Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Foveated rendering is complicated to implement with current rendering APIs in a way that actually improves performance, but foveated streaming seems like a much easier win that applies to all content automatically. And the dedicated 6 GHz dongle should do a much better job at streaming than typical wifi routers.
> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
It's an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate
Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I'd love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.
> Monochrome passthrough
So AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:
> User accessible front expansion port w/ Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) / PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)
Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?
One thing I don't see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That's something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.
More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There's an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I'm surprised it isn't standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index's "knuckles" controllers.
Back when I was in Uni, so late 80s or early 90s, my dad was Project Manager on an Air Force project for a new F-111 flight simulator, when Australia upgraded the avionics on their F-111 fighter/bombers.
The sim cockpit had a spherical dome screen and a pair of Silicon Graphics Reality Engines. One of them projected an image across the entire screen at a relatively low resolution. The other projector was on a turret that pan/tilted with the pilot's helmet, and projected a high resolution image but only in a perhaps 1.5m circle directly in from of where the helmet was aimed.
It was super fun being the project manager's kid, and getting to "play with it" on weekends sometimes. You could see what was happening while wearing the helmet and sitting in the seat if you tried - mostly ny intentionally pointing your eyes in a different direction to your head - but when you were "flying around" it was totally believable, and it _looked_ like everything was high resolution. It was also fun watching other people fly it, and being able to see where they were looking, and where they weren't looking and the enemy was speaking up on them.
Somewhere between '93 and '95 my father took me abroad to Germany and we visited a gaming venue. It was packed with typical arcade machines, games where you sit in a cart holding a pistol and you shoot things on the screen while cart was moving all over the place simulating bumpy ride, etc.
But the highlight was a full 3D experience shooter.
You got yourself into a tiny ring, 3D headset and a single puck hold in hand. Rotate the puck and you move. Push the button and you shoot. Look around with your head. Most memorable part - you could duck to avoid shots!
Game itself, as I remember it, was full wireframe, akin to Q3DM17 (the longest yard) minus jump pads, but the layout was kind of similar. Player was holding a dart gun - you had a single shot and you had to wait until the projectile decayed or connected with other player.
I'm not entirely sure if the game was multiplayer or not.
I often come back to that memory because shortly after within that time frame my father took me to a computer fair where I had the opportunity to play doom/hexen with VFX1 (or whatever it was called) and it was supposed to revolutionize the world the way AI is suppose to do it now.
Then there was a P5 glove with jaw dropping demo videos of endless possibilities of 3D modelling with your hands, navigating a mech like you were actually inside, etc.
That sounds like you're describing dactyl nightmare. [1] I played a version where you were attacking pterodactyls instead of other players, but it was more or less identical. That experience is what led me to believe that VR would eventually take over. I still, more or less, believe it even though it's yet to happen.
I think the big barrier remains price and experiences that are focusing more on visual fidelity over gameplay. An even bigger problem with high end visual fidelity tends to result in motion sickness and other side effects in a substantial chunk of people. But I'm sticking to my guns there - one day VR will win.
It is precisely that! My version was wireframe and I can't recall the dragon, but everything else is exactly like I remembered it!
For me this serves as an example.
Few years later VFX1 was the hype, years later Occulus, etc.
But 3D graphics in general - as seen in video games - are similar, minus recent lumen, it's still stuff from graphics gems from 80-90s, just on silicone.
Same thing is happening now to some degree with AI.
I expect part of it is that the contemporary recommendations for VR are extremely meaty - something like 2160x2160 and 120hz with stereoscopic rendering meaning you're rendering every frame twice.
That's more than 1.1 billion pixels per second. At 24 bits a pixel that's something like 26Gb/s of raw data. And that's just in bandwidth - you also need to hit that 120hz of latency, in an environment where hiccups or input lag can cause physical discomfort for a user. And then even if you remote everything you need the headset to have enough juice to decompress and render all of this and hit these desired throughputs.
I'm napkin mathing all of this, and so I'm sure there have been lots of breakthroughs to help along these lines, but it's definitely not a straightforward problem to solve. Of course it's arguable I'm also just falling victim to the contemporary trappings of fidelity > experience, that I was just criticizing.
I played that game in Berlin in the late 90s. There were four such pods, iirc, and you could see the other players. The frame rate was about 5 frames per second, so it was borderline unplayable, but it was fun nevertheless.
Later, I found out that it was a game called ”Dactyl Nightmare” that ran on Amiga hardware:
The booth depicted on the 1000CS image looks exactly how I recall it, and the screenshot looks very similar to how I remember the game (minus dragon, and mine was fully wireframe), but the map layout looks very similar. It has this Q3DM17 vibe I was talking about.
Isn't this crazy, that we had this tech in ~'91 and it's still not just there yet?
On similar note - around that time, mid 90s, my father also took my to CEBIT. One building was almost fully occupied by Intel or IBM and they had different sections dedicated to all sorts of cool stuff. One of I won't forget was straight out of Minority Report, only many years earlier.
They had a whole section dedicated to showcasing a "smart watch". Imagine Casio G-Shock but with Linux. You could navigate options by twisting your wrist (up or down the menu) and you would press the screen or button to select an option.
They had different scenarios built in form of an amusement park - from restaurant where you would walk in with your watch - it would talk to the relay at the door and download menu for you just so you could twist your wrist to select your meal and order it without a human interaction and... leave without interaction as well, because the relay at the door would charge you based on your prior selection.
Or - and that was straight out of Minority Report - a scenario of an airport, where you would disembark at your location and walk past a big screen that would talk to your watch and display travel information for you, prompting question if you'd like to order a taxi to your destination, based on your data.
I remember a guy I know went to japan/asia around 1985ish and came back with a watch. It had hands, but also a small LCD display. You could draw numbers on the face with your finger, like 6 then X then 3 then = and the LCD would show the values, and finally 18
This is completely uninteresting now, but this was 40 years ago
It was a really interesting and weird time growing up when Japan was the king of tech. I had a friend who's dad was often over there and bringing all sorts of weird stuff back. There was this NES/Famicon game where you played with a sort of gyroscope. I have no idea how you were supposed to play the game, but found the gyroscope endlessly fascinating. Then of course there were the pirated cartridges with 100 in 1 type games. Oh then we found the box full of his dad's "special" games. Ah, good times.
There were some licensed games in Japan that they'd never release in the West, and also a relatively large scene for unlicensed/'bootleg' games. Fun slightly related factoid - the Game Genie was an unlicensed hardware mod and they actually got sued by Nintendo, and won.
I somehow suspect in modern times they'd have lost.
Everything you described and more is available from modern home Vr devices you can purchase right now.
Mecha, planes, skyrim, cinema screens. In VR, with custom controllers or a regular controller if you want that. Go try it! It’s out and it’s cheap and it’s awesome. Set IPD FIRST.
William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, about 2 AIs with the same creator, locked in conflict, is actually prophetic. About Microsoft Bob and Clippy in the 1990s.
That’s reality cool. My first job out of college was implementing an image generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer on the USS Nimitz, also using SGI hardware. I would have loved to have seen the final product in person but sadly never had the chance.
I question that we could not create a special purpose video codec that handles this without trickery. The "per eye" part sounds spooky at first, but how much information is typically different between these frames? The mutual information is probably 90%+ in most VR games.
If we were to enhance something like x264 to encode the 2nd display as a residual of the 1st display, this could become much more feasible from a channel capacity standpoint. Video codecs already employ a lot of tricks to make adjacent frames that are nearly identical occupy negligible space.
This seems very similar (identical?) to the problem of efficiently encoding a 3d movie:
I'm entirely unfamiliar with the vr rendering space, so all I have to go on is what (I think) your comment implies.
Is the current state of VR rendering really just rendering and transporting two videostreams independent of eachother? Surely there has to be at least some academic prior-art on the subject, no?
Foveated streaming is cool. FWIW the Vision Pro does that for their Mac virtual display as well, and it works really well to pump a lot more pixels through.
It's the same amount of pixels though, just with reduced bitrate for unfocused regions so you save time in encoding, transmitting, and decoding, essentially reducing latency.
For foveated rendering, the amount of rendered pixels are actually reduced.
At least when we implemented this in the first version of Oculus Link, the way it worked is that it was distorted (AADT [1]) to a deformed texture before compression and then rectilinear regenerated after compression as a cheap and simple way to emulate fixed foveated rendering. So it’s not that there’s some kind of adaptive bitrate which applies less bits outside the fovea region but achieves a similar result by giving it fewer pixels in the resulting image being compressed; doing adaptive bitrate would work too (and maybe even better) but encoders (especially HW accelerated ones) don’t support that.
Foveated streaming is presumably the next iteration of this where the eye tracking gives you better information about where to apply this distortion, although I’m genuinely curious how they manage to make this work well - eye tracking is generally high latency but the eye moves very very quickly (maybe HW and SW has improved but they allude to this problem so I’m curious if their argument about using this at a low frequency really improves meaningfully vs more static techniques)
Although your eye moves very quickly your brain has a delay in processing the completely new frame you switched to. It's very hard to look left and right with your eyes and read something quickly changing on both sides
That depends on the specifics of the encode/decode pipeline for the streamed frames. Could be the blurry part actually is lower res and lower bitrate until it's decoded, then upscaled and put together with the high res part. I'm not saying they do that, but it's an option.
It’s the same number of pixels rendered but it lets you reduce the amount of data sent , thereby allowing you to send more pixels than you would have been able to otherwise
Foveated streaming is wild to me. Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text, so guaranteeing that latency over 2.4Ghz seems Sisyphean.
I wonder if they have an ML model doing partial upscaling until the eyetracking state is propagated and the full resolution image under the new fovea position is available. It also makes me wonder if there's some way to do neural compression of the peripheral vision optimized for a nice balance between peripheral vision and hints in the embedding to allow for nicer upscaling.
I worked on a foveated video streaming system for 3D video back in 2008, and we used eye tracking and extrapolated a pretty simple motion vector for eyes and ignored saccades entirely. It worked well, you really don't notice the lower detail in the periphery and with a slightly over-sized high resolution focal area you can detect a change in gaze direction before the user's focus exits the high resolution area.
Anyway that was ages ago and we did it with like three people, some duct tape and a GPU, so I expect that it should work really well on modern equipment if they've put the effort into it.
Foveated rendering very clearly works well with a dedicated connection, wiht predictable latency. My question was more about the latency spikes inherent in a ISM general use band combined with foveated rendering, which would make the effects of the latency spikes even worse.
They're doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).
With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.
Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
This is part of my job, dealing with spectrum and Washington.
I communicate with the FCC and NTIA fairly often at this point.
You need to pay attention to Arielle Roth, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information
Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
"... administration’s investment in unlicensed access in 6 GHz ensures the benefits of the entire spectrum band are delivered directly to American families and businesses in the form of more innovation and faster and more reliable connectivity at home and on the go, which will continue to transform and deliver long-lasting impact for communities of all sizes across the country.
Charter applauds Administrator Roth's leadership, and her recognition of the critical role unlicensed spectrum plays today and in the future, both in the U.S. and across the globe."
"... To identify the remainder, NTIA plans to assess four targeted spectrum bands in the range set by Congress: 7125-7400 MHz; 1680-1695 MHz; 2700-2900 MHz; and 4400-4940 MHz."
"On the topic of on-the-ground realities, let’s also not forget what powers our networks today. While licensed spectrum is critical, the majority of mobile traffic is actually offloaded onto Wi-Fi. Born in America, led by America, Wi-Fi remains an area where we dominate, and we must continue to invest in this important technology. With Wi-Fi, the race has already been won. China knows it cannot compete and for that reason looks for ways to sabotage the very ingenuity that made Wi-Fi a global standard."
Roth is not going to take away 6GHz from current ISM allocation.
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.
Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.
My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.
We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.
I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.
On the LTT video he also said that Valve had claimed to have tested with a small number of devices in the same room, but hadn’t tried out larger scenarios like tens of devices.
My guess based on that is you likely dont need to totally clear 6GHz in the room the Frame is in, but rather just make sure its relatively clear.
We’ll know more once it ships and we can see people try it out and try and abuse the radio a bit.
Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao
I'm not saying it doesn't work; I'm asking what special sauce they've added to make it work, and noting that despite the replies I've gotten, foveated streaming doesn't help latency, and in fact makes the effects of latency spikes worse.
The real trick is not over complicating things. The goal is to have high fidelity rendering where the eye is currently focusing so to solve for saccades you just build a small buffer area around the idealized minimum high res center and the saccades will safely stay inside that area within the ability of the system to react to the larger overall movements.
It was hard for me to believe as well but streaming games wirelessly on a Quest 2 was totally possible and surprisingly latency-free once I upgraded to wifi 6 (few years ago)
It works a lot better than you’d expect at face value.
At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn't seem like it would be a problem. If you can't get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they'll be on the floor vomiting.
> Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text
What sort of resolution are one's eyes actually resolving during saccades? I seem to recall that there is at the very least a frequency reduction mechanism in play during saccades
During a saccade you are blind. Your brain receives no optical input. The problem is measuring/predicting where the eye will aim next and getting a sharp enough image in place over there by the time the movement ends and the saccade stabilizes.
Yeah. I’d love to understand how they tackle saccades. To be fair they do mention they’re on 6ghz - not sure if they support 2.4 although I doubt the frequency of the data radio matters here.
I would guess that the “foveated” region that they stream is larger than the human fovea, large enough to contain the saccades movement (with some good-enough probability).
Saccades afaik can jump to an arbitrary part of the eye which adds to the latency of finding the iris; basically the the software ends up having to look through the entire image to reacquire the iris whereas normally it’s doing it incrementally relative to the previous position.
Are you really sure overrendering the fovea region would really work?
Not sure, probably depends on the content too. When you read text, the eye definitely isn’t jumping “arbitrarily”, it’s clustered around what you’re focusing on. Might be different for a FPS game where you’re looking out for ambushes.
I’m not sure what you mean by “look through the entire image to reacquire the iris”? You’re talking about the image from the eye tracking camera?
> You’re talking about the image from the eye tracking camera?
Yes. A normal trick is to search just a bit outside the last known position to make eye tracking cheap computationally and to reduce latency in the common case.
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low.
Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?
There's no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain.
> "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?"
Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly.
The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro.
There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels.
Even the vision pro at 35ppd simply isn't close to the PPD you can get from a good desktop monitor (we can calculate PPD for desktop monitors too, using size and viewing distance).
Apple's "retina" HiDPI monitors typically have PPD well beyond 35 at ordinary viewing distances, even a 1080p 24 inch monitor on your desk can exceed this.
For me personally, 35ppd feels about the minimum I would accept for emulating a monitor for text work in a VR headset, but it's still not good enough for me to even begin thinking about using it to replace any of my monitors.
Oh yeah for sure. Most people seem to accept that 35ppd is "good enough" but not actually at-par with a high quality high-dpi monitor.
I agree with you - I would personally consider 35ppd to be the floor for usability for this purpose. It's good in a pinch (need a nice workstation setup in a hotel room?) but I would not currently consider any extant hardware as full-time replacements for a good monitor.
I keep hearing this argument, and it baffles me. I find that, as I age and my vision gets worse, I need progressively finer text rendering. Using same-size displays (27") at the same distance, with text the same physical size on screen, 1440p gives me a much worse reading experience than 4k with 2x scaling.
I think part of getting by with a lower PPD is the IRL pixels are fixed and have hard boundaries that OS affordances have co-evolved with.
(pixel alignment via lots of rectangular things - windows, buttons; text rendering w/ that in mind; "pixel perfect" historical design philosophy)
The VR PPD is in arbitrary orientations which will lead to more aliasing. MacOS kinda killed their low-dpi experience via bad aliasing as they moved to the hi-dpi regime. Now we have svg-like rendering instead of screen-pixel-aligned baked rasterized UIs.
I'm not sure most of us do anymore - see my 1080p/24 inch example.
No one who has bought almost any MacBook in the last 10 years or so has had PPD this low either.
One can get by with almost anything in a pinch, it doesn't mean its desirable.
Pixel density != PPD either, although increasing it can certainly help PPD. Lower density desktop displays routinely have higher PPD than most VR headsets - viewing distance matters!
Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far.
Yes. You can make a low-resolution monitor (like 800x600px, once upon a time a usable resolution) and/or provide zoom and panning controls
I've tried that combination in an earlier iteration of Lenovo's smart glasses, and it technically works. But the experience you get is not fun or productive. If you need to do it (say to work on confidential documents in public) you can do it, but it's not something you'd do in a normal setup
Yes but that can create major motion sickness issues - motion that does not correspond top the user's actual physical movements create a dissonance that is expressed as motion sickness for a large portion of the population.
This is the main reason many VR games don't let you just walk around and opt for teleportation-based movement systems - your avatar moving while your body doesn't can be quite physically uncomfortable.
There are ways of minimizing this - for example some VR games give you "tunnel vision" by blacking out peripheral vision while the movement is happening. But overall there's a lot of ergo considerations here and no perfect solution. The equivalent for a virtual desktop might be to limit the size of the window while the user is zooming/panning.
For a small taste of what using that might be like turn on screen magnification on your existing computers. It's technically usable but not particularly productive or pleasant to use if you don't /have/ to use it.
This all sounds a bit like the “better horse” framing. Maybe richer content shouldn’t be consumed as primarily a virtualized page. Maybe mixing font sizes and over sized text can be a standard in itself.
It's just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup. Obviously it's enough for 80 char consoles but you'd need to dip into large fonts for a desktop.
