in today's video we're gonna be having a look at using home assistant in vr check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well recently home assistant released the first
version of the oculus quest 2 companion app and essentially what this does is it allows you to
sign into home assistant by making use of the oculus quest 2 and when you do this it shares
that information with home assistant you gain access to well over 40 different data points
and some of these data points include things like the oculus quest 2's battery life the interactive
state so whether it's active or inactive so if someone's wearing it or if they're not and other
things such as the ip address and wi-fi signal strength before we carry on a couple of things to
mention this is the first release of the companion app for the quest so do expect some bugs and the
next one being that this app is currently only available to set up and install through sidequest
so you can't access it through the oculus store now this is something that home assistant are
working on and over time it will be available through the oculus store but for now it's side
quest only and if you have no idea what side quest is imagine it as kind of like an alternate app
store but for the quest the setup process for side quests isn't too difficult and we are going to run
through it step by step now if you've never seen the sidequest store i would recommend checking
out because there's lots of great content on there and lots of it is free for you to try out so with
all that said let's get straight into getting the companion app installed on this thing as
always with my videos all the links and everything you'll need will all be in the description below
and it will also be chaptered so if there's a particular part you want to see feel free to use
those timestamps in the description and just jump ahead the first step that we're going to want to
take then is to just head over to the sidequest website and we're going to want to download
sidequest for the platform that we're on it's also worth noting here that sidequest does also work on
mac and linux so if you are using either of those systems you can also grab a download for them i'm
just using windows so i'm going to go ahead and grab download the 64-bit version there for windows
we're then just going to need to locate the file we downloaded and we're going to run it i'm just
going to leave it with the default installation setups but you can change it if you want so we're
going to press next and then install and once that completes we're done with this step of
sidequest so we can just hit finish so we're done with the sidequest app for the minute and we can
just leave that to one side we can now move on to our next step which is setting up an organization
to set up the organization we're going to want to head over to the oculus developer website
and you'll find a link to the page you need to go to in the description
once logged in you'll be taken to the create a new organization page and from here you're
going to need to provide an organization name for this you can just write whatever you want
so enter something in the box and then you're gonna need to tick the i understand button and
choose submit you're then gonna have to carefully read through your nda and if happy hit agree and
then hit submit and that's it for setting up an organization so you can now close that page and
you can follow the next link which is going to be to install the oculus drivers following that
link is going to take you to this page but you're only going to need to perform this step if you're
using a windows machine if you're on mac or linux then you can just skip this one but if you are on
windows you're going to go ahead and click that big blue download button at the top we then just
need to locate that file we downloaded and we're going to right click on it and choose extract all
with that extracted we're going to open it up and we're going to choose the usb driver file
and inside of there we're going to look for the android underscore win usb dot in file
with that located we're going to right click on that and we're going to choose install
we're then going to need to press open and then we'll get a security pop-up asking us if we'd
like to install the software and we're going to need to press install on this and once we've done
that that's the oculus drivers installed now you may have noticed that those were the oculus go
drivers and the reason for this is that the oculus go drivers are also compatible with the quest
so don't worry if you see oculus go mentioned we're now at a state where we're pretty much
done with all the software installs and everything we need there's just a couple of things left to do
the next step we need to do is to set up the developer mode and to do this we're going to
be making use of the mobile app so go ahead and open up the oculus app on your phone or tablet
and in the bottom right corner of the app you want to choose menu and from in the menu you're going
to click devices which is the small gray square in the top left from here you should see your
connected quest device and you're going to scroll down until you see developer mode you're then
going to want to select developer mode and you'll see a toggle for developer mode and you're going
to want to toggle this on once you've turned that on you're then just going to want to reboot your
oculus quest headset once the headset reboots you're going to need to plug it into your pc
a handy cable to use if you haven't got one is just the charging cable that comes with the quest
providing you've got a usbc port on your computer you'll then just need to put your headset on and
from here you should see a little pop-up telling you you need to confirm the usb debugging there's
also a little tick box that you can take to always trust the computer so go ahead and click that and
once you've done that that's it that side quest fully set up on your quest if you head back into
the sidequest software up at the top there you should see a little green dot and you should also
see the ip address as well as the battery life for your oculus quest if for whatever reason following
along with this didn't work for you and you still can't get your quest to connect with sidequest
then head over to the sidequest website and there is some troubleshooting information available
there so check that out and fail in that drop me a comment below and i'll do my best to help you out
carrying on then we're gonna return to the sidequest app that we originally installed
at the beginning now this is an optional step but i'd recommend it as it's worthwhile
especially if you're gonna make use of sidequest but all we're gonna do here is just create a
user account now it is just a simple case of filling in the form and entering your details
but if you don't want to do this then you don't have to if you're just downloading the
home assistant app and you're not bothered about sidequest or anything else then you can just skip
it and what we're finally going to do now is just install the home assistant companion app
