Best Oculus Link Cable Alternatives in 2024 (Quest, Quest 2)

A brief history of Oculus

Palmer Luckey coined, designed, and built the concept for Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controllers back in 2012. Luckey served as a head-mounted display (HMD) designer at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies back then. He has also built up a considerable reputation in his field, as well as being an avid collector of HMDs. In fact, he held the biggest collection of HMDs in the world at the time.

Once Luckey had enough knowledge and preparation for his Oculus mission, Luckey took to Kickstarter with the campaign name ‘Oculus – Step into the game’. It was a hit, raising over $2.4 million dollars with has considerably more than the original $250,000 target. This allowed Oculus to release not one but two developers ‘pre-production’ models whilst looking into how Oculus could be refined and developed further before the finished product was released.

By March 2014, Luckey had founded Oculus VR with Brendan Irbe, Michael Antonov, Nate Mitchell, and Andrew Scott Reisse. They had also attracted some big attention in the technology market which lead to a colossal $2.3 billion acquisition deal from Facebook Inc. Talk about a crazy couple of years!

When Facebook bought Oculus

Facebook turned out to be one of the best things to happen to Oculus in the long term. Looking to laser focus in-house development of Oculus Rift, Oculus was sent over to Samsung Electronics to help them develop Gear VR. Whilst Oculus wouldn’t be using Smartphones to render and produce VR experiences, it got them into the real world of big tech development. Ultimately, Facebook wanted to get it right, seeing as other VR experiences at the time weren’t exactly breathtaking.

Two years after the Oculus acquisition, Oculus Rift saw a retail release in March 2016. It was a unique proposition for virtual reality enthusiasts at the time, offsetting processing to a capable PC and touch controllers allowed for more possibilities than the competition over at Samsung with their smartphone-based VBR experiences. 

We’re not going to forget about the introduction of full room motion sensing, head tracking, and high-resolution optical lenses making Oculus a cut above the rest. It’s an experience that has only been refined and copied by their competitors since.

2017 saw the release of Oculus Go, a truly portable and wireless virtual reality experience that would one day evolve into the Oculus Quest series. It had a steep price tag of $600 but it couldn’t support the same high quality and powerful experiences the rift could.

Just a year later Facebook and Oculus released Oculus Quest, the first viable and true standalone virtual reality headset. By 2020, Oculus Quest 2 released and featured a better optical screen lens resolution, faster refresh rates, bigger storage, and bags more processing power.

As Oculus stands now, it’s actually being rebranded into the Meta family of products and companies, with Facebook being just one part of the Meta machine. That means by the end of 2022, Oculus will no longer exist, although their products will live on under the Meta moniker.

The best Oculus Quest 2 link cable alternatives

Now we’re up to speed, let’s check out some of the best Oculus Quest 2 link cable alternatives. We’ve tried to cater to everyone by looking for cables with flexible nylon insulation that cost more to more than a standard USB cable for budget shoppers. 

Our advice would be to not look into it too much. Users can buy the fastest USB cables in the world, but they will ultimately be at the mercy and speed of the USB ports they’re plugged into. 

All of these cables support up to 5 GBPS speeds, which is more than enough for any best Oculus Quest 2 link cable alternatives.