The Meta Quest and Meta Quest 2 both come with a pair of brilliant Touch controllers that let you feel and interact with the VR world. However, they aren’t always the best and most convenient solution.Fortunately, it’s easy to use a standard game controller in either wired or wired mode with either headset (though Quest 2 is far more common).

Meta Quest headsets (both versions) let you use your bare hands through the hand-tracking feature, which is great with certain games (e.g. Waltz of the Wizard) that are designed for hand-tracking in particular and media apps or the web browser, where you don’t necessarily want to grab a controller ever few seconds to scroll down a page or pause something.

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In addition to Touch controllers and hand tracking, the Meta Quest 2 has native support for traditional controllers or “gamepads”, if you’re old enough to remember the Gravis Gamepad. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are VR games (such as the Tetris Effect or certain racing titles) that simply play better with a controller, and if you can’t use (or don’t like) hand tracking then a standard controller can be a more comfortable away to operate media apps or the web browser, compared to having a touch controller strapped to your wrist. Whatever the reason you want to use a controller, you can do it thanks to Meta’s decision to add this feature to their headsets.

Civil liberty advocates are less enchanted. In a report published on Thursday, American Civil Liberties Union Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley worries that these kinds of drone programs may normalize usage and “usher in an era of pervasive, suspicionless, mass aerial surveillance.” He notes far more invasive turns that police drone usage could take, including warrantless surveillance of specific people, crime “hotspots” or even whole neighborhoods or cities. Stanley wonders if drone usage won’t just become “another weapon in the war on drugs, in over-policing, in the targeting of Black, low-income and other vulnerable communities, and otherwise amplify the problems with the deeply broken U.S. criminal legal system.”

While we didn’t see it documented anywhere, our Xbox Series X controller has a USB-C port, and our Meta Quest 2 has a USB-C port so, you can see where this is going. It turns out that this totally works, and we could activate menu choices and scroll up and down text pages using the controller by simply plugging it in. We also made sure there were no batteries in the controller, so there was no doubt the magic was happening over the cable.

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Connecting your controller via Bluetooth couldn’t be any easier. Before we show you the steps, please note that it’s not possible to provide screenshots of all the menus involved in the procedure, because casting, screenshots, and screen recordings don’t work when Bluetooth pairing is activated. With that said, here are the steps to follow:

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The drones U.S. police are using are much more like the consumer-grade type you might find at a big box store, than multi-million dollar, higher-tech military drones. Generally, police drones don’t carry weapons and are used primarily for video surveillance. It is possible for small drones to deliver chemical irritants like tear gas, however, a technology that police in Israel have used against Palestinians.

7. Put your controller in pairing mode. This differs from controller to controller, so check its documentation or look it up online.

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According to data from the Chula Vista Police Department, it has sent drones to more than 16,000 calls in total, with an average response time of under two minutes. For reference, average response times using officers exceeded 20 minutes in 14 of 15 other departments included in a review by data analyst Jeff Asher earlier this year.

Jamiles Lartey Twitter Email is a New Orleans-based staff writer for The Marshall Project. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the Guardian covering issues of criminal justice, race and policing. Jamiles was a member of the team behind the award-winning online database “The Counted,” tracking police violence in 2015 and 2016. In 2016, he was named “Michael J. Feeney Emerging Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists.

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“If they’d rushed into that with limited information about the call and he spun around because he’s scared of the cops and points the lighter at their general direction, we can see how easily that could become a tragedy,” a department official told the San Diego Union Tribune in 2020. Supporters also note that faster drone response times can aid investigations, and see the technology as a “force multiplier” that can help police address staffing shortages, and respond to potentially dangerous scenes without putting a human officer in danger.

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Many of the cities using drones in policing are doing so from so-called “real-time crime centers,” which are growing in popularity as well. These units function as centralized hubs to connect the various bits of surveillance and data that police collect from things like stationary cameras, drones, license plate readers and technology that listens for possible gunshots. Some centers can even integrate police body cameras and video from Ring doorbells at the homes of people who sign up.

While drones don’t have the same capabilities as officers, the Chula Vista department and drone manufacturers say that their use can function as a de-escalation tactic. In one frequently cited example, 911 received a call about a man waving around a gun in front of a taco restaurant. A Chula Vista police drone arrived in 84 seconds, and before officers could make it onto the scene, the operator used the drone video to determine that the “gun” was actually a cigarette lighter.

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The department denied his request, arguing that the video is “investigative” in nature and not subject to public records laws. The department does make drone flight path data public, along with the reason for the 911 calls that initiated the investigation. Over the past week, flights have been launched for reported robberies, domestic disturbances and assault, but also public indecency, welfare checks and “suspicious circumstances.”

Perhaps the most well-known police drone program in the country is run by the Chula Vista department in Southern California, which began its “drone as first responder” efforts in 2018. When 911 calls come in, the department routinely sends a drone first to assess what kind of human police response is necessary, if any. Most police drones are not used as first responders, it’s worth mentioning, but the approach is growing in popularity. In addition, the federal regulatory hurdles that limit such programs are likely to loosen in the near future.

Just this week, police departments in Salem, New Hampshire; Gresham, Oregon; and Luverne, Alabama announced the purchase of drones. More than 1,500 departments across the country now use them, “mostly for search and rescue as well as to document crime scenes and chase suspects,” according to a February report in the MIT Technology Review. Some agencies, like the New York Police Department, are experimenting with other uses, like public safety warnings during emergencies. It’s a new space where regulations and safeguards appear to be lagging behind adoption.

Just what kind of transparency the public has into the kind of data these police efforts collect is still playing out. This week, a California appeals court agreed to hear a case brought by a journalist who filed a public records request for footage from the Chula Vista drone program. Art Castañares, publisher of La Prensa San Diego, asked for a month of video to “independently verify police officials’ assurances that they do not use the drones to spy on residents.”

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Here we’re using a standard Xbox Series X controller for the tutorial, but your mileage may vary if you have something more esoteric.

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Now you can use the controller with apps and games that are compatible with it. If you want to know whether a given game or app supports a controller, head over to its store page and if it says “Supports Gamepad,” then you’re good to go.(Image Credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Officially, Meta lists “Bluetooth 3.0 Class 2” controllers as compatible. In practice, if you already have a controller there’s no harm in trying it with your Quest to see if it works. However, if you’re looking to buy a controller to use with your Quest, it’s essential to do a web search to see whether it works or not.