Screencapture and Streaming:

Let’s get this out of the way: to my knowledge, there is currently no way to record video or take screenshots in the Vive Focus without third-party software. Want to know more about how to do that? Tony Vitillo has you covered.

The Vive Focus can stream to, say, a Chromecast. It’s buried in the Settings, but you can do it. Far easier is the Mirage Solo, which gives you the Chromecast option right in the home menu. I find streaming to be particularly suited for making a single-user experience more social, showing everyone in a room or at a booth without a VR headset what the user is seeing. On a desktop VR experience, this of course would be the equivalent of seeing what is on the monitor.

Let’s talk screencapture: Oculus Go vs the Mirage Solo. The video above is meant to give some sense of an apples-to-apples comparison of the result of recording your screen, but what’s the process like to get there? Oculus Go would seem to be the most straightforward — there’s a Sharing tab on the main menu and from there, you can take a screenshot, record a video, or even livestream to Facebook. From what I can tell, you can’t record a video across multiple experiences, as the moment you leave either the main menu or the app you’re in, everything stops (this is not the case when going between web pages, but it is when you try to open a WebVR experience… more on that in a moment). With streaming, you can go between experiences sometimes — I was able to go from the main menu to browsing the web to a couple apps all in the same session (though random crashes were common). Some apps don’t stream (if you don’t see the blinking red light then it’s not streaming), but your livestream will continue on anyway, showing your viewers a black screen with no audio. Also, a streaming or recording session slows the framerate to a crawl, even when I’m just in the main menu. Granted, any of these problems could be Developer Kit issues not found in the consumer release — please let me know if your experience is different on any of those fronts.

Getting content off the Oculus Go is easy. Screenshots can be shared directly to Facebook (no editing) from inside the device and livestreams are (usually) saved to Facebook as well. Recorded videos seem to only be grabbable via plugging your device into your computer and treating it like any other MTP USB device (e.g. your phone).

Compare all of that to the Mirage Solo. Screenshots and video capture aren’t easily accessible to the average user, but hey, that’s why we’re here. In Developer Options you can enable screen capture and recording and once you’ve done that, the Mirage Solo is far and away the best device for capturing your experience. At any time at all, a screenshot can be captured by simultaneously pressing the Daydream and volume down buttons, and video by pressing the Daydream and volume up buttons. Great for keeping a record of what you’re doing (especially if you have stats like framerate and draw calls visible), but also for capturing what someone is doing within your experience.