I did the math on this site and I'd have to hunch less than a foot from the screen to hit 35 PPD on my work provided Thinkpad X1 Carbon with a 14" 1920x1200 screen. My usual distance is nearly double that so my ppd normally is more like 70 ppd, roughly.
That's pretty quick. I've heard that in ideal circumstances Wi-Fi 6 can get close to 5ms and Wi-Fi 7 can get down to 2ms.
I's impressive if they're really able to get below 2ms motion-to-photon latency, given that modern consumer headsets with on-device compute are also right at that same 2ms mark.
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use.
The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.
The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.
The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.
There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.
> There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. [...] But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer.
What's available now might vary from person to person. I'm using a normal-sized 1080p monitor, and this desk doesn't have space for a second monitor. That's what a VR headset would have to compete against for me; just having several virtual monitors might be enough of an advantage, even if their resolution is slightly lower.
(Also, I have used old-school VGA CRT monitors; as could be easily seen when switching to a LCD monitor with digital DVI input, text on a VGA CRT was not exactly sharp.)
The weight on your face is half that of Quest 3, they put the rest of the weight on the back which perfectly balances it on your head. It's going to be super comfortable.
Yeah, already many people use something like the Bobovr alternative headstrap for the Quest3 that has an additional battery pack in the back, which helps balancing the device in the front.
Which doubles the weight on your head, which increases the inertia you feel when moving around playing active games. The Frame is half the weight on your face, so active games are going to be a lot more comfortable.
Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.
To your point, I'd use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
One problem is that in most settings a real monitor is just a better experience for multiple reasons. And in a tight setting like an airplane where VR monitors might be nice, the touch controls become more problematic. "Pardon me! I was trying to drag my screen around!"
Lol, I laughed then 20 seconds later started taking this literally: I think that was July, it had been two years, and it was over by November (presumably due to my other excellent qualities!) (all joking aside, for younger members in our audience, it was sweet and she was around in my life for at least another decade)
Your 2K monitor occupies something like a 20-degree field of view from a normal sitting position/distance. The 2K resolution in a VR headset covers the entire field of view.
So effectively your 1080p monitor has ~6x the pixel density of the VR headset.
The problem is that 2k square is spread across the whole FOV of the headset so when it's replicating a monitor unless it's ridiculously close to your face a lot of those pixels are 'wasted' in comparison to a monitor with similar stats.
Totally true, but unlike a real monitor you can drag a virtual monitor close to your face without changing the focal distance, meaning it's no harder on your eyes. (Although it is harder on your neck.)
To get the same pixel per degree as my work laptop I'd have to put it's virtual replacement screen 11 (virtual) inches from my face and that's probably the lowest PPD screen in my normal life unless I get a bad desk at work that day. Just pasting them inches from your nose is not a great solution, you can already do that with a good set of monitor arms and there's a reason almost no one does it.
They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They've also bet more on standalone apps rather than streaming from a PC. These are reasonable tradeoffs. The next Quest may add eye tracking, who knows. Quest Pro had it but was discontinued for being too expensive.
We'll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don't expect them to match Meta's subsidies, so I'm betting on this being more expensive than Quest. I also think that streaming from a gaming PC will remain more of a niche thing despite Valve's focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86/Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.
It will be interesting to see how the X86 emulation plays out. In the Verge review of the headset they mentioned stutters when playing on the headset due to having to 'recompile x86 game code on the fly', but they may offer precompiled versions which can be downloaded ahead of time, similar to the precompiled shaders the Steam Deck downloads.
If they get everything working well I'm guessing we could see an ARM powered Steam Deck in the future.
Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
> Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
I think it should: we have Linux support/custom operating systems on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices right now today, and the 8 Gen 3 has upstream support already AFAIK
The main value of Meta VR and AR products is the massive price subsidy which is needed because the brand has been destroyed for all generations older than Alpha.
The current price estimate for the Steam Frame is $1200 vs Quest 3 at $600 which is still a very reasonable price given the technology, tariffs, and lack of ad invading privacy
> Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
That might be the reason I'm going to buy it. I want to support this and Steam has done a lot to get gaming on linux going.
I guess there's a market for this but I'm personally disappointed that they've gone with the "cram a computer into the headset" route. I'd much rather have a simpler, more compact dumb device like the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which in exchange should prove much lighter and more comfortable to wear for long time periods.
The bulk and added component cost of the "all in one" PC/headset models is just unnecessary if you already have a gaming PC.
I'm personally quite hyped to see the first commercially available Linux-based standalone VR headset announced. This thing is quite a bit lighter than any of the existing "cram a computer in" solutions.
Strictly speaking the mobile Oculus/Meta Go/Quest headsets were linux/android based, you can run Termux terminal with Fedora/Ubuntu on them and use an Android VNC/X app to run the 2D graphical part. But I share your SteamOS enthousiasm.
They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta's offerings, this is indeed an actual computer you can run linux on. Perhaps even do standard computer stuff inside the headset like text editing, Blender modeling, or more.
As a current and frequent user of this form factor (Pico 4, with the top strap, which the Steam Frame will also have as an option, over Virtual Desktop) I can assure you that it's quite comfortable over long periods of time (several hours). Of course it will ultimately depend on the specific design decisions made for this headset, but this all looks really good to me.
Full color passthrough would have been nice though. Not necessarily for XR, but because it's actually quite useful to be able to switch to a view of the world around you with very low friction when using the headset.
It's nice to have some local processing for tracking and latency mitigation. Cost from there to full computer on headset is marginal, so you might as well do that.
There's always going to be a computer in it to drive it. It's just a matter of how generalised it is and how much weight/power consumption it's adding.
You can get a Beyond if that's what you want. It's an amazing device, and will be far more comfortable and higher resolution than this one. Valve has supported Bigscreen in integrating Lighthouse tracking, and I hope that they continue that support by somehow allowing them to integrate the inside-out tracking they've developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.
I don't think it would be too bad. Cameras are tiny. The processing would still happen on the PC, and you could delete the lighthouse tracking sensors. I guess the hardest part would be sending that much camera data back to the PC over the cable.
Its worse than that. Cameras (plus DToF if you want tracking in the dark), imus, gyros, and necessarily onboard compute/SOC to handle processing that data. Shipping it all off to a remote computer and then making the round trip creates an untenable amount of lag. Thats not even accounting for controller and hand tracking.
And once you have the pipeline and computation power to enable inside out tracking all on device, adding an OS is essentially free.
It already has an IMU and gyro, obviously. Time of flight cameras are unnecessary. Steam Frame doesn't have them either. At most you would put IR LEDs for illumination which are tiny but also optional (Quest 3 doesn't have them), and there's no reason they have to be in the headset, you could just have a standalone IR illuminator on your desk.
As for sending data over a cable, there's nothing inherently laggy about it. After all, the display signal already travels over the cable, and the cable transfer is by far not the limiting factor in latency. The camera data is lower bandwidth than the display signal, too.
Linux is not officially supported but can absolutely work with the Beyond 2.
I'd suggest joining the Bigscreen Beyond Discord server for more information
Thanks
By Bigscreen Support Team
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Rant: they have disabled selected text for the reviews for some inexplicable reason.
It's super light compared to Quest 3, half the weight on your face, the rest is on the back which balances the headset. Big Screen Beyond isn't wireless and has a narrower field of view.
I was worried about the built in computer as well, but then I found out it's only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it's still pretty light.
I once lived in a place that had a bathroom with mirrors that faced each other. I think I convinced myself that not only is my attention to detail more concentrated at the center, but that my response time was also fastest there (can anyone confirm that?).
So this gets me thinking. What would it feel like to correct for that effect? Could you use the same technique to essentially play the further parts early, so it all comes in at once?
Kinda a hair brained idea, I know, but we have the technology, and I'm curious.
Yea, I've heard and noticed that as well (thought about adding a note about it to my original comment). But what I'm curious about is the timing. What I suspect is that peripherals are more sensitive to motion, but still lag slightly behind the center of focus. I'm not sure if it's dependent on how actively you are trying to focus. I'd love to learn more about this, but I didn't find anything when I looked online a bit.
I can see the spinning color wheels inside cheaper projectors as rapidly-changing rainbow lights leaking out of their ventilation grilles, but only with peripheral vision and mostly only if I'm moving my head at the same time.
It would be interesting to see⁰ how that behaves when presented with weird eyes like mine or worse. Mine often don't always point the same way and which one I'm actually looking through can be somewhat arbitrary from one moment to the next…
Though the flapping between eyes is usually in the presence of changes, however minor, in required focal distance, so maybe it wouldn't happen as much inside a VR headset.
How the hell would foveated streaming even work, it seems physically impossible. Tracking where your eye is looking then sending that information to a server, it processing it and then streaming that back seems impossible.
The data you're sending out is just the position and motion vectors of the pupils. And you probably only need about 16 bits for each of these numbers for 2 eyes. So the equivalent of two floating point numbers along a particular channel or 32 bits at minimum. Any lag can be compensated for by simply interpolating the motion vectors.
Eye tracking hardware and software specifically focus on low latency, e.g. FPGA close to the sensor. The resulting packets they send is also ridiculously small (e.g 2 numbers as x,y positions of the pupils) so ... I can see that happening.
Sure eyes move very VERY fast but if you do relatively small compute on dedicated hardware it can also go quite fast while remaining affordable.
They're probably thinking of it in comparison to the Apple Pro which attempts to do some facial tracking of the bottom of your face to inform their 'Personas', it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can't see the bottom half of the face well.
This is the first standalone headset with an open ecosystem. That's a big deal.
Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.
There is but one issue with the Lynx XR1 - no one really got it. A few backers randomly got a few pieces but many others (including myself) are still waiting for their device to arrive (and will most likely wait for ever).
This has a serious impact on the developer ecosystem - there are still a few people who got their devices and are doing interesting work, but with so few users actually having devices the community is too small for much progress to be expected.
It's kinda similar to the old Jolla Tablet - it was a very interesting device (an x86 tablet running an open Linux distro in 2013!) but it ended up in too few hands due to funding issues & the amount of Sailfish OS apps actually supporting the tablet (eg. big screen, native x86 builds, etc.) reflected that.
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
I bought an Oculus Go last year for € 30. Its support has been dropped for quite some time, and you can only activate developer mode and sideloading through an old version of the Meta Horizons app [1]. But if you do that, there are 71 GiBs of games to explore on the Internet Archive [2]. Some need patching to remove an online check to a server that no longer exists, but that is easy enough to do with a (regrettably Windows) tool someone published.
The Go is not the best headset of course, but the games are a different style because of the 3DoF tracking without camera's. Somewhat slower paced and sitting down. A style I personally like more.
You can also unlock the device to get root on it [3], which is quite neat, although there doesn't seem to be any homebrew scene at all. Not even the most bare-bones launcher that doesn't require a Meta login.
[1] That doesn't even seem intentional, but it does mean that once the old version of the app can't communicate with Meta servers anymore, any uninitialized Go turns into a brick.
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
sorry, maybe i missed it. But how do you know the ecosystem is open?
from the link we don't know if the OS can be changed (might be locked like many Android phones) or if a connected machine is required to run their DRM/Steam. The drivers may also not be open source
from a cursory look
. it seems SteamVR is intended to be used with their DRM platform and isn't open source. Maybe its a bit less limiting vs Meta's offering?
i wouldnt characterize this as an "open ecosystem" though
The key takeaway is that you will rebuild the drivers less often:
1) The stack is mature now, we know what features can exist.
2) For me it's about having the same stack as on a 3588 SBC, so I don't need to download many GB of Android software just to build/run the game.
The distance to getting a open-source driver stack will probably be shorter because of these 2 things, meaning OpenVR/SteamVR being closed is less of a long term issue.
I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling?
It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services
yeah but is foveated streaming and whatnot going to be opensource, or are we going to have to wait a decade for some grad student to reimplement a half broken version?
Probably, but eye traction is never going to be the focus of indie engines specially if they run on the 3588.
Also about cross compiling that is meaningless as you need hardware to test on and then you should be able to compile on the device you are using to test. Alteast that is what I want, make devices that cannot compile illegal.
Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.
Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.
If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).
And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.
The problem is that you're talking about the Linux desktop ecosystem whereas the op could be talking about the kernel. Both are just Linux (and the fact we've not evolved our nomenclature to differentiate the two is surprising). Also, fwiw, the android kernel is no longer heavily modified. Most of the custom stuff has been upstreamed.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
that doesn't in any way mean you can install an alternate OS. But i get your point that at least you can run Arch stuff. Isnt Arch ARM support unofficial? (its been ages since i tried) You dont hear of people running it on RPis for example
Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth, Valve's hardware has always been open like that. You're free to install windows on your steam deck, for example.
Valve sponsored asahi linux which was a herculean exercise in running another OS on locked down hardware. They've also sponsored wine and fex. It would be a sudden, steep, and unexpected departure for them to go from being leaders in cross platform OS/hardware support to locking down their own hardware platform. It's just not in their nature. They know their nature is good and they know we know it. That's called trust.
They're being a little vague about it but this collaboration to improve Arch's build service/infrastructure is being done in part to faciliate support of multiple architectures.
iirc it was in Tested coverage that Valve said the hardware supports other OSes. It'd be out of character for Valve not to allow for this.
If it's anything like the Deck, then the version of SteamOS on it won't be locked down in any way whatsoever. You can install Windows or any other distro you want on the Deck with 0 issues (other than regular ones you'd experience anyways on any regular computer, nothing to do with Valve locking anything down).
The steam deck was not arm. Unlike the steam machine page, the steam frame page does not insinuate you can put a custom OS on it. On top of custom drivers which are not necessarily upstreamed, qualcomm socs always require closed source userspace daemons which are coupled to the kernel.
Valve have been working with Linaro to develop FOSS drivers for the Adreno 750. This is necessary, given how heavily Valve leans on having integrations with Mesa whereas Qualcomm's drivers are designed for an Android environment.
I don't see why they wouldn't unlock the bootloader, it wouldn't be the first Qualcomm-based product to allow it and in press interviews they have pressed, quite hard, that the Frame is still a PC.
Even just have direct access to hardware apis is already a big win. On Oculus quest. The closest you can get is running with webxr. But webxr suffer from all those performance problem of web platforms. (And bug of meta softwares. The recent quest browser have bug that prevent you from disabling spatial audio, rendering it not usable for watch video at all)
I just want a "dumb" headset that I can use as a portable private display for my laptop.
That's it.
I don't need 3D, I don't need VR, I don't need weirdass controllers trying to be special. Just give me a damn simple monitor the size of my eyes.
Fuck off with your XR OSes and "vision" for XR, not even Apple could get it fully right, the people in charge everywhere are too out of touch and have no clue where the fuck to go after smartphones.
HUD glasses kind of suck since having a display oriented to your head is uncomfortable. Adding 3DOF tracking only partially solves that, so you go 6DOF to maximize optical/vestibular comfort. Now you're rendering a virtual display within a virtual environment, but look at all that wasted space! So add more virtual monitors! Now you need some mechanism to manage them, so you add that and now you have a windowing system... so why are you rendering virtual monitors with fixed space desktops when you can just be rendering the application windows themselves?
The best portable private display for your laptop will inevitably be a 6DOF tracked headset with an XR native desktop.
Yes sorry about my excessive use of French in the comment, I didn't mean it has to be a fixed 1:1 slab of the realspace screen, desktop app windows in XR space would be ideal, but none of the products seem to be able to get it all right yet.
Apple's visionOS comes close but it's crippled by the trademark Apple overcontrolling.
Then this is actually much closer than previous headsets?
There is a lot going on to render the desktop in a tracked 3D space, all that has to happen somewhere. If you're expecting to plug a HDMI cable into a headset and have a good time then I think you're underestimating how much work is being done.
OpenVR and OpenXR are really great software layers that help that all work out.
Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.
6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.
What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy/build any mini PC? There's plenty of options for that
A good while back I abandoned PC gaming because I was sick of driver issues, compatibility, and always having to update hardware to play the next game. Instead, I embraced consoles and haven't considered PC gaming since then. This, however, has me reconsidering that. I want it to "just work". When I want to play games, I don't want to deal with all of that other crap. I'm old, ain't nobody got time for that.
It's wild how experiences can vary so wildly. That's the nature of PC's though I suppose that you are trying to avoid.
I've had no driver or compatibility issues in longer than I can remember. Maybe Vista?
I also rarely upgrade because playing at console level settings means I can easily get effectively the same lifetime out of my hardware. Though I do tend to upgrade a little earlier than console users still leaning a bit more towards the enthusiast side.
I'm guessing you have a very positive experience with gaming PCs; I wish I could say the same. My Windows PC:
- Randomly BSODs because of (I think) a buggy Focusrite audio interface driver (that I can't fix and Focusrite refuses to)
- Regularly 'forgets' I have an RX 5600 XT GPU and defaults to the integrated graphics, forcing me to go into the 1995 'Device Manager' to reset it
- Occasionally just... stops playing audio?
- Occasionally has its icons disappear from the taskbar
- Regularly refuses to close applications, making me go into the Task Manager to force-quit them.
These are just the issues I can think of off the top of my head. I've been playing PC games for like 15 years and this is just par for the course for my experience.
Definitely an outlier. Windows has generally been very very solid since about Windows 7. Certainly since Windows 10.
Linux is still quite far behind in terms of desktop stability in my experience. But I guess if Valve fully controls the hardware they can avoid janky driver issues (it sounds like suspend will work reliably!), so this might actually make a good desktop Linux option.
You are also definitely an outlier. In my experience, Linux has been 5x as stable as Windows (and more performant, too). SteamOS is just Arch Linux with the KDE desktop, the actual desktop stability wont be different from the same setup on a normal PC.
