via their gaming PCs over Wi-Fi and USB. However, many Quest users do not own gaming PCs, making Avalanche a great option for those who don’t. If the server is located far away and the connection is not good, there is the possibility of high latency or judder. Jason Rubin, Facebook’s Gaming Vice President, said that in 2020, the technology would be five years away. But some Quest owners have been doing it for years now using third-party tools and services.
Virtual Desktop supports streaming from a PC outside your local network, which some Quest owners have paired with hundreds of millions of dollars to play SteamVR games without a PC. It even provided a paid-as you-go service via tokens. However, in March, the company cited Meta’s cloud VR ban in Quest Store and App Lab policies. Meta’s Air Link would have a similar effect to Virtual Desktop, who banned PC VR WiFi streaming when they launched their own Air Link. In 2022 a number that the US FTC was investigating Meta’s competitive practices, but there haven’t been any further reports on the status of this investigation.