Does the new Oculus Quest VR viewer work with Mac?
Bump. Interested in buying an Oculus Quest, to view my sketchup models in VR, but only if it’s compatible with my MacBook Pro. Is there anyone out there who can tell me if that’s possible?
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If you have Bootcamp set up on your Mac you can then run the SketchUp Viewer VR application, and see your models in VR. Getting Bootcamp going is tricky enough that I had the SketchUp IT person set it up for me! If you’re feeling brave enough, start here:
On the Quest side you need a Link compatible USB-C cable. Do a search in Amazon for “Oculus Quest Link Compatible USB-C”
You may have read about how v17 of the Oculus software has enabled USB-2 for cables, but I have tried that, and it may support USB-2, but my regular USB-C cable doesn’t let the headset be recognized. The Link compatible cable still works.
You would want to be up to date with the Oculus Windows application, it didn’t used to support Quest or S, only Rift. Then you open the SketchUp Viewer VR app, see a message on your Mac screen (that is running Windows by now) that there is no VR headset found. You connect the cable from your Mac to the Quest, and on the Quest you see a message about going into Rift mode. Select that, and now you’re looking at the Rift home screen instead of the Quest one. The SketchUp app will now know there is a VR headset attached.
There are other complications, you may need to open the Oculus app and set up your Quest as a known device, before trying the SketchUp app. You also may hit problems trying to sign into your SketchUp account, but those happen to anyone using a headset, not just Quest users.
I may make a video about some of this!
By the way, I have Bootcamp on my work MacBook Pro, that is a couple of years old. The frame rate you get isn’t high enough to play a high end game, I tried playing The Climb, and would frequently die because the frame rate was too low for me to react. But, going through a SketchUp model works well enough. One of these days I’ll get Bootcamp going on my own 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro, that should do better.
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Hi. Have the issues with Sketch Up Viewer and the Mac OS now been resolved? Seems ridiculous that Mac users aren’t able to access much of the VR capability of Sketch Up. Is there a work around for this or a 3rd party app? Ive just bought a Oculus Quest 2 for client presentations but it seems that there isn’t a straight forward solution for exploring a model from the Mac on to the quest 2 in VR. Some help or direction would be very much appreciated.
Oculus don’t support headsets on macOS. The only Mac solution at the moment is what I described, where you install Bootcamp and run the Mac as a Windows 10 machine.
The performance of the Rift interface isn’t always good, but when you get into the SketchUp viewer it’s tolerable.
There are other ways in which VR can be done, and I hope that we are investigating those, but I wouldn’t expect progress on that any time soon, at least while headset manufacturers are only interested in PC.
My son and I just attempted to get his Oculus Quest to work on my MacBook running BootCamp & SketchUp VR- Jeez - what a performance. The SketchUp VR app doesn’t recognize the Oculus and whenever we launched it we simply got the horizon with “no VR device detected” even though it was tethered with the correct cable. We can continue without the VR device but kind of defeats the purpose. Seems like this should be much easier. Any advice?
We didn’t get the option of viewing as a Rift mode, but will try again.
Another way to get SketchUp to work on Mac is to use a 3rd party plugin that exports the model to the cloud and offers an app on the Oculus app store. I recommend you to try the SENTIO VR plugin that is available for Mac users as well as Windows.