I also had frequent BSOD issues because of a Focusrite audio interface, lol. I've since thrown it out and gotten an alternative brand product and have never had the issues again.
I'm quite confused too, that doesn't align with my experience in the last couple years as well. There's notably been a few very good and long lived video cards and also as time goes on there's an ever deepening library of older games that can be played with very affordable cards.
I'm wondering when and with what hardware they had that bad experience.
Drivers are not an issue for quite some time (but its always good to have latest nvidia ones for example for optimizations focused on given game).
But its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet. I have roughly 20 of them installed currently (why the heck?) and earlier versions would happily get installed over already-installed version of same for example as part of game installation process, not a stellar workmanship on MS side. Whats wrong with having latest being backward compatible with all of previous ones, like ie Java achieved 25 years ago?
Talking about fully updated windows 10 and say official steam distros of the games.
> its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet.
I can't speak for the other poster, but I actually recently "abandoned" PC gaming. For me, it wasn't a deliberate decision but more of a change in behavior that occurred over time. I suspect the key event was picking up a PS5 Pro. For me, it's the first console that's felt powerful enough to scratch a similar itch as PC gaming -- except I could just plug it into our Atmos-equipped "home theater" set up and have it not only work flawlessly but be easily accessible to everyone, not just me. Since picking it up, between the PS5 Pro and handheld gaming devices, I just have not played a game on my gaming PC a single time and am currently planning on retiring it as a result.
There may be a connection here with age and the type of games I play too. I'm in my mid-30s now and am not interested in competitive twitch shooters like Call of Duty. In many cases, the games I've been interested in have actually been PS5 exclusives or were a mostly equivalent experience on PS5 Pro vs. PC or were actually arguably better on PS5 Pro (e.g., Jedi Survivor). In some cases, like with Doom: The Dark Ages, I've been surprised at how much I enjoyed something I previously would've only considered playing on PC -- the PS5 Pro version still manages to offer both 60 FPS and ray tracing. In other cases, like Diablo IV, I started playing on PC but gradually over time my playtime naturally transitioned almost entirely to PS5 Pro. The last time I played Diablo IV on my PC, which has a 4090, I was shocked at how unstable and stutter-filled the game was with ray tracing enabled, whereas it's comparatively much more stable on PS5 Pro while still offering ray tracing (albeit at 30 FPS -- but I've come to prefer stability > raw FPS in all but the most latency-sensitive games).
One benefit of this approach if you live with someone else or have a family, etc., is that investments in your setup can be experienced by everyone, even non-gamers. For instance, rather than spending thousands of dollars on a gaming PC that only I would use, I've instead been in the market for an upgraded and larger TV for the "home theater", which everyone can use both for gaming and non-gaming purposes.
Something else very cool but still quite niche and poorly understood, even amongst tech circles, is that it's possible to stream PS5 games into the Vision Pro. There are a few ways of doing this, but my preferred method has been using an app called Portal. This is a truly unique experience because of the Vision Pro's combination of high-end displays and quality full-color passthrough / mixed reality. You can essentially get a 4K 120"+ curved screen floating in space in the middle of your room at perfect eye level, with zero glare regardless of any lighting conditions in the room, while still using your surround sound system for audio. The only downside is that streaming does introduce some input latency. I wouldn't play Doom this way, but something like Astro Bot is just phenomenal. This all works flawlessly out of the box with no configuration.
There's not currently a way to officially put SteamOS on Steam* hardware. Plenty of people have done it but there's the usual compatibility issues where the image is built for the very specific hardware Valve installs it on so there's often wake from sleep and fan control issues. All solvable but it's not the level of turn key of even a mainline linux distro.
As someone who has been building my PCs for decades, I have to admit seeing some appeal here:
It's apparently small, quiet, capable, and easy.
I'll keep building my own, but most people don't, and the value of saved time and reduced hassle should not be underestimated.
If comparing this device to other pre-built systems, consider that this one is likely to be a first class target for game developers, while others are not.
Some people really don't want to spend time exchanging parts when the memory they buy turns out to be incompatible or that the GPU doesn't fit the sleek mITX case. There's a lot of research to ensure all parts are compatible and optimal when building a PC - for some it's time that could be better spent on using the PC instead of building one.
The hardware is not, but the implications are pretty close (major gaming company is pushing a first party product of open hardware + open software with a linux box). It is literally the year of linux desktop.
This thing is meant for a living room media center. A prebuilt PC with discrete GPU is a much bigger profile (and probably cost). You could say, fine, go buy a small Mini PC. But a system with the current best AMD Strix 890m GPU not only is expensive at $700-1000, but would only have half the performance of the Steam Box if its conjectured performance is similar to an RX 7600.
It's tiny. It runs SteamOS which is built to be used with a controller on a TV. And it will probably be a performance target for many developers.
But I think the biggest feature might be the quick suspend and resume. Every modern console has that, but not PCs. You can try to put a computer to sleep, but many games won't like that.
For me it would be the small size and CEC capability. A custom built PC can't currently use CEC on HDMI to have a seamless experience the entire home theater like a console can.
The experience of using a custom build is terrible.
The best experience you can get atm is to use Steams big picture mode, and that doesn't give you pause/resume, and you will sometimes need to use keyb & mouse to solve issues, plus you need to manage the whole OS yourself etc.
Valves SteamOS which already runs on the Steam Deck gives you all the QoL that you expect out of a console. Pause / resume with power button press, complete control via controller, fully managed OS.
What's missing are "in experience" native apps like Netflix/AppleTV/etc. as well as support for certain games which are blocked on anti-cheat.
My wife is a research scientist who uses linux with her day job, but she isn't interested in dealing with any nonsense when she's relaxing at the end of the day. The Steam Deck has been a wonder for her - suddenly she's playing the same games as me with none of the hassle. The Steam Machine will suddenly open a bunch of my friends and family up to PC games as well.
It won't be long until you can put SteamOS on any machine you make yourself, but the Steam Machine will serve as reference and "default" hardware for the majority.
Lots of companies tried to recreate the Steam Deck and quite frankly, they're just not as good as the original.
SteamOS is a super controller-friendly desktop that would be right at home in a living room. Like the Deck, the Steam Machine could become a target profile for developers.
Snapdragon doesn't really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.
Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.
The GPU is fine and the drivers Valve are using, if their past hardware is any indication, will be open source. Doesn't magically fix them, but it does allow for Valve to fix them.
If valve can convince Qualcomm to open source their GPU drivers I will eat a banana peel. They would need to write a new one from scratch (or reuse freedreno, but those are going to have performance issues).
Not the first time Valve funded the development of FOSS drivers. They've already done so with Intel's Vulkan stack on Linux, AMD (AMDGPU) and Nvidia (NVK).
SteamOS's core functionality leans heavily on Mesa and there's been a lot of commits for the Adreno 750 lately, mostly coming from Linaro.
Fair enough. The problem is usually in terms of getting enough documentation and help to do this in a cost effective manner. If they manage to pull it off, I will start to second guess every phone OEM who seems to not go down this road.
(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)
Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it's limited to HDMI 2.0 it will have to rely on 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to get there. Unfortunately the lack of HDMI 2.1 might be down to politics, the RDNA3 GPU they're using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.
I'm not sure that would work. From what I can tell, the adapters are basically dumb straight through cables, they aren't converting anything. And it's the actual GPU that's outputting a HDMI signal over the Displayport connector, which the adapter than rewires in to a HDMI shaped connector.
> And it's the actual GPU that's outputting a HDMI signal over the Displayport connector, which the adapter than rewires in to a HDMI shaped connector.
There are two kinds of DP to HDMI adapters. The passive ones are like you said, they need special support on the GPU (these ports are usually labelled as DP++), IIRC they only do some voltage level shifting. The active ones work on any DP port (they don't need AFAIK any special support on the GPU), and they do the full protocol conversion.
... but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
It seems to me the wireless is pretty important. I have an MQ3 and I have the link cable. For software development I pretty much have to plug the MQ3 into my PC and it is not so bad to wander around the living room looking in a Mars boulder from all sides and such.
For games and apps that involve moving around, particularly things like Beat Saber or Supernatural the standalone headset has a huge advantage of having no cable. If I have a choice between buying a game on Steam or the MQ3 store I'm likely to buy the MQ3 game because of the convenience and freedom of standalone. A really good wireless link changes that.
So, in the specs for the mini-pc, it claims the video out can do 4K @ 120Hz (even faster if displayport). I assume the 4K @ 60Hz you saw is from the "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" line.
I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.
Considering how much they talk about Foveated rendering, I think it might not be constrained by the traditional limitations of screens - instead of sending a fixed resolution image at whatever frequency, it'll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.
I am incredibly excited for the new controller. The og steam controller for me was unmatched as a controller, I could never play any first person game on anything else other than mouse and keyboard, not to mention it allows playing rts or point and clicks from the couch.
The controller looks pretty cool for sure, my biggest fear is the dpad though. I hope they go for a clicky feel like on the latest xbox controllers, and not the mushy feel you've got on the Dualshock 5 or even the 8BitDo Pro 2, which, for me, really is the only think missing from those.
I'm more of a "Dpad in the top left" kind of guy, but I want it to be clicky like on the Xbox controllers :( We'll see!
I'm with you on the dpad. For me I've never found better dpads outside of retro focused controllers from companies like 8bitdo, so when I want to play a retro game with dpad I just grab one of those and use my steam controller for everything else.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
... which likely wouldn't have happened if they didn't want a computer inside their VR headset. The steam machine is x86 considering it's an AMD processor.
This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.
The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.
I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.
Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.
Valve kinda shows how a well-managed private business ought to run: respect your customers, find a cash cow and use it for slowly expand into related markets to your niche, develop good products over a long period (SteamOS took many years to become something actually useful) without focusing on the mentality of hyper-growth, keep the stereotypical contemporary MBA thinking away, have a small but competent team.
There are, of course, the issues with lootboxes but even there they've kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.
It's a very well oiled machine, I had another VR headset ordered for sim racing, immediately canceled it when saw the Frame announcement because even if specs-wise it's a bit of a downgrade, I want to buy what Valve is selling.
> There are, of course, the issues with lootboxes but even there they've kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.
They do seem to get a pretty big pass on that. Wonder what it is about.
Almost every other aspect of the company I find great, and I do wish they would release more games. Maybe Alyx 2 will come out with the headset? Could be what HLX has been this whole time, where people think it is HL3.
On sim racing in VR, absolute game changer. I would never go back to screens, it's the perfect application for VR.
That's sacrilege, that game doesn't even come close to the quality of Left 4 dead series and suffers from just about every problem that plagues so many modern games.
Back 4 blood was just another "live service" game that stirred up hype, released in an extremely buggy state, poorly balanced, with terrible AI that was never fixed, without mod support or community servers. They cashed in on the initial surge of popularity, cashed in on the DLCs, and then it quickly died off because it didn't have any of the charm or reply value of the games they claimed to improve upon.
Word is they're aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it'll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.
Thanks for the article link. Nice quote from the article:
> Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don't have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.
I was disappointed seeing no hand grip straps. I've never used a Valve Index but they seemed very useful. Very glad that they will still be available.
As an Index controler and Pico user: The back straps are pretty much essential for any serious use; the controller purportedly includes finger tracking (capacitive) but you can't really open your hand without dropping the controller unless you have the strap.
If as I currently intend I end up purchasing this device, I will definitely endeavour to obtain the controller straps as well as the top strap for the headset at the same time, and I recommend others do the same.
I only own Index controllers, not the headset. I have a mixed tracking Pico 4 setup and wireless functionality is definitely one of the pluses; the higher resolution panels also make a significant difference (the Frame and the Pico 4 seem to have the same resolution). This is basically an open Steam-backed Pico 4 that's superior to my hardware and definitely superior to the Index. Here's a comparison:
The 1000hz tracking frequency is from the Lighthouse tracking system, which the Frame loses. For that and other reasons, I am not convinced the controllers are better than the Index controllers. Personally I think it's likely I will keep using the Index controllers, since I have the whole lighthouse setup and I own trackers as well.
Wireless, weight, no lighthouses, standalone use, more polished rendering. It won't be prefect, but it'll be a heck of a lot better experience than what came before.
You're gonna love where VR is at right now. If you had been holding off until it's good enough, then I think you've timed it well. The Quest 3 from an experience point of view was the watershed headset for me, but the ecosystem being Meta makes it less good from a privacy and ownership point of view.
But this headset solves the ecosystem aspect and brings that visual experience with it.
They've cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it'll be any thing close to $1k.
I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.
I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.
Seconding this, I love my Quest 1 but at this point it's looking more and more like it'll turn into a brick at some point. The Frame looks like the next best non-meta alternative, and a damn good one at that.
Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.
I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception
I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.
I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.
> at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest
Having the headset also be a PC (and not essentially a phone OS) is worth a premium of >$250 at least. You can build desktop apps/games on this thing, it can (hopefully) do just about anything a normal PC can.
The Quest is impressive in many ways, but it's a much narrower-use device. I don't think Valve's pricing needs to be in that same bracket to still sell.
Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.
Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about. Not having high hopes due to it being only 2160px, but… a man can dream
> Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about
This. The combination of this being from Valve, and the fact it's highly likely to be an open Linux machine you can strap to your face, I'm looking to finally bite the bullet on a headset and the one thing I need to know is, can I use it for productivity, I'm used to working on 27"+ 4k monitors, _how much_ clarity am I going to sacrifice with this.
Sure, but there are already quite a few pretty nice looking games on Quest 3 running locally, so it can be done and should not be discounted as a gimmick.
It has pretty important benefits - lowest possible latency & being able to just pick the headset any play anywhere.
I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you're moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.
At 2.5x fewer pixels vs the Vision Pro it doesn’t make sense. That’s 12 million pixels per eye vs 4.5 million pixels. Feels like a much more inferior product. The games aren’t going to look great.
Financially, it makes sense. I don't need the absolute best of everything. The Steam Frame already has a very solid and comparable display. The Vision Pro is the one that's absolutely insane - and the only one on the market with those specs
Yeah, Frame already seems to do all the right tradeoffs for an early 2026 VR headset - has resolution similar to the Quest 3 AND has eye tracking, enabling very nice and useful eye tracking based optimizations for both rendering and streaming.
In comparison Meta might have cut down too much in Quest 3 by omitting eye tracking.
Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.
Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.
The Steam Deck was wildly popular for a non-Nintendo device. It's got Linux up to 3% of total Steam playtime. If this has a similar draw (play every game on Steam without having to buy a TV), maybe the install base of VR will grow to a point where it's more feasible to make games that support it.
It also makes SteamVR relevant again in a world where Oculus has been eating a lot of the mindshare by releasing affordable headsets and buying the most successful game studios.
It will be more expensive than Quest 3s and so is unlikely to grow the VR market significantly beyond what Meta has achieved so far IMO. I'd love to be wrong.
I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.
The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.
The headsets that have AR cameras don't use them for tracking AFAIK. They all have monochrome cameras for that. The AR cameras are an additional cost that is only used for AR.
I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs.
Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.
I'm sure they did their market research. For me it's the exact opposite. Performance is absolutely key to me, and AR is just a fad in my eyes. All it does for me is give a glimpse into the real world if I'm about to bump into something. AR games are scarce and have never truly impressed me.
AR is a gimmick. VR has real games people spend many hours in. People don't want to see their boring surroundings unless it's to find the couch or a bag of chips.
The real reason the Frame is monochrome AR is because the cameras are also used for IR tracking which is better in monochrome. You can use the Frame in the dark or a dimly lit room - Quest 3 you can't. For real VR users the trade off is worth it.
> You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both.
You clear the area within the boundaries, leave a little buffer space to the walls, and respect the boundary warnings in game. No problems. You do need a few square meters without any furniture to do this.
Boxing and ping pong feel just as great in VR as they do in AR. It's more a matter of the level of immersion: AR works well for table tennis, but fantasy games are severely limited in what they can do. The most impressive experiences are always in VR - "flying in space" doesn't work while looking at your living room walls.
> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.
That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.
> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.
There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.
Exactly. Performance is welcome for everyone. AR is, right now, a gimmick that would eat into performance if you kept the price point the same. Good choice by Valve imo.
Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
What pass-through apps are you using for all this? I tried pass-through pingpong but it didn't fit in my room so it clipped through the wall uncomfortably. There is AR golf?
Home Sports is a collection of five sports that includes amazing AR pickleball and badminton, and a pretty good AR mini-golf. So I would recommend starting with it. But it does need quite a bit of space—about 2 × 1.5 m. I had to rearrange my room to make it fit.
I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.
The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.
I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.
When you full screen this, it's crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it's like an inch or inch and a half on a 32 inch 4k display at a normal seated position.
(If I move my head closer it gets larger, further and it gets smaller)
That's crazy. I feel dumb for initial thinking it was somehow doing eye tracking to achieve this, despite having no such hardware installed.
I would be curious to see a similar thing that includes flashing. Anecdotally, my peripheral vision seems to be highly sensitive to flashing/strobing even if it is evidently poor at seeing fine details. Make me think compression in the time domain (e.g. reducing frame rate) will be less effective. But I wonder if the flashing would "wake up" the peripheral vision to changes it can't normally detect.
It’s normal to be "more sensitive" to brightness differences in the peripheral areas compared to the fovea. The fovea has more color receptors, in the other areas, there are comparatively more monochromatic receptors (brightness). The general density of the fovea is also much larger.
Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.
