PlutoSphere is a new cloud streaming platform in beta that lets Quest users play PC VR games without requiring a gaming rig—a big investment if you’re looking to play SteamVR titles like Half-Life: Alyx. Developers Pluto VR have been teasing it for the past few months, however now Quest owners will be able to finally see if it’s up to snuff via SideQuest.

PlutoSphere essentially lets you play your own games from Steam, the Epic Games Store, or the Oculus PC app—basically any app store you can install—all without needing a gaming computer capable of playing those graphically-intense titles.

The process is this: download PlutoSphere via SideQuest, have either a Quest or Quest 2, a 50 Mbps Internet connection, and a WiFi 6 router capable of 5 GHz. If you’ve never used SideQuest before, the unofficial Quest app store requires a few hoops to jump through. Check out our how-to guide to get started.

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The download is free, however time allotment with the virtual gaming rig is measured in tokens. During its Early Access period each user starts with a limited supply of tokens automatically each day, however if you want to keep connected you’ll have to buy tokens via the PlutoSphere token store to continue.

All info is wiped from the virtual rig once you’re finished with a session, which means you’ll have to download all of your games there again when you start back up. The virtual computer boasts PC specs (and likely network specs) that would put any home rig to shame though, packing a Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL CPU@ 2.50 GHz, NVIDIA Tesla T4, and 32GB RAM.

“Getting to Early Access on SideQuest has been a significant milestone for us and our community. We couldn’t have done it without our Plutoneers: our dedicated early adopters and testers,” said Forest Gibson, Co-founder of Pluto.

We haven’t had a chance to try out PlutoSphere ourselves, however it’s currently sitting at a [3.8/5] rating on SideQuest. Many users have reported acceptable latency levels, something that can make or break any cloud gaming service.

This is especially true for VR since it requires input latency measured around 10-20 milliseconds to be unnoticeable by the user. We’ll be trying out PlutoSphere is the coming days to see just what it’s made of, so check back soon.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • snakataka

    Its due to the way the stream is instanced. It’s that or nothing in terms of the money required to do this. So for people who are keen, great. For everyone else they aren’t holding a gun to your head. You don’t have to have an extreme opinion be it good or bad on everything..

  • It will be interesting to see how many people will adopt this to understand the potential of cloud rendering for consumer use in this period

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  • Camaman

    I don’t understand the part where the article casually mentions you need to re-download the game you want to play on each session.
    What?
    If they are basing their business model long term on this just being a rent-a-VPS-with-RTX-GPU by the hour and they erase your instance it will just be used as a gimmick.
    –
    It requires to long prep time to start playing.

    Hope this is just a beta limitation, because any investor dumb enough who backed this deserves what comes from user experience.

    • Paul

      I’ve been using it for a while as an early tester – its a great service and the low latency is amazing – playing Minecraft VR, full fat Blade and Sorcery with mods, Alyx etc – just brilliant – the need to reinstall is only a quick process – it uses Steam, so you just reinstall from your library and cloud saves mean no progress is lost – its not perfect, but its pretty amazing for someone who can’t afford a £1K plus gaming PC…I recommend trying it – the first setup is slow, but after that its fast(ish) getting signed on and a few quirks are overcome with practice – then its just part of putting on the headset and immersing yourself…

  • Sławomir Kubicz

    Installing Half Life Alyx takes approx. 15 mins (around 60 GB), but what with Medal Of Honor? It requires more than 170GB. I wonder how much time (tokens You can receive freely once for a day or buy) it will cost.

    2nd matter – lags. Before launching You could play only if You were invited. After launching number of users increased 10 times, I think, maybe even more. I live in Poland and unfortunatelly I’ve got lags – yesterday I could play but latency was 200-300 miliseconds. Today it’s a slideshow.

  • kontis

    It should be criminal for companies like Meta nad Apple to prevent this kind of innovation. But it isn’t.

    You buy the device and then they use their ToS to control your life. Gaming consoles do the same nasty thing.

    This is why people have to use SideQuest and pretend they are all developers.

  • Camaman

    F me
    Talk about bloat!
    Its like the whole game is video from taken from multiple angles and scenarios and GPU just does AI that serves it based on our action