so inside quest in the top right corner you'll see this little search for game section and in here
you're gonna just do a search for home assistant and as you start typing it you should just see it
pop up here so we're just gonna select that and that will take us into the home assistant side
quest page and the option that we care about here is this big pink button that says download app and
we're just going to select that when you select that do make sure that your quest is connected
and you'll know that it's connected again just because you'll see that green dot in the top
left corner once that's downloaded you'll see at the bottom there it will say all tasks completed
just briefly and then you know that it's done and now that that's done we can unplug the headset and
put it on and we'll carry the home assistant setup from within vr so we're here now in vr and what
we're going to need to do is now just access the home assistant app that we installed so to do this
we're just going to press on apps and then in the top here we can see that it's filtering all apps
so we're going to want to just change that filter so if we just press on that you should see a new
section called unknown sources and this is going to be where any of your side quest content goes
so if we select that we can see home assistant in that list and we're just going to open that up
and what this is going to do is just open up the home assistant companion app and all we're gonna
need to do here is just sign into home assistant so if we press continue it's gonna look for any
home assistant instances on our network and i can see my demo one there so i'm gonna go ahead
and press that and then it's just gonna ask me to sign in with my username and password it's then
going to ask us to name our device so i've just called minequest but you can call this whatever
you want and this is going to be the name that appears in your companion app list of devices
so name it something appropriate we're then just going to press finish and it's going to take us to
our home assistant dashboard so we're here on the home assistant dashboard and i can pretty much do
anything that you'd expect to be able to do within the home assistant dashboard so i can see up there
i've got my office lights and i can toggle those on and off by making use of the toggle switches
here and when i turn them on and off as you'd expect the lights will turn on and off you also
have full access to everything else within your home assistant so you can expand the hamburger
menu there and you can just browse through all the different bits that you've got installed
one cool thing that you can do with the oculus app is if you go to either the left or the right of
the screen you'll see these white little tabs that appear and if you grab on those little white tabs
you can actually stretch the screen out so if you wanted a longer screen a wider screen sorry
then you could do that or if you wanted a smaller kind of mobile screen then again you can do that
and that's the home assistant ui is responsive it will just snap down to whichever size you got
it on now this is quite a nice feature and if you make use of the oculus multitasking then it might
be a cool one to have to just have home assistant minimized on the side so as well as being able to
make use of the home assistant dashboard and any of the various different screens that you've got
you also have access to those 40 data points that i mentioned earlier and to actually access those
you just need to go into the companion app settings so in configuration there you can
just scroll down and you'll see this option here for companion app so you're going to select that
and what this is going to show us is all the bits that we can customize and configure for the quest
so the bit that we're interested in here is the sensors so if we head into managed sensors here
we can view all the different bits of information about the various sensors so we can see that by
default it disables a lot of them and it only enables a couple of them to actually start with
so have a scroll through that list of data points and just look for ones that you're interested in
and when you do find one that you are interested in just select it and it will give you a brief
description of what it is and what it does and then you simply just press the toggle in the
top right corner and that will turn it on and it'll be accessible through home assistant back
home assistant side then i can see underneath mobile app that my quest has been added there
now i've only got this one mobile app on this demo version so it's the only thing that's there
but i can see my quest there and i can see that i've got 20 entities i think from the default
settings i think you only get access to seven entities without turning on some of the other
ones but i've turned on a few here so let's just have a look at those so if i select the device
there i can see my quest and i can see the battery level for it so currently mine's on 96 percent and
if i press it again that's going to take me into the device where i can see the various different
sensors that we just turned on a second ago from the list of different sensors that you can enable
one of the ones that i would recommend you check out is the interactive sensor and what this one
does is it tells you whether or not the quest is currently active or not so if the screen is
on or not and basically that little sensor that tells you if it's on your face or not if that's
detecting something then the sensor will be on so i can see it here it's currently off and it
updates really quick so if i just turn the headset on there you should see that that just instantly
changes and if i turn it off then it will just go off again some other simple automations you could
do are to do with the battery level so if the battery level is below a set point or if it's
fully charged then home assistant could send you a notification to let you know another one could be
to have your lights brightness automatically adjust so depending on that state of the
interactive sensor you could have the lights go brighter or dimmer to just help out with the vr
tracking i'm not sure if it's possible but some sensors that i'd like to see added to the list
are the oculus health sensors so the ones for tracking your activity goals and your calories
if you could have those brought into home assistant i think that'd be quite cool
especially if you use the oculus for health related things like doing workouts and whatever
because that way you could have that link to it and you could have notifications to remind you to
complete your goals or you know to charge it up if you haven't completed your goals
if you're going to be making use of the companion app and you've got a cool automation or a cool
use case that you're gonna make use of then let me know what your idea is in the comments below
and there we go guys that's been a quick look at the new companion app for the oculus quest
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