It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)
Foveated rendering is already a thing. But since it needs to be coded for in the game, it's not really being used on PC games. Games designed for Playstation with the PS VR 2 in mind do use foveated rendering since they know their games are being played with hardware that provides eye tracking.
That's foveated rendering. Foveated streaming, which is newly presented here, is a more general approach which can apply to any video signal, be it from a game, movie or desktop environment.
They are complementary things. Foveated rendering means your GPU has to do less work which means higher frame rates for the same resolution/quality settings. Foveated streaming is more about just being able get video data across from the rendering device to the headset. You need both things to get great results as either rendering or video transport could be a bottleneck.
Not quite: you can use it for games rendering, but with a Wifi adapter you more importantly want to use it for the video signal, and only transfer highres in the area you're looking at. A 4k game (2048*2048*2 screens) is 25gbit uncompressed at 100fps, which would stress even Wifi-7. With foveated rendering you can probably get that down to 8gbit easy.
Valve is applying it to the streamed view from the computer to reduce the bandwidth requirements it's not actually doing foveated rendering in the game itself because not all games support it.
Foveated streaming is just a bandwidth hack and doesn't reduce the graphic requirements on the host computer the same way foveated rendering does.
As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.
While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.
TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)
I think you could do foveated rendering efficiently with rasterization if you "simply" render twice at 2 different resolutions. A low resolution render over the entire FOV, and a higher resolution render in the fovea region. You would have overlap but overall it should be less pixels rendered.
I believe the standard way is to downgrade the sampling density outside the area you're looking, see https://docs.vulkan.org/samples/latest/samples/extensions/fr... . Optimally you could attach multiple buffers with different resolutions covering different parts of clipspace, saving vram bandwidth. Sadly this is not supported currently to my knowledge, so you have to write to a single giant buffer with lower sample resolution outside the detail area, and then just downsample it for the coarse layer.
Foveated streaming should be much easier to implement than foveated rendering. Just encode two streams, a low res one and a high res one, and move the high res one around.
I don't think a lot of people realize how big of a deal this is. You used to have to choose between wireless and slow or wired and fast. Now you can have both wireless and fast. It's insane.
Yep, that basically guarantees this as a purchase for me. It's basically a Quest 3 with some improvements, an open non-Meta OS, and the various WiFi and Streaming app issues fixed to make it nearly as good as a wired headset.
If you are lucky enough to have wired as an option anyway, especially in linux this has been shaky. But with Steam continuing to push into linux and VR I have no doubt this will change quickly.
If you are going to be pedantic then at least do it right. Because that's also not what he said. He said that no matter how fast he moved his eyes he wasn't able to catch it.
I'm super curious how they will implement it, if it's a general api in steam vr that headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond could use or if it's more tailored towards the Frame. I hope it's the first as to me it sounds like all you need is eye input and the two streams, the rest could be done by steam-vr.
The dedicated communication dongle between the PC and the headset sounds like a real game changer.
Right now getting fast enough and reliable wireless connection means either tweaking to death one's setup or spending car money on the entire setup. In particular normal people usually don't realize how crappy their wi-fi and assume it's all the same, which would end in blaming the poor perf on the headset.
Reminds me of Apple's AWDL, a similar workaround for crappy networks when the devices need a high speed low latency network. I do wonder if the headset here will do similar channel hoping tricks to join both the dongle's network and the normal wifi network.
A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".
And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:
- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now
- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution
- pancake lenses
- inside-out tracking
In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.
Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.
I think they made the right choice with Snapdragon chip... it will drop in and work as a dev kit for all the android toolchains that support quest3, devs will easily port quest3 games etc... so it's basically a non-spyware quest3 which is what everyone wants at this point. Custom drivers on the wifi 6 dongle are going to likely offer the best wireless experience, which again is what everyone wants.
I'm curious how meta responds imo the only way to compete is on price/ease of use but i'm not interested in another quest the 'social features' are just an excuse to collect data.
100%, a non-spyware Quest 3 is what I wanted. The Q3 is a fantastic headset, easily the best amalgamation of features at the right level of performance. Very pragmatic.
But Meta basically having access to my room in 3D, full audio, is not ideal. The very last company I want to invite into my home.
This being a whole system that will allow you to put whatever software you want onto it makes me think that it might actually succeed at being what the Vision Pro wanted to be.
I'd be willing to take the L on the hardware in order to be able to actually run the software I care about. (I own a Vision Pro and barely use it because the pejorative description of "an iPad on your face" is more accurate than I would like to admit.)
Monochrome is rough, but I think pixel count is a few orders of magnitude less important than being able to actually use the damn thing. The Vision Pro has been out for over a year and I haven't seen a single notable application that takes advantage of the hardware, and it seems that that's largely in part due to it being nigh impossible to develop and run software on it.
Vision Pro wants to be an iPad on your face. The hardware's just not good enough (in the sense of general manufacturing capabilities, not lack of investment from Apple) to make that an enticing product yet.
I would agree, but I'm a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I'm fearful that because of its great computing specs it's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.
I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it'd be a step up but not a huge one. I've seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.
Now that they've ported Steam to Android with FEX + Proton [0] (what this is running), the question is will they release it for the rest of Android devices? There is a ton of Android gaming handhelds and people are already experimenting with things like Winlator [1] but having well supported way could be awesome.
Google has also agreed to officially open up to competing app stores from the next version(https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-...), so the time is ideal for this. Valve, if you're reading this, please release Steam for Android.
It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.
Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?
It really cannot be understated how big of a deal this is. The tech here is impressive AND they're not trying to lock you in. Practically speaking it's the only VR headset that holds real-world appeal for the vast majority of gamers, because it plays the games they're already playing.
At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!
Whoo - first party support - including a graphics stack on ARM!
I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.
Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn't compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.
I'm still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this'll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.
Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting Australian pricing details (and release dates...) but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too.
Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.
Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.
I'm fairly sure/wishful thinking that the reason the last round of Valve hardware was very late/absent in Australia was because it was the time that the ACCC took Valve to court for its no refunds policy (and won). Now that Valve has rectified that and are in good standing in Australia, I'm hoping we see all this new hardware ASAP, alongside the rest of the world.
I've actually just recently started using my Quest 3 again through virtual desktop. I found the sharpening feature to actually make text look good enough that I'm able to work in it for hours uninterrupted, mostly writing papers and coding.
I'm super excited for this launch and for all the crazy open source builds, mods, and fun that are going to come from an open VR system (or at least that's my hope).
I am unable to parse announcements such as for this Valve product. Could I use this as a thing through which to spawn multiple monitors and code / read papers?
Definitely. There will be apps that will allow this (Virtual Desktop Classic is on steam already), and I foresee some neat things coming from its more open environment.
On the other hand, it will be highly subjective. I have found that the sharpening algorithms they have put into apps like Virtual Desktop to be sufficient for me to read text with, but it will probably bother some people. The Quest 3 and Valve’s will have very similar resolutions.
And although it looks like this Valve product will actually be quite light, the weight could be another factor in its use over many hours.
For some people, XR glasses with OLED screens might provide a better experience as well if you are looking solely for monitor or tv support. I kind of like going to an entirely new environment to work in for a while, so I appreciate the VR aspect, but if you are looking only for screen support, XR glasses may be the better choice (there are quite a few models, though, and I unfortunately don’t know the market well enough to make suggestions on that).
One of the most interesting parts of this to me that not many people are talking about is what their approach will be to making Steam games work on ARM…
I assume they will have put a lot of work into an emulation layer (maybe an existing one like FEX) to make it usable similar to what they did with Proton? This could be really good for the Linux ARM ecosystem in general
Steam Frame is running SteamOS on ARM, and is capable of playing games standalone, which implies ARM support in Steam. Through granted, it could be in a limited form.
They'll need that either way if they want to get back onto macOS, even if it's separate binaries and not a translation layer. At this point I think Steam basically doesn't work on Mac? Since the x64 Macs are legacy and the new ones are aarch64
It technically works since ARM macs can still run x86 binaries. But it's so slow and buggy, and the selection of playable games so slim that there is almost no point.
Nice to finally have a hackable headset on the market. I’ve been using the dji goggles for fpv flying because of vendor lock in. I wonder I could use these with OpenIPC to fly fpv with a fully open video stack.
I'm surprised no one is talking about the fact that the headset is ARM and that valve has been heavily contributing to the translation layer FEX.
I love my steam deck, but lately find myself reaching for emulation handhelds like the Retroid Pocket 5 more due to smaller size, especially when I'm leaving the house. There's already projects like GameNative that try to hack steam onto these devices, but if valve offers an official client on Android and other arm devices that would be incredible.
Edit: Some interesting insights in the FEX FAQ about why it's not a great fit for Android right now [0]. Interested to see if this ARM version of steamos is installable on other devices though. RP5 can already run alternatives like Rocknix
But rechargeable lithium batteries in AA form factor are cheap and cheerful. Even low quality ones will get 20 hours in that situation. So I have no more room to complain.
Valve is weirdly good at making controllers efficient. The original steam controller could get 80 hours out of two AAs if you turn off rumble.
At this point so many battery packs use the 2 double-a batteries side-by-side, I wish they just sold those as a usb-c rechargeable cartridge, that would make a lot of sense
I’ve seen mice with rechargeable AA batteries. Plugging in the mouse recharged the battery (the mouse is basically a battery charger). But you can also quickly swap them in and out if the cable is inconvenient. Best of both worlds.
It felt like the headset hardware had reached a sweet spot for the moment, but with this announcement the software situation is now also going to be reaching a similar place. Now we have a continuity of freedom with a PC OS on the headset away from home as well as the full mobility of a untethered headset display with the full power of a stationary PC at home. Can't wait to see what dev's do with this.
This feels like a really great headset. It was going to be an instant buy for me until I realised it has LCDs instead of OLEDs. I'll wait for reviews. I don't really want to buy these if they release another OLED version down the line.
Also, if this is arm and it has steam in it, that means we can finally run steam on arm, which means we can finally install steam "natively" on android Linux, specially now that we have the terminal app on android 16.
Can't wait for graphical acceleration to be fully merged to the terminal app and we have Linux running on android with near native performance and steam.
OLEDs have problems in VR with glare, persistence, refresh rate, power usage, heat, etc.. the LCDs in the Frame can hit 144 hertz - that's what you really want for VR gaming.
Apparently there's something to do with phosphor afterglow in OLEDs, the persistence after a pixel was turned off? No one seem to talk about it in the public but it seems to be a known issue among VR device designers.
I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I'm stuck with it and can't upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it's one more nail in my wallet :)
What a weird site. Am i getting it right that this "Deckard" was the code name for the Frame, it's out now, but the makers of the site went through all that trouble make a dotcom and a pedantic design but can't be bothered update it now that it is, indeed, out?
On the PlayStation VR 2, there is Resident Evil 4 and 8. I'd never cared for those games until I tried them in VR. I'd argue is more like a good game with decent VR support rather than a good "VR" game though. That's also the case for things like Hitman, No Man's Sky, Metro Awakening and such.
And then there are the racing sims. I find these are such an immersive experience it reaches an uncanny-valley type feeling for me, where my body is expecting G-forces that never come, or gets confused with the steering wheel not being the exact same size as my eyes are seeing. It's great though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy cars at all.
Driving sims with the right setup are truly breathtaking gaming experiences. For driving, especially, even things like the weight of a headset almost add to the experience since in the real thing you are wearing a helmet. But it is a way to have a legit, e-sports level gaming experience with real-to-life controls with total VR immersion.
I once played a custom Japanese Highway map in Assetto Corsa made for nighttime cruising and was a little high and I forgot what reality was.
I used to do a lot of GoKarting at a local course before the Pandemic, and VR racing is the single most immersive video game experience that you can have. The only thing you are missing is the physical exertion and G-Forces. Even the feel of the helmet and reduced field of view is emulated by the headset. Even cheap wheels have force feedback, and you can feel the weight shifting around. You can intuitively glance around for situational awareness. If you have experience, you will naturally fall into the look at where you want to go style of skid recovery, and you will feel the tires about to skid and feel in the wheel when they line back up with your vector of motion. It all transfers so well, even real race car drivers enjoy it.
You can feel your body freak out when you hit a wall at 200mph because you misjudged the distance because you're not a real racecar driver.
Driving an open cockpit car like an old F1 car is insane. You feel like you are just hanging out in the open air. I guess we didn't have survival instincts back then.
If you have a few thousand extra dollars, you can even fix the lack of physical exertion and G-Forces!
Shooting games are super fun too because it feels rewarding to be good at actually aiming, rather than stupid mouse twitches I have never been that good at. Also because Pavlov VR mods let me play Halo 1 Blood Gulch for real and that's magic.
VR Chat is also a pretty incredible experience. When the pandemic first hit, I actually spent several weekends clubbing in VR Chat clubs.
I have driven on tracks in real life and then the same track in VR, and all the spatial cues map perfectly. It's so close to "the same thing" that I really don't mind driving in VR more and then only paying for the occasional real life track day.
My partner also likes that I can't actually die in VR, though sometimes I still close my eyes just before an impact.
Agreed, if you have all the sim racing equipment already adding in VR brings you basically "there". The sim rig is a rabbit hole of immersive technologies of its own, but even just a basic wheel and pedal plus a headset will get you an incredible experience.
I believe sim flight people would have the same opinions on that side of simming too. It's a uniquely ideal situation for VR. Seated with full tactile controls.
I'm a huge fan of the "I Expect You To Die" series. They're basically a series of small escape rooms. The game's designed to be played seated.
You play James Bond, except that for various silly reasons you find yourself stationary, and you have psychic powers to reach far away stuff because, again, stationary. "They've trapped Bond in a bathysphere!" "You're in a car in a jet ful of poisonous gas that's going to explode!" Each level will kill you quickly and hilariously over and over until you figure out a sequence of steps to survive.
I'll never forget the hilarious moment when given a grenade with a missing pin, I opened various cupboards to find a replacement pin only for more grenades to pile out.
"I Expect You To Die" is a very funny game. Great for when you have spectators too, everyone can pitch in with ideas for the person playing to try.
I totally agree with you, I'm actually doing another Alyx run after only playing it on my Index. It actually please extremely well on the Quest 3 with the Steam Link app. Seamless.
This guy on X gave me some suggestions of top tier VR games:
Hubris, Into The Radius, Wanderer, Blade & Sorcery, RE4 Remake, Modded Skyrim VR, Modded Minecraft, Vertigo 2, Arken Age, Half Life 1 & 2 VR, UNDERDOGS, Hitman VR, Pixel Ripped Series, Walking Dead, Propagation Paradise Hotel
Various random and unexpected indie games exist. Like the Indie community has fully embraced VR and it is full of unique and experimental and awesome and garbage games.
Euro and American Truck Simulator still have VR support and it's more fun and satisfying than it should be.
Load up Google Earth VR, plop yourself in front of your childhood home and feel more than you expected.
If you like modern air combat: VTOL VR and DCS. If you like WW2 fighter combat, IL-2 Sturmovik.
Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades for the ultimate American Freedom simulator.
Project Wingman for Ace Combat 7 in VR. Star Wars Squadrons is fully playable in VR. War thunder has VR
BeamNG has unofficial VR
Rec Room if you want to get absolutely schooled by 13 year olds at laser tag and paintball and other games.
Hyperbolica is an exploring and puzzle game about non-euclidean space, where walking in a straight line doesn't work like you expect and apparently it has VR
Pulsar Lost Colony is a game about being a star trek captain with your friends and also can be played without VR.
Phasmaphobia is a game about getting the shit scared out of you and you can do it in VR if you do not fear death
An upcoming game about "Be an artemis astronaut". There was also one to explore a Google Earth style of the ISS. Also Kerbal Space Program at one time had a VR mod.
Fair warning about rec room: That game is quite possibly slightly too immersive. Playing frisbee I dented the ceiling, and playing paintball I managed to dive head-first into a closet.
Hitman is amazing insofar as the worlds are so well realised and the gameplay is excellent. But the controls are a bit pants, and I had an issue on Quest three where it was applying a foveated rendering but the mask was off (and the quest 3 doesn't have eye tracking). So it was blurry within my field of view, and sharp just next to it.
There are some games yes but in my opinion right now the best VR experiences are simulators. Assetto Corsa, iRacing, DCS, MSFS etc.
I bought a Bigscreen Beyond 2 + 5090 gpu basically just to play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator, a flight sim with full fidelity figher jets that you can even fly in PvP multiplayer) and it's the coolest thing VR has to offer for me. All my relatives and friends who tried it were stunned too.
On my own system I've played a lot of modded Beat Saber. Arizona Sunshine was good but not very long. Other than that mostly just mini game type things like The Lab.
One of my friends also has a KAT Walk C2 and I've played Skyrim VR on that. It takes a bit to get used to but it's a lot of fun.
Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it's unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it's incredible,
That's gonna be one expensive BeatSaber machine, but after having owned an Index (and really feeling how nice that headset was when I got my current Quest 2), there's no way I'm not gonna get one.
You're right that it's "not too-too hard" to get them, but it's also "not too-too easy" to actually use them in comparison just plugging a USB-C cable into the device. The process you will have to go through to recharge this will become incredibly annoying for something that will eat through batteries as quickly as a VR headset. Think of all the criticisms Apple has received over the years due to the Magic Mouses charging port being on the bottom and that only needs a charge every couple months, this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
There are 1.5V AA li-ion batteries on the market. I bought a few to power children's toys and they have comparable capacity to alkaline batteries. At high currents they actually perform better.
Cost is about 10x that of their non-rechargeable brethren, but obviously there's return on that investment.
