Meta Quest 2 introduces new features designed to try to reduce motion sickness VR symptoms

Meta Quest 2, the VR headset formerly owned by Facebook Meta, recently launched its Air Link "frame rate insurance" feature. This feature solves the problems some users may encounter when the headset's Air Link can no longer be fully adapted to their home wireless network.

Air Link is a feature introduced last year on Quest and Quest 2 that allows the headset to connect to a PC on a Wi-Fi network and play VR games on the PC wirelessly.

The Oculus developer blog notes that the problem with headsets connecting to PCs via Wi-Fi rather than a dedicated transmitter is that performance is usually dependent on Wi-Fi signal strength. As a result, if there is any interference, you will experience undesirable lag or frame drops when playing games in VR. In fact, these types of dropped frames can be quite disastrous for users who are already prone to VR dizziness.

Air-Link Frame Rate Insurance (AFI) is an experimental feature in Quest 2 that mitigates network interference by generating composite frames when frames are lost due to network issues. It does this by looking at the motion between previous frames and essentially making a rough guess at what it should look like so that the gameplay experience remains as smooth as possible.

AFI is disabled by default, so you must launch the Oculus Debugging Tool (ODT) and set the ASW on Mobile drop-down menu to Enable - Frame Rate Insurance.

PC ASW (Asynchronous Spacewarp) is a similar feature that can be generated every other frame to reduce the workload on the PC.

Meta recommends that users keep PC ASW on when AFI is enabled to ensure maximum latency mitigation. If power consumption is a concern, you can disable PC ASW when AFI is enabled. Meta also notes that AFI does not yet support 120Hz refresh rates, so make sure the headset is set to 90Hz or you will experience "noticeable jitter and latency artifacts".