Oculus Quest: Compile and Run Apps

Important

All Oculus Quest developers MUST PASS the concept review prior to gaining publishing access to the Quest Store and additional resources. Submit a concept document for review as early in your Quest application development cycle as possible. For additional information and context, please see Submitting Your App to the Oculus Quest Store.


We're no longer accepting submission of 32-bit Oculus Quest apps. Any new or updated Oculus Quest application needs to be 64-bit. Please contact Oculus if you are unable to comply with this policy. Oculus Go and Gear VR apps will not be affected by this change.

This section provides in-depth information for getting started developing Unreal applications that target Oculus Quest.

Overview

Once your environment is set up with the appropriate tools and your project settings are configured properly, you may build virtual reality projects targeting Android, the load and run APKs on the Oculus Quest.

Building and Running Projects

  1. Connect your Oculus Quest headset to your PC via USB.
  2. Open a shell terminal and verify that your device is communicating with your PC using adb devices. Note that depending on the device you are using, you may need to configure your connection for software installation. For more information, see ADB in our Mobile SDK Developer Guide.
  3. We recommend using ASTC compression, though ETC2 will also work. Select File > Package Project > Android > Android (ASTC).
  4. When prompted, browse to the destination folder where you would like your APK to be installed.
  5. Once the build process is completed, navigate to the destination folder. Run the .bat file beginning with Install_ to install the application.
  6. Click the application to launch.

Launching a Project Directly onto your Headset

You may also directly build and launch an application to your Oculus Quest headset without saving the APK locally.

  1. Connect your device to your PC by USB.
  2. Select the Launch menu from the Unreal toolbar and select your headset under Devices. If you do not see your device listed, verify your USB connection, and check if you need to set your connection to Connected as an Installer.
  3. Your application will build and install to your Oculus Quest device.

Preview Content on a PC

You may launch the Unreal Engine with a configuration option to use the Oculus Quest plugin in conjunction with the Mobile renderer on the PC. This allows you to preview mobile development from the desktop using an Oculus Rift. To do so, disable OculusRift and SteamVR plugins for your project, and add -OpenGL -FeatureLevelES2 to your command line.

Although it is possible to preview mobile applications in the Oculus Rift during development, it is not generally useful to do so, because Rift applications are subject to substantially different performance requirements (see “Performance Targets” in Oculus Quest: Testing and Performance Analysis). You may find it easiest to use the 2D preview in Unreal, and then either build an APK or use Launch on Device when you need to view the app in VR.

Note: Mobile Content Scale Factor is not currently supported for Oculus development.

Blueprints

Oculus provides Blueprints for common Oculus Quest operations such as querying battery level and headphone connection status.

For more information, see Blueprints Reference.

Advanced Rendering Features for Mobile

The Oculus SDK offers advanced mobile rendering feature such as multi-view and hybrid monoscopic rendering. Under some conditions these features can significantly improve performance.

For more information, see Rendering