I wasn't denying their existence. I was comparing the process of opening your device, taking out the batteries, finding their proprietary charger or hooking each individual battery up to a USB cable depending on the specific variety of battery, and them putting them back into your device is more annoying than just plugging the device into one of the half dozen USB-C chargers we all have scattered around our homes.
I doubt this would be a dealbreaker for most people, but it's a choice that will provide a consistent small annoyance for users.
Why would I want to go the route of having to plug in the controllers and not be able to use them while I charge them versus just swapping in a set of spare, charged batteries? Rechargeable AAs have been around for decades! It's the same setup my quest 1 and 2 have, and it has never failed me, I got 4 batteries total, 2 in the charger, 2 in the headset, I swap them around when they eventually (after a looooong time) run out.
Batteries in machine leads to having to wait 30 minutes for them to charge. Replaceable rechargeable batteries means you can instantly get a full new set. This is ideal
The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can't say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made "battery replacements" a cinch.
I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA/AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don't have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.
User replaceable batteries are... fine? Expected; preferred even? 40 hours on a single charge is more than adequate, imo, and if the controllers were too light that might actually bother some players.
Nothing against user-replaceable batteries, just that they use AA batteries. I was expecting something a bit more long lasting and rechargeable via USB.
I'm not trying to sell you on these in particular, it's just that I am struggling to find "non-German" results. Go search for them on ebay or a local store.
Those are cool but it does seem like they are forced to have that form factor to fit in most existing devices.
While a brand new device could employ something more apt? Even say something larger which can store more energy, dunno. It just feel off to still have AA batteries (which are generally not rechargeable) in a new product in 2025 which is not targeted to elderlies.
Maybe I'm just old but I bought some Eneloop rechargable batteries in 2008 and then some more Amazon branded rechargable batteries in like 2015 and a single charger and they've been powering devices consistently for over a decade. Half of my toddler's toys run on AA or AAA batteries. Calling them old fashioned feels like complaining the form factor of a 12 oz/330ml soda can is old; technically you're right but it's been around for 50 years because it works exceptionally well.
>AA batteries (which are generally not rechargeable)
I can't recall the last time I saw single use batteries in use, except maybe in a brand new remote control bundled with a TV, which was quickly swapped for rechargable. I don't even think of this most months, from where I'm siting I can see my battery chager and there's two sets of AA and a set of AAA sitting on there fully charged, ready to go. I think I paid $12 for the charger in 2008, very low barrier to entry.
I think it's a lot better. Rechargeable batteries built into a device degrade over time. The vast majority of people will discard a device as a result of battery degradation.
I'm frustrated by the error rate on my Eneloops over the years. I have dozens of them and I swear every other time I recharge them, one more starts blinking and refuses to recharge.
Also I would recommend switching to the IKEA rechargeable batteries which are supposedly the same thing except cheaper.
I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I'd expect there will be third party options to replace the cover/battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.
Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove/insert then it wouldn't surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).
Why? You can use rechargeable AA batteries and if you want you can swap them out and basically never have downtime for charging. Also all embedded batteries degrade over time which is a non issue here
This looks fantastic. The only negative I see so far it is only monochrome passthrough. The full color passthrough on the Quest 3 is pretty killer, it sucks to go backwards on that.
I guess we're in a minority but I'm in full agreement. Color passthrough really felt like a game-changer, and I've long wished for a more open, non-Meta alternative. Guess we'll be waiting a bit longer
I think the passthrough is more useful when there's a VR OS to take advantage of it (map your real room/hands/kb/screen onto VR, let you pin stuff, etc.) and I'm not sure Valve is even planning to do that, or anyone is on the Linux side of things (?)
I have a quest 2 where the passthrough is laughable. Would you really use it for anything other than getting a glimpse of the outside world? I sure don't, but that may be because of the shitty camera's. But I never saw the appeal of passthrough anyways, isn't the point of a VR headset to see a different reality? Like, not the real world?
I have both a quest 2 and quest 3 and you are right, the quest 2 is laughable. The quest 3 is WAY better, and is way closer to making it feel like you are just looking through glass (not quite, but on the way).
Eh, I don't use it for augmented reality a TON, but there are some fun apps that my kids and I like to use that use the passthrough for augmented reality... one is a virtual aquarium thing where you can draw 'windows' on your wall that become a window to the ocean, with things swimming around. It is pretty cool.
I mostly use it, though, for short term moving around things, like to pick up something in the real world or to figure out where I am. I guess that can work in monotone, but it really feels cool in full color.
with the galaxy xr, you don't have to choose. sometimes it's good to have windows in your reality, other times you can go to a fully immersive mode with different environments
A resolution of 2160@110° is kind of low normally, effectively being around 20 pixels per degree. I wonder if they could pull off something like what the engineers behind the Simula VR headset did, where they shift the outer resolution to the centre of the lens, up to 35.5 PPD, higher than the Apple Vision Pro. Last I checked, it was difficult to find off-the-shelf VR displays suitable for pancake lenses with a resolution above 2160, so this might be the best option.
Pretty sure the OS is just the same old Steam-flavored Linux distro "SteamOS" with ARM support and some new graphics pipeline stuff for the VR portion, though we don't know until it's actually out.
Though Valve has put a focus on developer ease and very low software lockdown in the recent years with their hardware, so I'd say the chances on direct rendering are quite good!
Wondering what window/desktop manager will valve ship with the new steam frame. Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently? Will that be a mod of kde or something?
> Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently?
The best known is perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass but there's many others, at varying stages of development. It will be interesting to see if custom OS/UX development is made available for this device. We'd also need quite a bit of custom development to make the OS comprehensively usable with gamepad-like controllers alone (no mouse or keyboard required). The existing work on "10-ft." media center interfaces can provide a useful starting point for this but it's far from covering all possible uses.
YouTube just happened to show me Gamers Nexus Lossless Scaling & Lossless Frame Generation video just now. [1]
Which, I can't help but wonder. If this ran on the Frame... To aid in streaming from your desktop... In conjunction with Foveated Streaming...
What's even more bonkers to me is the idea that this could really be baked in to the streaming, if you think about it.
Server generates 100 beautiful frames in one second.
The streaming hardware reminds the server that with the current network conditions, that it can only handle X bits per second.
The Frame says, "Hey, here's where the eyes were looking, here's where they are looking, here's where they're projected to look."
The Server knows how many actual frames it can send in a second.
But the Server can run the same Lossless Scaling & Lossless Frame Generation that the client will run.
The Server can then compare the predicted frames against the actual frames, and it can send the delta needed to correct the predictions. Especially in areas close to where the eyes are looking.
The Client consumes the stream, predicts frames, applies the delta, and ends up with better framerate and quality...
Can you do this all low latency, too? I suspect so.
Add it all up, and this is pretty bonkers. I mean, it's kind of obvious that that's how streaming "should work," but I think I hadn't really put it all together yet in my mind. My mental model was too "off the shelf." It didn't include how much effort the client could do... And that the server could then also do, to help the client... It's really a beautiful pairing, when you think about it.
What's really bonkers is that Steam could learn what final images are supposed to look like, for a given game, and train AI specifically for that game. Update the server and the client, and bam, everyone gets better quality. With zero developer interaction.
It is unfortunate that it doesn't have a strap that goes over the top of your head. It is extremely irritating that almost every headset does this, then charges extra for an actually usable strap that takes the pressure off of your face.
Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.
I have the Bigscreen Beyond 2 which is OLED + pancake fine. But only if you have the perfect light seal that the BSB face gasket ensures. Your eyes just adjust to it and I never thought about it while using it. The upside of having perfect blacks is sooooo worth it in my opinion. Flight sims in VR at night are an amazing experience
It's interesting to see them putting more attention on playing traditional games with this. I have long thought that the most broadly viable use for VR headsets in gaming is giving users a big screen to play their regular games. There just doesn't actually appear to be much market for true VR games considering all the complicating factors like motion sickness or requiring a big play area. It reminds me of the Nintendo Wii. Taking turns playing Beat Saber with a few of your friends is fun just like Wii Sports was, but in the end people are going to spend a lot more time sitting on their couch to play something more traditional like Mario Kart.
I am beginning to wonder if the rumoured HLX is actuallya VR native experience, perhaps Alyx 2. All the leaks have pointed toward increased focus on systems like objects having physical properties that would really add to immersion in VR.
I'm unreasonably excited on all things Steam nowadays. I still like my PS5. And the PSVR2 is quite amazing for the games it has. But Steam has been amazing in getting back into games for me in ways that I did not anticipate.
110 deg fov is a bit on the low side but I guess it'll have to do. I hate how 90% of VR headsets are designed to feel like you have binoculars strapped to your face, absolutely zero peripheral vision.
One of the reasons I put off getting corrective lenses for a long time and kept trying to use contacts despite how horrible they make my eyeballs feel, is that I have an extremely wide peripheral vision. I can see my fingers wiggle behind the plane defined by my shoulders, I will react to motion out there.
Having my FoV dumbed down to 90º sounds like hell, especially in a game where we are looking for opponents.
Playing Doom on a widescreen monitor with the FoV modifications made it a lot less annoying. I want that even more today.
The normal human field of vision is about 190°, which mine is just about. If you don’t have a stoop that will catch the front edge of your shoulders. Fingers wiggling with your shoulders slightly overextended is just easier to see than a shoulder shrug.
It’s the amount of compute power that my brain allows for peripheral vision that’s the only unusual thing. But it makes video games feel claustrophobic to an unpleasant degree.
There are tons of pro level headsets that go up to 170, the tech definitely exists, it's just not as cheap cause you need larger displays if you want to maintain dpi.
Are there any real-world tests or reviews of foveated streaming in actual gameplay? I’m wondering how it holds up in fast shooters where you depend on tiny cues in your peripheral vision. Wouldn’t the lower-resolution periphery make it harder to notice subtle movement?
There are some reviews like LTT that talk about it's impact. I'm not sure about the subtle movement though. I think they're lowering the quality to what your peripheral vision is already, so I don't think it would effect anything negatively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU3ru09HTng
I find it mind boggling that so many VR headsets cannot be used with glasses.
Imagine an engineering team and developers working on the device. There must be a pretty large proportion of folks with glasses. Does the fact that they cannot use their own product not raise a flag in any way!?
Anyway, for this particular model, others indicate that there may be an (optional?) spacer.
“Optional” sounds kinda sucky. Someone buys the headset, has a friend over, and the friend can’t use it because support for glasses is optional? It’s not like glasses are a niche thing.
Steam does a lot of things right here, but also some things wrong, which is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.
I read the specs and got excited, until I read about the resolution.
2160x2160 is what I have now with the Pico 4, and while it's ok for entertainment, and acceptable for browsing and reading, it's far too low for professional work.
Linux would have been great, but I can't justify spending money on a headset with exactly the same low resolution as my current one.
Also, I've become used to color passthrough, and going back to monochrome would feel like a big regression.
I don't think any VR headset is good for professional work due to the focal plane mismatch which causes eye strain with long term use. Unless you like using a computer with a screen 4 feet away. For most people that's pretty uncomfortable for productivity work.
Interesting they went with the 8 Gen 3 instead of something like the X Elite. From what I’ve seen, the 8 Gen 3 actually outperforms the Elite in emulation and running PC games. I wonder if that factored into the decision.
Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan / burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.
VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.
Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I'm using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).
> Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"):
Yes, but it's not degrading as fast as OLED haters makes you think. I spent days playing the same games (so HUD is in the static place) on multiple OLED screens I owned for years. No noticeable burn-in and still looks better than my only IPS screen.
I used colorcontrol to enter the service menu of my LG C2 and disable all anti-burn-in features. No auto dimming, no auto picture level, no anti-logo, etc. The only one I kept is pixel shift because it's only noticeable if you're looking at the edge of the screen when it moves, it's a tiny movement. I skip the "pixel cleaning" prompt every time it wants me to wait. When I'm gaming in HDR, I use filters to increase the exposure to get the maximum brightness range of the panel. Been using it like that for ~8hrs/day for over 2 years now. Zero detectable hint of burn-in.
If you want a different anecdote, I have a LG C1 that got burn in after a year of use, playing FFXIV. I can see a blue outline of where my minimap and hotbars are. HUD burn-in. The only thing I disabled was the dimming feature, because it's outright annoying to use, where every time i'd scroll it'd make the text on a page illegiblly dark. (Dark mode pages, white text becomes dark gray while scrolling then back to white when stopped... sometimes not!). I moved that TV to the living room and got a non oled samsung instead which is what I use now.
I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.
And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.
I'm just not convinced it's really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it's on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).
I wonder what the overhead is to stream from the headset or host PC to another monitor. VR is great but comes with a barrier of overcoming social isolation. Having the VR session on a screen would be a way to keep it social. Especially multiple VR slit screen. We want to engage the rest of people in the room beyond the players.
Watching various interviews, clearly it can be on another monitor.
I could see a Steam Frame OLED coming just like the Steam Deck OLED, but I wonder how long it will take. Like others here, this will be an instant buy for me and my first VR device, apart from Cardboard maybe. Looking forward to gaming on it.
Is the steam controller registering as a joystick and a mouse? It could be amazing to manage my current media center! As I cannot make KDE detect my current controller as a mouse
It seems the controller on steamdeck on windows detects as such when steam or whatever companion program is not running. Although in this state. You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself.
Although on Linux side. As far as i remembered, it's up to how kernel driver developer to map the device input into different class. It would be up to valve to decide what to do in this case.
There won't be 'mode' if neither steam or other 3rd software is running though. So it must default to one of control layout. Fortunately, controller on steamdeck does have enough button to fit both.
Probably a dumb question, I might've missed it in the description somewhere, but I assume the onboard PC is mostly to facilitate the streaming functionality, and it will stream from your main machine to the headset right?
I'm very curious about the latency if that's the case. This might be the trigger for me to get into VR finally, but I'm worried that if there's noticeable lag in the stream that I'll basically cover myself in vomit from motion sickness lol
The latency introduced by the network link will be tiny compared to most games total frame latency. I would prefer a cable link just so I don't have to worry about charging it ever, but I think the wireless link will be fine from a lag perspective.
it supports standalone, may allow sideloading apks too, sounds more powerful than quest3 and also - no lag because the 6Ghz wifi doesn't go through the router, so long as you are close to the PCVR source - it's probably lag free.
how did you do?
Will SteamFrame ARM support paired with Alyssa Rosenzweig's work - large amount of Steam games are very close to be able to run on mac hardware, right?
Apple already has excellent x86 emulation. But Apple has locked-down GPU with a proprietary API that adds another unnecessary translation layer where it hurts more.
The main thing I dislike about VR is how uncomfortable it is on my head and how hard it is to adjust that comfort. Too much friction to enjoy. If I can just easily slip these on that would be perfect.
I also never got used to the feeling of being completely detached from my own world. I know that's the point of VR, for it to be completely immersive but it felt very jarring not knowing what was going on around me.
Wow this is perfect timing! I've dusted out my old Valve Index tuesday so my kids could try The Lab. It now shows a green pixels line on the right. Also the headset is too heavy for them and not easy to adjust, and I had to hold the cable so they don't trip over it. This new headset will be perfect for them.
Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.
> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.
Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.
I'm disappointed it seems to have dropped lighthouse tracking with the previous Valve Index. Especially because with the Valve Knuckles controllers are my favorite with how they strap to your hand.
Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.
Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.
These new controllers look just like the Quest 3 controllers. Ergonomically I really like them, and they have capacitive touch for most surfaces as well.
This is my main concern with the new headset.. hopefully they have a way to support lighthouse.. maybe as an "upgrade" to the tracking if you already have a lighthouse setup. I play a game called VTOLVR and it's atrocious on the quest with inside-out tracking, because the game VERY often has you looking in a direction where your arm is behind your back or behind your leg (from the VR's perspective) and it completely loses tracking.. literally killing you in game sometimes. Think "looking up and behind you for threats" while your hand is in the throttle/stick for a combat plane.
It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don't make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don't know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.
The controllers also have gyros, but from what I've read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn't reliable for extended periods.
The controllers won't have lighthouse tracking though. The IR tracking is the headset tracking the controller's IR LEDs, which the Index controllers do not have. It might be possible to have the headset IR track the lighthouses, and then use the old Index controllers, which also track the lighthouses.
There's also tools to calibrate the different tracking methods together, but that seems less than ideal.
Good catch, I just saw IR tracking on the page and didn't investigate further. I can't wait to see some teardowns (physical and firmware) of the device, then we can get a better look at what it is truly capable of.
Though it wouldn't help the controllers, perhaps the expansion port on the headset could be used for a lighthouse-compatible tracker? (One can dream...)
I’m holding out hope that this could be utilized in a similar fashion to the Apple Vision Pro’s Remote Desktop. I’d love the chance to work in a coffee shop or plane and not need to look down for prolonged periods of time. I’m hoping that that dongle is able to be used as video pass through.
I am running Endeavour OS an Arch based distro, and it has been almost hassle free for games. Even less hassle than windows since I didn'teven have to download and install GPU drivers. Games with anti-cheat sometimes won't run, but that's not the fault of the OS.
I don't play just niche games either, AAA titles work too. Currently playing Arc Raiders without issue and that only just came out. Installed it via steam, started playing. 10 years ago I would never have seen this coming.
It was so thoughtful of them to use IR tracking. Bed time gaming becomes much easier. I wonder if there was a choice between color passthrough and IR tracking and they chose the latter. Good choice!
Anybody know the limiting factor to providing lower IPDs on VR headsets? My wife had always struggled with this with an IPD in the 50s when we were exploring early gen VR headsets. The Frame bottoms out at 60.
