The VR home system for Meta Horizon OS V81 PTC Overhaul Quest replaces all previous environments with free transfers with high quality lofts.
What is a Public Test Channel (PTC)?
The Public Test Channel (PTC) is the Meta Quest beta release channel. Once you opt in, the headset will receive a pre-release build of each quest system software. Horizon OSversion.
In many cases, the final stable version that is not present in PTC may not reach the stable version of PTC.
Over the past few hours, some testers have received their V81 PTCs on their quest headsets and have begun posting screen recordings to X.
Immersive home overhaul
Horizon OS V81 PTC replaces all legacy VR home environments with a new system called Immersive Home.
The Quest 3 legacy home environment has been criticized for being significantly lower in visual quality than the Apple Vision Pro, and even the Pico 4 Ultra has been criticized by owners of new headsets for having a bad impression of the quality of VR, which is capable of even mobile chipsets.
The Horizon OS V81 PTC removes them all.
Horizon V81 footage from VR enthusiasts ari.
The new home, known as “loft” in some of the OS and elsewhere as “immersive homes”, is a single core environment with four background scenery options: Horizon Central, Midnight, Valley and Oceanarium.
According to testers deployed by V81 PTC, including Nori and Luna, the new home is of much higher visual quality than the legacy home. The lighting will also change based on the selected background scenery, as you can see on screen recordings.
Horizon V81 footage from VR enthusiasts ari.
Although I was only able to teleport to a pre-determined position at Legacy Homes, I was able to teleport and slide freely around my new home. Furthermore, Meta appears to have unified the movement settings for the Home and Horizon worlds into the System-Level World Movement Settings tab.
Some quest developers and enthusiasts have been requesting a system-level mobility configuration system for years. This was hoping that a third-party app could read through the API. It is unclear whether this applies to the setting of the World Movement.
In a new home, you can simply drag and release near the wall to pin a 2D window to a virtual wall.
There is also a new Instagram window home “object” that lets you enable large virtual photo frames on one of the walls of the new home. This displays Instagram images and videos in the same composite 3D as the main Horizon OS app. This is the third “object” available after the Avatar Mirror and Horizon Central Portal.
From Horizon OS V81 video Luna. Note that the lag runs in Quest Pro.
Pin windows to pass-through
Window pinning works slightly differently with pass-through. The default home view for Quest 3.
Instead of securing the window to a physical wall, Meta is pinning the window in the air with the new “pin” option in the window’s toolbar. This means that the window will persist in this real world position whenever you are in pass-through mode.
Meta updated the Horizon OS panel documentation to show a new control bar and confirmed that “follow me” and “pin to space” will become future options. https://t.co/4ovejncqtl pic.twitter.com/p1gb9x30dy
– Luna (@lunayian) December 15th, 2024
More than a year ago, VR enthusiast Luna discovered a reference to the “PIN” option in Horizon OS’s Code of Horizon OS, and discovered a metadocument that mentions the feature that dates back to December.
Nori and Luna say they haven’t seen this yet in their current build of the Horizon OS V81, but Meta says it’s coming.
“Navigator” system UI now available for option
The overhaul of the Horizon OS UI, called Navigator, began its first deployment on Horizon OS V77 in late May, and is only available to a subset of Quest Headset Owners as part of a very progressive rollout.
Quest V77 Test System UI Overhaul & Instagram Photos 3D
Meta has rolled out an overhaul of the Horizon OS interface to some quest owners of PTC, bringing it to everyone “over the next few months.”
The Navigator moves main system interfaces such as libraries, quick controls, notifications, cameras, and more to new, large overlays that appear in both immersive and 2D apps. This means that the system interface will no longer change when opening other windows, making it easier to launch new apps. Navigator’s library also allows you to pin up to 10 items similar to the Windows Start menu.
When the navigator first fired, there was an oval purple purple background, which was quickly removed.
After one important change, the overhaul of the Meta Quest UI went from bad to great
The Quest System UI overhaul began with the testers in May, with significant improvements, but with an ugly, translucent grey “cloud” background. Now Meta has removed it.
With the V81 PTC, Meta says he’s back to defaulting the old universal menu to “keep things simple and familiar.”
“We continue to experiment and improve the navigator, but it’s still available,” Meta notes. It can be enabled in advanced settings.
This may even suggest that Navigator feels that Meta is not ready to replace traditional quest UI, and that it is still not ready, and that it will reevaluate its VR/MR interface strategy.
According to Meta, the Horizon OS V81 PTC has also improved Quest’s Meta AI, “it’s more accurate and you can guess what you want to do.”
For example, if you say “it’s too big”, then Meta AI can reduce the volume and ask you to “go back” if you prefer the previous volume.
Meta AI is also good at building browser URLs, so you can ask them to open specific pages on websites, such as “Search for AA Battery on Amazon” or “Open Chris Hemsworth’s IMDB Page.”
Meta AI is coming to the US and Canada quest headsets
Meta AI came to the US and Canada quest headsets in August and can answer questions about what you’re seeing in Quest 3.
Meta AI is available in Ray-Ban Meta in all 18 countries where glasses are sold, but it still appears to be available only in the US and Canada on Quest.
