The Meta Quest 2, a VR headset owned by the former Facebook Meta, recently officially launched the Air Link “frame rate insurance” function. This feature can solve some problems that some users may encounter when the Air Link of the headset is no longer fully compatible with the home wireless network.
Air Link, a feature introduced last year on the Quest and Quest 2, allows the headset to connect to a PC on a Wi-Fi network to wirelessly play VR games on the PC. The Oculus developer blog notes that the problem with the headset connecting to the PC via Wi-Fi rather than a dedicated transmitter is that performance is often dependent on Wi-Fi signal strength.
Therefore, if there are any interruptions, you will experience undesirably stuttering or dropped frames while playing in VR. In fact, these types of frame drops can be quite disastrous for users who are already prone to VR stuns.
Air-Link Framerate Insurance (AFI) is an experimental feature of the Quest 2 that mitigates network interference by generating synthetic frames when frames are lost due to network issues.
It does this by looking at the motion between previous frames and basically making a rough guess at what it should look like so that the gameplay experience is as smooth as possible. AFI is disabled by default, so you must launch the Oculus Debug Tool (ODT) and set the “Mobile ASW” dropdown to “Enable – Framerate 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 turned on when AFI is enabled to ensure maximum latency mitigation.
If you are concerned about power consumption, you can disable PC ASW when AFI is enabled. Meta also notes that AFI doesn’t yet support 120Hz refresh rates, so make sure the headset is set to 90Hz or you’ll experience “obvious jitter and latency artifacts.”