As you lower the IPD you're scrunching the displays and optics closer and closer together and at some point you mechanically run out of room. You'd need to reduce the FOV or add mirrors or something to get the lenses to fit.
There's probably also an element of it not being worth complicating the design to chase users in the long tail of IPDs. (My IPD is about 72, which is slightly outside the range on the other end for this and most other headsets, despite it being less of a mechanical challenge.)
I am wondering about this "dedicated 6 GHz dongle".
So, I am gathering that this thing, just like the quest will be able to run things locally but is also supposed to be able to stream pcvr stuff from a connected pc where steam is running.
I would have thought they give you a wired connection for that. you know, like the quest. but with the option to do it wireless.
My question would be:
given that the wireless solution in the quest apparently is a peer-to-peer pairing of the headset and the pc through the local networks wireless router, just much of a difference will this dedicated 6GHz dongle make?
Would I be kidding myself if I assumed using this dongle would give me the analog experience of when I am using a dedicated dongle to connect my xboy controller to my pc?
I mean, I plug it in, the dongle automagically comes pre-paired with the headset, I start steam on pc, hit play on a VR title and I get to play right away?
Because that is my current experience with my controller that is connected via a dedicated wireless dongle. I hated the bluetooth connection. But using this dongle is really making a difference here.
So, I wonder just how "painless" this will all be with the new headset.
I held out on buying a quest because the wireless connection through my router would not be possible simply because I cant change my router at the moment and while it is fine for everything i use it for, it would not be enough to stream the quest data. Therefore I would have always wanted a "wired" connection, simply because my router wouldnt be able to do it.
Therefore I was a bit miffed when I learned that this new headset would not come with a wired option. But if this dongle can do everything a wired connection can do without having to go through my router then this would be absolutely game changing for me.
Trying to decide if Steam Frame is going to be better than Apple Vision Pro + ALVR + lighthouses... AVP has higher resolution and OLED displays with higher PPD but obviously weighs a lot more.
There was a lot of discussion about some work they've done to minimize compression artifacts... that's the biggest drawback for me in terms of ALVR + AVP... I suppose time will tell.
I own the Index and Vision and haven't tried this yet. I was considering buying PSVR2 controllers since they're officially supported but maybe I shouldn't bother?
i wonder if foveated streaming combined with foveated rendering could be used in the cloud gaming space?
if latency is low enough, then you could get a super high fidelity experience on a thin client VR display with low cost rendering server side.
Nvidia GeForce Now is already very impressive for streaming games at full field of view 4k.
thin client VR gives you longer battery life, lighter devices, lower entry cost. and with a cloud gaming service rendering the game, an even lower barrier to entry
This is due to a video that has drm encoding and the browser trying to decode it. The drm blob contains the codec keys in our driver and the browser is supposed to negotiate this. It fails. At least on Nvidia for you. It fails for me on safari on iOS.
DRM in context of that log message is Direct Rendering Manager which is a Linux subsystem for handling GPUs; it's unrelated to Digital Rights/Restrictions Management and there are no DRM-encumbered videos on that page.
The death of VR has been greatly exaggerated. The only thing that died is the hype, and the hype will not be missed. It's just nice to have so much less bullshit.
Little disappointing its not got colour passthrough. I am not convinced this generation of headsets will really be the ones that AR breaks through but still its a bit disappointing and has been useful with the latest Quest headsets. Other than that it looks fairly solid.
It was noted in some articles that the "expansion port" could hypothetically be used for a color passthrough module later. But I also read that the Index had a similar port and never did much of anything with it, so that may never happen.
Definitely a cost measure to not include color passthrough, I'm not in the market to replace my Quest 3S but I'm very curious to see what price they hit with this.
Nice that it has a microSD slot so you can buy the low storage on and not be stuck with 256 GB forever.
Being in the park kinda loses its lustre when you've got a headset strapped to your face - I'd prefer a laptop with a screen that's still visible in sunlight.
> I'd prefer a laptop with a screen that's still visible in sunlight.
I don't understand why Amazon worked so hard to replace their neutral gray Kindles with "Kindle PaperWhite".
Paper, the material, is so white that trying to read it in sunlight will hurt your eyes. Why would you want a white reading surface instead of a gray one?
The main shtick of Kindle Paperwhite, aside of the obvious ability to read in the dark, is not how white it is but rather how it can remove shadows when outside or in brightly lit rooms. You don't really notice this effect until you disable backlight and suddenly can notice the shadows cast by your fingers.
> aside of the obvious ability to read in the dark
My Kindle Keyboard came with a case that hooked into it to draw power for a nice, orange booklight. It was a much better reading-in-bed experience than the Kindle Oasis with its uniform glow. :(
Like a wii-mote kind of thing? Is there anything out that's good enough for general desktop usage? I'd be really interested if it's actually at a usable state.
I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)
The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.
The biggest variation is above 6 GHz: most of the world allows 5.9-6.4 but reserves 6.5-7 GHz for cellular or haven't decided yet if it'll be for wifi or cellular. There's a nice map on https://6ghz.info/
It's both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
> But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
That's my experience streaming games to steam deck. I have central 2.4/5/6Ghz AP and 6Ghz-only APs in other rooms. Any sort of wireless streaming at my place is snappy.
There's a devkit... I'm disappointed, that's the Sony method? I actually tried to do dev for the Meta Quest 2 the other week and was disappointed there because it's my son's, and he can't sign up for a Meta dev account (age), so there's no way for me to do anything with it without factory resetting the thing. This is more disappointing though. Why can't I dev games for the consumer headset?
It sounds like the dev kit is more of a way to get devices out to devs before the full launch, I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware. The Adam Savage Tested video had interviews with the Valve team and it was pretty clear that "it's your computer" was a core part of the philosophy.
I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware. I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware.
> It depends though. Some console's devkit have memory or vram larger than consumer device. So it will allow un-optimized dev version of the softwares to run without crash. (And allow you to check what part goes wrong later instead of immediately fix it) Although you will need to test the production build on retail device eventually, it will make development easier.
Extremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
The IPD range is a bit on the lower side, which is unfortunate knowing it can make a VR headset unusable and that it is just a matter of design and not technology
Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.
It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.
USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.
It is my second laptop I got from my employer (replacement every few years) and it also has just usb c ports. I hate plugging in usb-a adapter. I would at least expect adapter included for usb c.
I'st much less likely to break a usba dongle compare to usb c though.(the area is much mcuh bjgger) And I don't think the dongle really need the 40gb potential of a usbc port.
I mean.. my X670E motherboard (a high end, modern mobo!) has only ONE usb-c port.. it has, in comparison, 3 usb-a 10gbps ports and another 4x usb-a 5gbps ports. Given the headset's main use case to be plugged in is for PC-VR game streaming, it makes sense that they'd go with USB-A. Maybe in a few years they can switch but right now most desktop mobos barely even have usb-c.
It is still a major non-trivial difference between implementing USB-A header (super trivial, just wire up the lines) and implementing USB-C - needs additional TCPC with enough ports, located nearby enough, plus flash rom, plus possibly an extra interfacing chip per each port. And that's if you only want reasonable USB-C that does just USB with maybe a bit of Power Delivery (but not too much). And then you need to ensure firmware handles it right (and that's not including bugs like Intel "firmware quality" leading to broken flash roms on entire product lines with thunderbolt controllers).
There's a reason why USB-C ports on laptops are often very... "clustered", let's say. Makes it reasonably easy to route signals if you're routing just what's essentially USB+DP or USB4, and I2C, and put 2 port capable TCPC and necessary switching and support circuitry near the port.
If it's anything like the Deck, they will eventually announce a more tangible release date (right now it's early 2026) and then announce a date for preorders to open. For the Deck unless you got into the preorder queue within ~1 minute you had to wait several months for it to be delivered to you.
Can we use one Steam Machine to drive, say, 4 to 16 Steam Frames.
Multiplayer gameplay, like Goldeneye. With the convenience that all of the state is in memory in one process, so there's no networking layer in the gameplay logic itself.
For a AAA modern game, you're right - of course not.
But remember, they're saying this thing is six times as powerful as the Steam Deck.
That sounds like it might be able to handle 4 players running at about as good as on the Steam Deck.
And that's ignoring the whole idea of the server running on the Steam Machine, and custom clients running on everyone's Steam Frames. That would give you even more compute power.
I like the idea that the Steam Frame, in this "Living Room" scenario, doesn't even need to do network prediction. It just blasts game state to each of the clients.
So what, there's multi-player games on the same TV, like Goldeneye 64.
There's LAN games.
And now there's maybe a new category... Living Room, Multi-Screen games?
I have a Quest 2 that I don't care for, so it's caught me somewhat offguard how much I want this. The whole set please. I thought I'd just want the controller, but everything here looks exciting to me.
Cell phones and other mobile devices only transmit non-ionizing radiation (perfectly safe glorified invisible light), and studies have been done regarding this topic, returning inconclusive results. It's most likely perfectly safe.
Saw that the Steam Frame was wireless and lost interest. Wireless is always an extra complication that never improves things. I've learned lots about framing to hardwire my home network. Sure, make it an option, but I won't pay for latency, battery life, battery weight, cost, or pairing issues of wireless solutions. Give me (replaceable, standard) cables anyday!
That said, there is hope, because if there is a wireless version and it takes off, it can't be hard to make a wired version.
It doesn't improve quality and latency, but for VR it absolutely improves not dealing with a cable that you can't see and will tangle yourself up with if you turn either direction more than once
Two notes on how Steam Frame is handling this
- It's a standalone headset, less demanding games run directly on the Steam Frame and the wireless connection doesn't factor in to anything.
- It makes two simultaneous wifi connections, one on 5 ghz for connecting to your wifi network / internet, and another on 6 ghz for connecting to your streaming PC. They include an official 6 ghz USB dongle for the PC so you don't have to deal with finding which 3rd party option will work reliably.
Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Foveated rendering is complicated to implement with current rendering APIs in a way that actually improves performance, but foveated streaming seems like a much easier win that applies to all content automatically. And the dedicated 6 GHz dongle should do a much better job at streaming than typical wifi routers.
> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
It's an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate
Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I'd love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.
> Monochrome passthrough
So AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:
> User accessible front expansion port w/ Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) / PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)
Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?
One thing I don't see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That's something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.
More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There's an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I'm surprised it isn't standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index's "knuckles" controllers.
> Foveated streaming! That's a great idea.
Back when I was in Uni, so late 80s or early 90s, my dad was Project Manager on an Air Force project for a new F-111 flight simulator, when Australia upgraded the avionics on their F-111 fighter/bombers.
The sim cockpit had a spherical dome screen and a pair of Silicon Graphics Reality Engines. One of them projected an image across the entire screen at a relatively low resolution. The other projector was on a turret that pan/tilted with the pilot's helmet, and projected a high resolution image but only in a perhaps 1.5m circle directly in from of where the helmet was aimed.
It was super fun being the project manager's kid, and getting to "play with it" on weekends sometimes. You could see what was happening while wearing the helmet and sitting in the seat if you tried - mostly ny intentionally pointing your eyes in a different direction to your head - but when you were "flying around" it was totally believable, and it _looked_ like everything was high resolution. It was also fun watching other people fly it, and being able to see where they were looking, and where they weren't looking and the enemy was speaking up on them.
I'll share a childhood story as well.
Somewhere between '93 and '95 my father took me abroad to Germany and we visited a gaming venue. It was packed with typical arcade machines, games where you sit in a cart holding a pistol and you shoot things on the screen while cart was moving all over the place simulating bumpy ride, etc.
But the highlight was a full 3D experience shooter. You got yourself into a tiny ring, 3D headset and a single puck hold in hand. Rotate the puck and you move. Push the button and you shoot. Look around with your head. Most memorable part - you could duck to avoid shots! Game itself, as I remember it, was full wireframe, akin to Q3DM17 (the longest yard) minus jump pads, but the layout was kind of similar. Player was holding a dart gun - you had a single shot and you had to wait until the projectile decayed or connected with other player.
I'm not entirely sure if the game was multiplayer or not.
I often come back to that memory because shortly after within that time frame my father took me to a computer fair where I had the opportunity to play doom/hexen with VFX1 (or whatever it was called) and it was supposed to revolutionize the world the way AI is suppose to do it now.
Then there was a P5 glove with jaw dropping demo videos of endless possibilities of 3D modelling with your hands, navigating a mech like you were actually inside, etc.
It never came.
That sounds like you're describing dactyl nightmare. [1] I played a version where you were attacking pterodactyls instead of other players, but it was more or less identical. That experience is what led me to believe that VR would eventually take over. I still, more or less, believe it even though it's yet to happen.
I think the big barrier remains price and experiences that are focusing more on visual fidelity over gameplay. An even bigger problem with high end visual fidelity tends to result in motion sickness and other side effects in a substantial chunk of people. But I'm sticking to my guns there - one day VR will win.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBkP2to1P_c
It is precisely that! My version was wireframe and I can't recall the dragon, but everything else is exactly like I remembered it!
For me this serves as an example.
Few years later VFX1 was the hype, years later Occulus, etc.
But 3D graphics in general - as seen in video games - are similar, minus recent lumen, it's still stuff from graphics gems from 80-90s, just on silicone.
Same thing is happening now to some degree with AI.
Nah, people spend 700 on consoles, the biggest barriers is comfort.
As long as the headsets are heavy, I won't get one, no matter how great the graphics are or how good the game is
And even more so for people with corrective lenses and/or weird eye behaviors.
Didn't stop me from getting two different Oculus headsets (and some custom corrective lense inserts) but ultimately, comfort is what made me give up.
Bigscreen Beyond 2 is 107g
1400 Euro, yeah... No...I would like to have something light, with just enough power to stream from my pc via WiFi.
That's it. No idea why something like this doesn't exist. ( Or it exists and I don't know it?)
I expect part of it is that the contemporary recommendations for VR are extremely meaty - something like 2160x2160 and 120hz with stereoscopic rendering meaning you're rendering every frame twice.
That's more than 1.1 billion pixels per second. At 24 bits a pixel that's something like 26Gb/s of raw data. And that's just in bandwidth - you also need to hit that 120hz of latency, in an environment where hiccups or input lag can cause physical discomfort for a user. And then even if you remote everything you need the headset to have enough juice to decompress and render all of this and hit these desired throughputs.
I'm napkin mathing all of this, and so I'm sure there have been lots of breakthroughs to help along these lines, but it's definitely not a straightforward problem to solve. Of course it's arguable I'm also just falling victim to the contemporary trappings of fidelity > experience, that I was just criticizing.
I played that game in Berlin in the late 90s. There were four such pods, iirc, and you could see the other players. The frame rate was about 5 frames per second, so it was borderline unplayable, but it was fun nevertheless.
Later, I found out that it was a game called ”Dactyl Nightmare” that ran on Amiga hardware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)
Maybe something like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)
I think I played with the 1000CS or similar in a bar or arcade at some point in early 90's
Yes!
The booth depicted on the 1000CS image looks exactly how I recall it, and the screenshot looks very similar to how I remember the game (minus dragon, and mine was fully wireframe), but the map layout looks very similar. It has this Q3DM17 vibe I was talking about.
Isn't this crazy, that we had this tech in ~'91 and it's still not just there yet?
On similar note - around that time, mid 90s, my father also took my to CEBIT. One building was almost fully occupied by Intel or IBM and they had different sections dedicated to all sorts of cool stuff. One of I won't forget was straight out of Minority Report, only many years earlier.
They had a whole section dedicated to showcasing a "smart watch". Imagine Casio G-Shock but with Linux. You could navigate options by twisting your wrist (up or down the menu) and you would press the screen or button to select an option.
They had different scenarios built in form of an amusement park - from restaurant where you would walk in with your watch - it would talk to the relay at the door and download menu for you just so you could twist your wrist to select your meal and order it without a human interaction and... leave without interaction as well, because the relay at the door would charge you based on your prior selection.
Or - and that was straight out of Minority Report - a scenario of an airport, where you would disembark at your location and walk past a big screen that would talk to your watch and display travel information for you, prompting question if you'd like to order a taxi to your destination, based on your data.
I remember a guy I know went to japan/asia around 1985ish and came back with a watch. It had hands, but also a small LCD display. You could draw numbers on the face with your finger, like 6 then X then 3 then = and the LCD would show the values, and finally 18
This is completely uninteresting now, but this was 40 years ago
EDIT: I think Casio AT-552
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aQHnyZdgF4
It was a really interesting and weird time growing up when Japan was the king of tech. I had a friend who's dad was often over there and bringing all sorts of weird stuff back. There was this NES/Famicon game where you played with a sort of gyroscope. I have no idea how you were supposed to play the game, but found the gyroscope endlessly fascinating. Then of course there were the pirated cartridges with 100 in 1 type games. Oh then we found the box full of his dad's "special" games. Ah, good times.
Special games? I thought NES was controlled by Nintendo?
There were some licensed games in Japan that they'd never release in the West, and also a relatively large scene for unlicensed/'bootleg' games. Fun slightly related factoid - the Game Genie was an unlicensed hardware mod and they actually got sued by Nintendo, and won.
I somehow suspect in modern times they'd have lost.
> Isn't this crazy, that we had this tech in ~'91 and it's still not just there yet?
Not really, because feeding us ads and AI slop attracted all the talent.
Oh wow, I also played with this one in what might have been a COMDEX, in the 90s.
I remember the game was a commercially available shooter though, but the machine was exactly the same, with the blue highlights.
>It never came.
