Meta Quest

Meta Quest support turns your Touch controllers into an ordinary PC gamepad. The pair fuses into one controller, so every mapping, macro, shift layer and emulation output you already have works with them unchanged. Reading them is free, and by default OmniControl reads them without taking the headset display, so you can set the Quest down and play on your monitor.

Overview

OmniControl talks to your Quest through Meta's own PC software, over a Link cable or Air Link. Both hands then arrive as a single device: A, B, X and Y become the four face buttons, the triggers become the analog triggers, the grips become the shoulder buttons, the stick clicks become the stick presses, and Menu becomes Start. From there it is a pad like any other. It appears in the device list, drives the remapper, saves into profiles, and reaches both virtual pad outputs with nothing to reconfigure.

The app gives it a page of its own, under Setup, because a Quest is the only input device in OmniControl that needs setting up before it works. That page draws the signal path from your headset to your game and names the link that is broken when something is not arriving, checks each setup step rather than describing it, and shows the pair as a live 3D model you can click to rebind.

Why use it

You already own the controllers, and they are good hardware sitting idle whenever you are not in VR. This is the shortest route to using them on the games you play on a monitor: no new pad, no per-game work, and no rebuilding the setup you have.

It also adds an aiming option a pad does not have. The hand holding your aim controller can steer the camera directly, either as a mouse or as the aim stick, with the thumbstick still available for large turns. That is closer to gyro aiming on a Switch or DualSense than to anything a thumbstick alone does.

Use cases

• Play a controller game without a controller. Your pad is flat, packed, or in another room, and the Quest is on the desk.
• Aim with your hand. Sweep with the thumbstick and settle the shot with a small turn of the controller, or hand the whole camera to your hand.
• Keep the setup you already built. Existing profiles, macros and shift layers apply to the pair with no new configuration.
• Play a keyboard-and-mouse game with Touch controllers. Have OmniControl send key presses and mouse movement instead of a virtual pad.
• Stream it. The Touch pair is a full 3D model, so it draws in the Overlay and takes Themes like every other controller.

Your headset while it runs

There are two ways to run it, and they are a genuine trade rather than a good option and a bad one.

Leave my headset alone is the default. OmniControl reads the controllers without ever taking the display, so your headset keeps showing whatever you were looking at, and the controllers carry on working after you take it off and set it down. This is what most people want.

Take over the headset is the alternative. OmniControl becomes the app your headset is running, so nothing else reacts to your controllers. The cost is real and immediate: the headset shows a black screen, and the controllers stop about half a minute after you take it off your head. Choose it when you want the controllers exclusively and are happy to lose the view.

Supported devices and compatibility

Quest 3 and Quest 3S, with their Touch Plus controllers, are what this is built and tested for. You need Meta's desktop app installed and signed in, and a Link cable or Air Link over your network; both connections work identically for controllers. OmniControl runs on Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.

Quest support is off until you turn it on, so a machine with no headset never touches any of it.

Limitations

A Touch pair gives you eleven bindable buttons and no d-pad, so a shooter loadout is a tight fit and shift layers are how you get more. The Meta button on the right controller cannot be bound at all: your headset keeps it for its own menu, whatever any app does.

The hardware offers four analog controls, a trigger and a grip on each hand, and a controller has two analog slots. So each hand picks which one is analog, and the other one still arrives, as a shoulder button.

A plugged-in pad always wins the active slot, on purpose, so that switching this on cannot steal the slot from a controller somebody is holding. If you have another controller connected, the Quest does nothing until you tell OmniControl to use it, which is one button on the setup card. Touch controllers also sleep quickly when you set them down, which is their own behaviour and not something OmniControl changes.

Aiming with your hand as the aim stick needs a virtual controller running for it to aim, which is Emulation and part of Pro (see pricing). Aiming as the mouse does not.

Works with the rest of OmniControl

The whole point of fusing the pair is that nothing downstream is special. Rebind it on Remapping, shape its sticks and triggers in the studios, hand it to a game through Emulation or as keyboard and mouse, and put it on stream with the Overlay. For the setup steps, the aiming options and the troubleshooting, read the Meta Quest documentation.