Overview

The new Oculus Dash 2.0 allows pinning application windows inside your VR space. This is pretty nifty and allows you to add anything from movies to web pages to third-party utility apps. The feature has undergone a few changes and revisions throughout the beta program, but with Oculus finally releasing the update to the general public, the usage should be fairly stable now. It’s not entirely straightforward though, especially if you’re running multiple monitors.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in order to

Getting it working

I just started using my Oculus Rift for Elite Dangerous again (my desktop speakers are in for repair) and found the following when using Dash 2.0 with ED in v1.31 of Oculus (the current one):

1. You must enable the “Desktop Panel Pull-out” experimental feature (from the Dash Panel -> Settings -> Experiments) in order to pin individual windows

– If this is “greyed out” you probably have too many monitors plugged into your graphics card. Doesn’t seem to matter what ports they are plugged into (I had 3 plugged into Displayports, reddit seemed to think it was limited to HDMI/DVI ports. Unplugging any one of these let me enable this feature. I have since plugged one of my secondary monitors into the onboard GPU; still have 3 screens + Oculus now).

2. If pull-out panels are blank with an exclamation mark on them, then try setting the “NVidia-VR” (ie, Oculus) screen as the “primary monitor”.

3. To pull out individual windows, you have to press & hold either the “A” button or the trigger button, and -then- “grab” the window. Once it’s pulled out of the screen and placed somewhere, you just have to “grab” it to move it. Remember to “pin” the window(s) you want visible in your cockpit.

4. You can also enable the “Hide Panel Controls” to remove the gubbins around pinned windows.

5. In order to place windows in “seamless mode” (that is, the Elite Dangerous environment is displayed while you muck about in Dash) you MUST run Elite Dangerous from Oculus. Otherwise the Dash will open in an empty space and you have to guess where you want to pin the windows.
(There’s a workaround to use the Oculus launcher for Elite but you can research that yourself).

Transparent windows don’t seem to work