Everything you described and more is available from modern home Vr devices you can purchase right now.
Mecha, planes, skyrim, cinema screens. In VR, with custom controllers or a regular controller if you want that. Go try it! It’s out and it’s cheap and it’s awesome. Set IPD FIRST.
[flagged]
My dad had an Apple Newton.
Tell us more about how Microsoft Bob was a user agent LLM? :P
William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, about 2 AIs with the same creator, locked in conflict, is actually prophetic. About Microsoft Bob and Clippy in the 1990s.
That’s reality cool. My first job out of college was implementing an image generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer on the USS Nimitz, also using SGI hardware. I would have loved to have seen the final product in person but sadly never had the chance.
I remember there was a flight simulator project that had something like that, or even it was that.
it was called ESPRIT, which I believe was eye slaved programmed retinal insertion technique.
> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate
I question that we could not create a special purpose video codec that handles this without trickery. The "per eye" part sounds spooky at first, but how much information is typically different between these frames? The mutual information is probably 90%+ in most VR games.
If we were to enhance something like x264 to encode the 2nd display as a residual of the 1st display, this could become much more feasible from a channel capacity standpoint. Video codecs already employ a lot of tricks to make adjacent frames that are nearly identical occupy negligible space.
This seems very similar (identical?) to the problem of efficiently encoding a 3d movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D_plus_Delta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiview_Video_Coding
I'm entirely unfamiliar with the vr rendering space, so all I have to go on is what (I think) your comment implies.
Is the current state of VR rendering really just rendering and transporting two videostreams independent of eachother? Surely there has to be at least some academic prior-art on the subject, no?
Foveated streaming is cool. FWIW the Vision Pro does that for their Mac virtual display as well, and it works really well to pump a lot more pixels through.
It's the same amount of pixels though, just with reduced bitrate for unfocused regions so you save time in encoding, transmitting, and decoding, essentially reducing latency.
For foveated rendering, the amount of rendered pixels are actually reduced.
At least when we implemented this in the first version of Oculus Link, the way it worked is that it was distorted (AADT [1]) to a deformed texture before compression and then rectilinear regenerated after compression as a cheap and simple way to emulate fixed foveated rendering. So it’s not that there’s some kind of adaptive bitrate which applies less bits outside the fovea region but achieves a similar result by giving it fewer pixels in the resulting image being compressed; doing adaptive bitrate would work too (and maybe even better) but encoders (especially HW accelerated ones) don’t support that.
Foveated streaming is presumably the next iteration of this where the eye tracking gives you better information about where to apply this distortion, although I’m genuinely curious how they manage to make this work well - eye tracking is generally high latency but the eye moves very very quickly (maybe HW and SW has improved but they allude to this problem so I’m curious if their argument about using this at a low frequency really improves meaningfully vs more static techniques)
[1] https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/how-does-oculus-lin...
Although your eye moves very quickly your brain has a delay in processing the completely new frame you switched to. It's very hard to look left and right with your eyes and read something quickly changing on both sides
That depends on the specifics of the encode/decode pipeline for the streamed frames. Could be the blurry part actually is lower res and lower bitrate until it's decoded, then upscaled and put together with the high res part. I'm not saying they do that, but it's an option.
It’s the same number of pixels rendered but it lets you reduce the amount of data sent , thereby allowing you to send more pixels than you would have been able to otherwise
I think it works really well to pump the same amount of pixels, just focusing them on the more important parts.
Always PIP, Pump Important Pixels
It lets you pump more pixels in a given bandwidth window.
People are conflating rendering (which is not what I’m talking about) with transmission (which is what I’m talking about).
Lowering the quality outside the in focus sections lets them reduce the encoding time and bandwidth required to transmit the frame over.
Foveated streaming is wild to me. Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text, so guaranteeing that latency over 2.4Ghz seems Sisyphean.
I wonder if they have an ML model doing partial upscaling until the eyetracking state is propagated and the full resolution image under the new fovea position is available. It also makes me wonder if there's some way to do neural compression of the peripheral vision optimized for a nice balance between peripheral vision and hints in the embedding to allow for nicer upscaling.
I worked on a foveated video streaming system for 3D video back in 2008, and we used eye tracking and extrapolated a pretty simple motion vector for eyes and ignored saccades entirely. It worked well, you really don't notice the lower detail in the periphery and with a slightly over-sized high resolution focal area you can detect a change in gaze direction before the user's focus exits the high resolution area.
Anyway that was ages ago and we did it with like three people, some duct tape and a GPU, so I expect that it should work really well on modern equipment if they've put the effort into it.
It is amazing how many inventions duck tape found its way into.
Foveated rendering very clearly works well with a dedicated connection, wiht predictable latency. My question was more about the latency spikes inherent in a ISM general use band combined with foveated rendering, which would make the effects of the latency spikes even worse.
They're doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).
With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.
Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
You're talking about "Wi-Fi 6" not "6 GHz Wi-Fi".
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
Not so much of an issue when neighbors with paper thin walls see that 6ghz as a -87 signal
That said, in the US it is 1200MHz aka 5.925 GHz to 7.125 GHz.
The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.
Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.
Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.
Here's the overview: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/senate-gop-budge...
This is part of my job, dealing with spectrum and Washington.
I communicate with the FCC and NTIA fairly often at this point.
You need to pay attention to Arielle Roth, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
https://policy.charter.com/2025-ntia-spectrum-policy-symposi...
From the article, about the November event:
"... administration’s investment in unlicensed access in 6 GHz ensures the benefits of the entire spectrum band are delivered directly to American families and businesses in the form of more innovation and faster and more reliable connectivity at home and on the go, which will continue to transform and deliver long-lasting impact for communities of all sizes across the country.
Charter applauds Administrator Roth's leadership, and her recognition of the critical role unlicensed spectrum plays today and in the future, both in the U.S. and across the globe."
---
Now here: https://www.ntia.gov/speech/testimony/2025/remarks-assistant...
"... To identify the remainder, NTIA plans to assess four targeted spectrum bands in the range set by Congress: 7125-7400 MHz; 1680-1695 MHz; 2700-2900 MHz; and 4400-4940 MHz."
"On the topic of on-the-ground realities, let’s also not forget what powers our networks today. While licensed spectrum is critical, the majority of mobile traffic is actually offloaded onto Wi-Fi. Born in America, led by America, Wi-Fi remains an area where we dominate, and we must continue to invest in this important technology. With Wi-Fi, the race has already been won. China knows it cannot compete and for that reason looks for ways to sabotage the very ingenuity that made Wi-Fi a global standard."
Roth is not going to take away 6GHz from current ISM allocation.
If Wi-Fi 6E goes upto 7125 and the targeted spectrum band includes 7125 (onwards), what will happen exactly at 7125?
The same thing that happens with every frequency range?
Depending on the spectrum and technology there can be a small slice of guard band between usable portions, which is what we have today.
Nothing there today as provisioned is going to change.
Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.
I know you're attempting humor here, but I am not aware of anyone investing in broadcast tv.
I'm just amazed you can do bidirectional ATSC 3.0 with two PlutoSDRs, a minor investment to hack on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sdr/comments/1ow80n5/help_needed_ho...
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.
Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.
My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.
We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.
I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.
Enough bandwidth to absolve any latency issues over a wireless connection is not really a thing for a low latency use case like foveated rendering.
What do you do when another device on the main wifi network decides to eat 50ms of time in the channel you use for the eye tracking data return path?
I believe all communication with the dongle is on 6GHz - both the video and the return metadata.
So again, you just make sure the 6GHz band in the room is dedicated to the Frame and its dongle.
The 5GHz is for WiFi.
On the LTT video he also said that Valve had claimed to have tested with a small number of devices in the same room, but hadn’t tried out larger scenarios like tens of devices.
My guess based on that is you likely dont need to totally clear 6GHz in the room the Frame is in, but rather just make sure its relatively clear.
We’ll know more once it ships and we can see people try it out and try and abuse the radio a bit.
Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao
I'm not saying it doesn't work; I'm asking what special sauce they've added to make it work, and noting that despite the replies I've gotten, foveated streaming doesn't help latency, and in fact makes the effects of latency spikes worse.
Why are you assuming the fob would use the same WiFi channel as your regular 6GHz network? That would be extremely poor channel selection.
MU-MIMO is very nice.
The real trick is not over complicating things. The goal is to have high fidelity rendering where the eye is currently focusing so to solve for saccades you just build a small buffer area around the idealized minimum high res center and the saccades will safely stay inside that area within the ability of the system to react to the larger overall movements.
Picture demonstrating the large area that foveated rendering actually covers as high or mid res: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/66nfap/made_a_pic_t...
It was hard for me to believe as well but streaming games wirelessly on a Quest 2 was totally possible and surprisingly latency-free once I upgraded to wifi 6 (few years ago)
It works a lot better than you’d expect at face value.
At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn't seem like it would be a problem. If you can't get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they'll be on the floor vomiting.
> Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text
What sort of resolution are one's eyes actually resolving during saccades? I seem to recall that there is at the very least a frequency reduction mechanism in play during saccades
During a saccade you are blind. Your brain receives no optical input. The problem is measuring/predicting where the eye will aim next and getting a sharp enough image in place over there by the time the movement ends and the saccade stabilizes.
Yeah. I’d love to understand how they tackle saccades. To be fair they do mention they’re on 6ghz - not sure if they support 2.4 although I doubt the frequency of the data radio matters here.
I would guess that the “foveated” region that they stream is larger than the human fovea, large enough to contain the saccades movement (with some good-enough probability).
Saccades afaik can jump to an arbitrary part of the eye which adds to the latency of finding the iris; basically the the software ends up having to look through the entire image to reacquire the iris whereas normally it’s doing it incrementally relative to the previous position.
Are you really sure overrendering the fovea region would really work?
Not sure, probably depends on the content too. When you read text, the eye definitely isn’t jumping “arbitrarily”, it’s clustered around what you’re focusing on. Might be different for a FPS game where you’re looking out for ambushes.
I’m not sure what you mean by “look through the entire image to reacquire the iris”? You’re talking about the image from the eye tracking camera?
> You’re talking about the image from the eye tracking camera?
Yes. A normal trick is to search just a bit outside the last known position to make eye tracking cheap computationally and to reduce latency in the common case.
They use a 6 Ghz dongle
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low.
Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?
There's no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain.
> "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?"
Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly.
The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro.
There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels.
Even the vision pro at 35ppd simply isn't close to the PPD you can get from a good desktop monitor (we can calculate PPD for desktop monitors too, using size and viewing distance).
Apple's "retina" HiDPI monitors typically have PPD well beyond 35 at ordinary viewing distances, even a 1080p 24 inch monitor on your desk can exceed this.
For me personally, 35ppd feels about the minimum I would accept for emulating a monitor for text work in a VR headset, but it's still not good enough for me to even begin thinking about using it to replace any of my monitors.
> https://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html
Oh yeah for sure. Most people seem to accept that 35ppd is "good enough" but not actually at-par with a high quality high-dpi monitor.
I agree with you - I would personally consider 35ppd to be the floor for usability for this purpose. It's good in a pinch (need a nice workstation setup in a hotel room?) but I would not currently consider any extant hardware as full-time replacements for a good monitor.
Most people in what age group?
I'm 53 and the Quest 3 is perfectly good as a monitor replacement.
I'm in the same boat. Due to my vision not being perfect even after correction, a Quest 3 is entirely sufficient.
I keep hearing this argument, and it baffles me. I find that, as I age and my vision gets worse, I need progressively finer text rendering. Using same-size displays (27") at the same distance, with text the same physical size on screen, 1440p gives me a much worse reading experience than 4k with 2x scaling.
Are you saying ppd requirements for comfortable usage vary with age?
They vary with quality of eyesight which usually correlates with age.
I think there is a missing number here: angular resolution of human eyeballs is believed to be ~60 ppd(some believes it's more like 90).
We get by with lower resolution monitors with lower pixel density all the time.
I think part of getting by with a lower PPD is the IRL pixels are fixed and have hard boundaries that OS affordances have co-evolved with.
(pixel alignment via lots of rectangular things - windows, buttons; text rendering w/ that in mind; "pixel perfect" historical design philosophy)
The VR PPD is in arbitrary orientations which will lead to more aliasing. MacOS kinda killed their low-dpi experience via bad aliasing as they moved to the hi-dpi regime. Now we have svg-like rendering instead of screen-pixel-aligned baked rasterized UIs.
I'm not sure most of us do anymore - see my 1080p/24 inch example.
No one who has bought almost any MacBook in the last 10 years or so has had PPD this low either.
One can get by with almost anything in a pinch, it doesn't mean its desirable.
Pixel density != PPD either, although increasing it can certainly help PPD. Lower density desktop displays routinely have higher PPD than most VR headsets - viewing distance matters!
Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far.
Couldn't you get around that by having a "zoom" feature on a very large but distant monitor?
Yes. You can make a low-resolution monitor (like 800x600px, once upon a time a usable resolution) and/or provide zoom and panning controls
I've tried that combination in an earlier iteration of Lenovo's smart glasses, and it technically works. But the experience you get is not fun or productive. If you need to do it (say to work on confidential documents in public) you can do it, but it's not something you'd do in a normal setup
Yes but that can create major motion sickness issues - motion that does not correspond top the user's actual physical movements create a dissonance that is expressed as motion sickness for a large portion of the population.
This is the main reason many VR games don't let you just walk around and opt for teleportation-based movement systems - your avatar moving while your body doesn't can be quite physically uncomfortable.
There are ways of minimizing this - for example some VR games give you "tunnel vision" by blacking out peripheral vision while the movement is happening. But overall there's a lot of ergo considerations here and no perfect solution. The equivalent for a virtual desktop might be to limit the size of the window while the user is zooming/panning.
For a small taste of what using that might be like turn on screen magnification on your existing computers. It's technically usable but not particularly productive or pleasant to use if you don't /have/ to use it.
This all sounds a bit like the “better horse” framing. Maybe richer content shouldn’t be consumed as primarily a virtualized page. Maybe mixing font sizes and over sized text can be a standard in itself.
It's just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup. Obviously it's enough for 80 char consoles but you'd need to dip into large fonts for a desktop.
I did the math on this site and I'd have to hunch less than a foot from the screen to hit 35 PPD on my work provided Thinkpad X1 Carbon with a 14" 1920x1200 screen. My usual distance is nearly double that so my ppd normally is more like 70 ppd, roughly.
https://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html#find:dis...
And foveated streaming has a 1-2ms wireless latency on modern GPUs according to LTT. Insane.
That's pretty quick. I've heard that in ideal circumstances Wi-Fi 6 can get close to 5ms and Wi-Fi 7 can get down to 2ms.
I's impressive if they're really able to get below 2ms motion-to-photon latency, given that modern consumer headsets with on-device compute are also right at that same 2ms mark.
Wow, that's just 1 frame of latency at 60 fps.
Edit: Nevermind, I'm dumb. 1/60th of a second is 16 milliseconds, not 1.6 milliseconds.
No, thats between 0.06 and 0.12 frame latency on 60fps. It's not even a frame on 144Hz (1s/144≈7ms)
Much less than, 1 frame is 16ms
60 fps is 16.67 ms per frame.
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use.
The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.
The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.
The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.
There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.
> There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. [...] But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer.
What's available now might vary from person to person. I'm using a normal-sized 1080p monitor, and this desk doesn't have space for a second monitor. That's what a VR headset would have to compete against for me; just having several virtual monitors might be enough of an advantage, even if their resolution is slightly lower.
(Also, I have used old-school VGA CRT monitors; as could be easily seen when switching to a LCD monitor with digital DVI input, text on a VGA CRT was not exactly sharp.)
VR does need a lot of resolution when trying to display text.
Can get away with less for games where text is minimized (or very large)
The weight on your face is half that of Quest 3, they put the rest of the weight on the back which perfectly balances it on your head. It's going to be super comfortable.
Yeah, already many people use something like the Bobovr alternative headstrap for the Quest3 that has an additional battery pack in the back, which helps balancing the device in the front.
Which doubles the weight on your head, which increases the inertia you feel when moving around playing active games. The Frame is half the weight on your face, so active games are going to be a lot more comfortable.
Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.
To your point, I'd use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
One problem is that in most settings a real monitor is just a better experience for multiple reasons. And in a tight setting like an airplane where VR monitors might be nice, the touch controls become more problematic. "Pardon me! I was trying to drag my screen around!"
> (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
Yikes. How'd that relationship end up? Haha.
Lol, I laughed then 20 seconds later started taking this literally: I think that was July, it had been two years, and it was over by November (presumably due to my other excellent qualities!) (all joking aside, for younger members in our audience, it was sweet and she was around in my life for at least another decade)
2k X 2k doesn't sound low res it is like full HD, but with twice vertical. My monitor is 1080p.
Never tried VR set, so I don't know if that translates similarly.
Your 2K monitor occupies something like a 20-degree field of view from a normal sitting position/distance. The 2K resolution in a VR headset covers the entire field of view.
So effectively your 1080p monitor has ~6x the pixel density of the VR headset.
Thank you for explaining, it makes sense now.
The problem is that 2k square is spread across the whole FOV of the headset so when it's replicating a monitor unless it's ridiculously close to your face a lot of those pixels are 'wasted' in comparison to a monitor with similar stats.
Totally true, but unlike a real monitor you can drag a virtual monitor close to your face without changing the focal distance, meaning it's no harder on your eyes. (Although it is harder on your neck.)
