Everything you need to know about the recent Android Overlay update to DeoVR

We recently updated DeoVR to include Android Overlay, but what is this functionality and how will it affect the VR experience? Here’s everything you need to know about this useful new improvement to DeoVR. 

From the user’s perspective, by enabling Android Overlay they will see an improvement to the image quality by a huge 33%. The enhanced visuals can be best seen in the small details, such as patterns on chairs and similar items. It will go a great way toward increasing immersion in VR as objects in virtual reality become much more lifelike and realistic. 

Due to limitations in Oculus’s OVROverlay, we created this feature on our own. OVROverlay does not support more than 180 degrees fisheye, and since we moved to OpenXR it does not support fisheye visuals at all. 

In response, we created our own layer which lies underneath our menu (meaning it is more correctly called an underlay). We applied this by integrating the DeoVR player with the Android media player Exoplayer, and in time this will become our primary video tool. 

To provide support for fisheye and deliver improvements to the video quality, we created a plugin that loads various meshes, such as fisheye, equirectangular, etc. During testing, we estimated that video quality was improved by a third. 

But there is more to come. We plan to keep on improving this Android Overlay tool and the VR experience to give even greater visual quality for the user. Keep checking back to the blog for more information.