To get the same pixel per degree as my work laptop I'd have to put it's virtual replacement screen 11 (virtual) inches from my face and that's probably the lowest PPD screen in my normal life unless I get a bad desk at work that day. Just pasting them inches from your nose is not a great solution, you can already do that with a good set of monitor arms and there's a reason almost no one does it.
Why hasn't Meta tried this given the huge amount of R&D they've put into VR and they had literally John Carmack on the team in the past?
They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They've also bet more on standalone apps rather than streaming from a PC. These are reasonable tradeoffs. The next Quest may add eye tracking, who knows. Quest Pro had it but was discontinued for being too expensive.
We'll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don't expect them to match Meta's subsidies, so I'm betting on this being more expensive than Quest. I also think that streaming from a gaming PC will remain more of a niche thing despite Valve's focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86/Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.
It will be interesting to see how the X86 emulation plays out. In the Verge review of the headset they mentioned stutters when playing on the headset due to having to 'recompile x86 game code on the fly', but they may offer precompiled versions which can be downloaded ahead of time, similar to the precompiled shaders the Steam Deck downloads.
If they get everything working well I'm guessing we could see an ARM powered Steam Deck in the future.
Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
> Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
I think it should: we have Linux support/custom operating systems on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices right now today, and the 8 Gen 3 has upstream support already AFAIK
https://rocknix.org/devices/ayn/odin2/
If you mean foveated streaming - It’s available on the Quest Pro with Steam Link.
What do you mean? What part have they not tried?
I use a 1920x1080 headset as a monitor replacement. It's absolutely fine. 2160x2160 will be more than workable as long as the tracking is on point.
> But the price is hopefully low.
The main value of Meta VR and AR products is the massive price subsidy which is needed because the brand has been destroyed for all generations older than Alpha.
The current price estimate for the Steam Frame is $1200 vs Quest 3 at $600 which is still a very reasonable price given the technology, tariffs, and lack of ad invading privacy
Quest 3 is $499 and Quest 3S is $299 in the US
> Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset. That might be the reason I'm going to buy it. I want to support this and Steam has done a lot to get gaming on linux going.
I guess there's a market for this but I'm personally disappointed that they've gone with the "cram a computer into the headset" route. I'd much rather have a simpler, more compact dumb device like the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which in exchange should prove much lighter and more comfortable to wear for long time periods.
The bulk and added component cost of the "all in one" PC/headset models is just unnecessary if you already have a gaming PC.
I'm personally quite hyped to see the first commercially available Linux-based standalone VR headset announced. This thing is quite a bit lighter than any of the existing "cram a computer in" solutions.
Strictly speaking the mobile Oculus/Meta Go/Quest headsets were linux/android based, you can run Termux terminal with Fedora/Ubuntu on them and use an Android VNC/X app to run the 2D graphical part. But I share your SteamOS enthousiasm.
Yeah, this is exactly what I've been waiting for for quite a long time. I'm very excited.
They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta's offerings, this is indeed an actual computer you can run linux on. Perhaps even do standard computer stuff inside the headset like text editing, Blender modeling, or more.
As a current and frequent user of this form factor (Pico 4, with the top strap, which the Steam Frame will also have as an option, over Virtual Desktop) I can assure you that it's quite comfortable over long periods of time (several hours). Of course it will ultimately depend on the specific design decisions made for this headset, but this all looks really good to me.
Full color passthrough would have been nice though. Not necessarily for XR, but because it's actually quite useful to be able to switch to a view of the world around you with very low friction when using the headset.
It's nice to have some local processing for tracking and latency mitigation. Cost from there to full computer on headset is marginal, so you might as well do that.
There's always going to be a computer in it to drive it. It's just a matter of how generalised it is and how much weight/power consumption it's adding.
You can get a Beyond if that's what you want. It's an amazing device, and will be far more comfortable and higher resolution than this one. Valve has supported Bigscreen in integrating Lighthouse tracking, and I hope that they continue that support by somehow allowing them to integrate the inside-out tracking they've developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.
That would probably add a lot of extra weight and it would need to make the device bigger.
I don't think it would be too bad. Cameras are tiny. The processing would still happen on the PC, and you could delete the lighthouse tracking sensors. I guess the hardest part would be sending that much camera data back to the PC over the cable.
Its worse than that. Cameras (plus DToF if you want tracking in the dark), imus, gyros, and necessarily onboard compute/SOC to handle processing that data. Shipping it all off to a remote computer and then making the round trip creates an untenable amount of lag. Thats not even accounting for controller and hand tracking.
And once you have the pipeline and computation power to enable inside out tracking all on device, adding an OS is essentially free.
It already has an IMU and gyro, obviously. Time of flight cameras are unnecessary. Steam Frame doesn't have them either. At most you would put IR LEDs for illumination which are tiny but also optional (Quest 3 doesn't have them), and there's no reason they have to be in the headset, you could just have a standalone IR illuminator on your desk.
As for sending data over a cable, there's nothing inherently laggy about it. After all, the display signal already travels over the cable, and the cable transfer is by far not the limiting factor in latency. The camera data is lower bandwidth than the display signal, too.
I agree. Hopefully Bigscreen continues making hardware. I still have the original bigscreen beyond and im very happy with it besides the glare.
How is Linux support?
From the review section:
Nikos Q: Linux Desktop support? A: Hi,
Linux is not officially supported but can absolutely work with the Beyond 2. I'd suggest joining the Bigscreen Beyond Discord server for more information
Thanks By Bigscreen Support Team
---
Rant: they have disabled selected text for the reviews for some inexplicable reason.
Lol, doesn't sound confidence inspiring. "More info in Discord" is such a non-starter.
I wish Valve every bit of success, if they deliver an open platform people can own and hack.
its using SteamVR, so it should work
It's super light compared to Quest 3, half the weight on your face, the rest is on the back which balances the headset. Big Screen Beyond isn't wireless and has a narrower field of view.
> has a narrower field of view.
On the beyond 2, only by 2 degrees horizontally. I don't think that would even be noticeable.
I was worried about the built in computer as well, but then I found out it's only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it's still pretty light.
I once lived in a place that had a bathroom with mirrors that faced each other. I think I convinced myself that not only is my attention to detail more concentrated at the center, but that my response time was also fastest there (can anyone confirm that?).
So this gets me thinking. What would it feel like to correct for that effect? Could you use the same technique to essentially play the further parts early, so it all comes in at once?
Kinda a hair brained idea, I know, but we have the technology, and I'm curious.
Peripheral vision is extremely good at spotting movement at low resolution and moving the eye to look at it.
I don't know if it's faster, but it's a non-trivial part of the experience.
Yea, I've heard and noticed that as well (thought about adding a note about it to my original comment). But what I'm curious about is the timing. What I suspect is that peripherals are more sensitive to motion, but still lag slightly behind the center of focus. I'm not sure if it's dependent on how actively you are trying to focus. I'd love to learn more about this, but I didn't find anything when I looked online a bit.
It's good enough to see flickering on crt monitors at 50-60hz for some people.
I can see the spinning color wheels inside cheaper projectors as rapidly-changing rainbow lights leaking out of their ventilation grilles, but only with peripheral vision and mostly only if I'm moving my head at the same time.
> Foveated streaming! That's a great idea.
It would be interesting to see⁰ how that behaves when presented with weird eyes like mine or worse. Mine often don't always point the same way and which one I'm actually looking through can be somewhat arbitrary from one moment to the next…
Though the flapping between eyes is usually in the presence of changes, however minor, in required focal distance, so maybe it wouldn't happen as much inside a VR headset.
----
[0] Sorry not sorry.
Have a look at this video by Dave2D. In his hands-on, he was very impressed with foveated streaming https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
Yet this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting VR releases
How the hell would foveated streaming even work, it seems physically impossible. Tracking where your eye is looking then sending that information to a server, it processing it and then streaming that back seems impossible.
The data you're sending out is just the position and motion vectors of the pupils. And you probably only need about 16 bits for each of these numbers for 2 eyes. So the equivalent of two floating point numbers along a particular channel or 32 bits at minimum. Any lag can be compensated for by simply interpolating the motion vectors.
It actually makes a lot of sense!
Eye tracking hardware and software specifically focus on low latency, e.g. FPGA close to the sensor. The resulting packets they send is also ridiculously small (e.g 2 numbers as x,y positions of the pupils) so ... I can see that happening.
Sure eyes move very VERY fast but if you do relatively small compute on dedicated hardware it can also go quite fast while remaining affordable.
It just needs to be less impossible than not doing it. I.e. sending a full frame of information must be an even more impossible problem.
> Mouth tracking?
What a vile thought in the context of the steam… catalogue.
I'm guessing it's main use case will be VR chat syncing mouths to avatars.
The porn industry disagrees.
If the porn industry likes it, it's bad?
Guess we have to get rid of physical home media.
And the internet.
It was a good run I guess.
They're probably thinking of it in comparison to the Apple Pro which attempts to do some facial tracking of the bottom of your face to inform their 'Personas', it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can't see the bottom half of the face well.
I gathered as much, but still.
Funny enough the Digital Foundry folks put a Gabe quote about tongue input in their most recent podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9zfExb5vCU&t=1h32m44s
This is the first standalone headset with an open ecosystem. That's a big deal.
Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.
Valve giving users root access out of the box is huge. It puts the headset in the same category as a real PC
Praise be to gaben
> first standalone headset with an open ecosystem
What about the Lynx XR1? Running Android sure but officially rooted (details https://lynx.miraheze.org/wiki/Rooting_Process ) and with Linux proper (details https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lynx_R1_(lynx-r1) ) even though experimental.
There is but one issue with the Lynx XR1 - no one really got it. A few backers randomly got a few pieces but many others (including myself) are still waiting for their device to arrive (and will most likely wait for ever).
This has a serious impact on the developer ecosystem - there are still a few people who got their devices and are doing interesting work, but with so few users actually having devices the community is too small for much progress to be expected.
It's kinda similar to the old Jolla Tablet - it was a very interesting device (an x86 tablet running an open Linux distro in 2013!) but it ended up in too few hands due to funding issues & the amount of Sailfish OS apps actually supporting the tablet (eg. big screen, native x86 builds, etc.) reflected that.
> many others (including myself) are still waiting for their device
Sucks, sorry to hear that :(
Yes we released our headset with root access and an open bootloader. We are going to announce our next headset in a couple of months :-)
Cool! Do you have a link for a store where I can buy it ? ;-)
Sorry Stan, forgot about the Lynx, huge fan of your work!
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
I bought an Oculus Go last year for € 30. Its support has been dropped for quite some time, and you can only activate developer mode and sideloading through an old version of the Meta Horizons app [1]. But if you do that, there are 71 GiBs of games to explore on the Internet Archive [2]. Some need patching to remove an online check to a server that no longer exists, but that is easy enough to do with a (regrettably Windows) tool someone published.
The Go is not the best headset of course, but the games are a different style because of the 3DoF tracking without camera's. Somewhat slower paced and sitting down. A style I personally like more.
You can also unlock the device to get root on it [3], which is quite neat, although there doesn't seem to be any homebrew scene at all. Not even the most bare-bones launcher that doesn't require a Meta login.
[1] That doesn't even seem intentional, but it does mean that once the old version of the app can't communicate with Meta servers anymore, any uninitialized Go turns into a brick.
[2] https://archive.org/details/gear-vr-oculus-go
[3] https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/unlocking-oculus-go...
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
> £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I'm sure he put it to good use. Like 500ms worth of upkeep for one of his yachts.
sorry, maybe i missed it. But how do you know the ecosystem is open?
from the link we don't know if the OS can be changed (might be locked like many Android phones) or if a connected machine is required to run their DRM/Steam. The drivers may also not be open source
It's SteamOS and SteamVR - you can run arbitrary aarch64 Linux binaries that talk to SteamVR and they should just work
Yep, I'm back into VR with this move, specially if the price is closer to $500 than $1000.
Unless the lenses/displays are bad, but I figure we would have heard by now?
from a cursory look . it seems SteamVR is intended to be used with their DRM platform and isn't open source. Maybe its a bit less limiting vs Meta's offering?
i wouldnt characterize this as an "open ecosystem" though
The key takeaway is that you will rebuild the drivers less often:
1) The stack is mature now, we know what features can exist.
2) For me it's about having the same stack as on a 3588 SBC, so I don't need to download many GB of Android software just to build/run the game.
The distance to getting a open-source driver stack will probably be shorter because of these 2 things, meaning OpenVR/SteamVR being closed is less of a long term issue.
I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling?
It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services
3588 can do VR, just not Unity/Unreal VR. That is a problem with bloated engines not the 3588.
All mainstream headsets get open-source drivers eventually: https://github.com/collabora/libsurvive
yeah but is foveated streaming and whatnot going to be opensource, or are we going to have to wait a decade for some grad student to reimplement a half broken version?
Probably, but eye traction is never going to be the focus of indie engines specially if they run on the 3588.
Also about cross compiling that is meaningless as you need hardware to test on and then you should be able to compile on the device you are using to test. Alteast that is what I want, make devices that cannot compile illegal.
*tracking
It said its running Steam OS, which is just Linux.
Android is also just Linux. But i cant install Debian on my phone
Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.
Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.
If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).
And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.
The problem is that you're talking about the Linux desktop ecosystem whereas the op could be talking about the kernel. Both are just Linux (and the fact we've not evolved our nomenclature to differentiate the two is surprising). Also, fwiw, the android kernel is no longer heavily modified. Most of the custom stuff has been upstreamed.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
SteamOS at its base is just Arch with Steam and some additional software installed.
that doesn't in any way mean you can install an alternate OS. But i get your point that at least you can run Arch stuff. Isnt Arch ARM support unofficial? (its been ages since i tried) You dont hear of people running it on RPis for example
Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth, Valve's hardware has always been open like that. You're free to install windows on your steam deck, for example.
> Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth
They do hint that you can install a different OS on it:
> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
Every other SteamOS device does allow you to install whatever OS on the device, so seems Frame will be the same, judging by that landing page blurb.
They also explicitly mention os. I'm highly doubtful a product with a Qualcomm soc will support installing an alternative os.
Valve sponsored asahi linux which was a herculean exercise in running another OS on locked down hardware. They've also sponsored wine and fex. It would be a sudden, steep, and unexpected departure for them to go from being leaders in cross platform OS/hardware support to locking down their own hardware platform. It's just not in their nature. They know their nature is good and they know we know it. That's called trust.
https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
They're being a little vague about it but this collaboration to improve Arch's build service/infrastructure is being done in part to faciliate support of multiple architectures.
iirc it was in Tested coverage that Valve said the hardware supports other OSes. It'd be out of character for Valve not to allow for this.
If it's anything like the Deck, then the version of SteamOS on it won't be locked down in any way whatsoever. You can install Windows or any other distro you want on the Deck with 0 issues (other than regular ones you'd experience anyways on any regular computer, nothing to do with Valve locking anything down).
The steam deck was not arm. Unlike the steam machine page, the steam frame page does not insinuate you can put a custom OS on it. On top of custom drivers which are not necessarily upstreamed, qualcomm socs always require closed source userspace daemons which are coupled to the kernel.
Valve have been working with Linaro to develop FOSS drivers for the Adreno 750. This is necessary, given how heavily Valve leans on having integrations with Mesa whereas Qualcomm's drivers are designed for an Android environment.
I don't see why they wouldn't unlock the bootloader, it wouldn't be the first Qualcomm-based product to allow it and in press interviews they have pressed, quite hard, that the Frame is still a PC.
Great username for this type of comment.
Even just have direct access to hardware apis is already a big win. On Oculus quest. The closest you can get is running with webxr. But webxr suffer from all those performance problem of web platforms. (And bug of meta softwares. The recent quest browser have bug that prevent you from disabling spatial audio, rendering it not usable for watch video at all)
I just want a "dumb" headset that I can use as a portable private display for my laptop.
That's it.
I don't need 3D, I don't need VR, I don't need weirdass controllers trying to be special. Just give me a damn simple monitor the size of my eyes.
Fuck off with your XR OSes and "vision" for XR, not even Apple could get it fully right, the people in charge everywhere are too out of touch and have no clue where the fuck to go after smartphones.
HUD glasses kind of suck since having a display oriented to your head is uncomfortable. Adding 3DOF tracking only partially solves that, so you go 6DOF to maximize optical/vestibular comfort. Now you're rendering a virtual display within a virtual environment, but look at all that wasted space! So add more virtual monitors! Now you need some mechanism to manage them, so you add that and now you have a windowing system... so why are you rendering virtual monitors with fixed space desktops when you can just be rendering the application windows themselves?
The best portable private display for your laptop will inevitably be a 6DOF tracked headset with an XR native desktop.
Yes sorry about my excessive use of French in the comment, I didn't mean it has to be a fixed 1:1 slab of the realspace screen, desktop app windows in XR space would be ideal, but none of the products seem to be able to get it all right yet.
Apple's visionOS comes close but it's crippled by the trademark Apple overcontrolling.
Then this is actually much closer than previous headsets?
There is a lot going on to render the desktop in a tracked 3D space, all that has to happen somewhere. If you're expecting to plug a HDMI cable into a headset and have a good time then I think you're underestimating how much work is being done.
OpenVR and OpenXR are really great software layers that help that all work out.
I am currently writing this from an xreal one pro. I think it fits what you are asking for.
I don't understand your comment. What you're describing has existed for years.
Well maybe not compatible with MacBooks then, with just a USB-C plug-and-play experience? or I presumed it didn't exist
When I look up the actual release dates on viable head mounted displays, it turns out I'm wrong: not years, more like "year."
You should check out the xreal one!
There you go https://www.sightful.com/
My Viture AR glasses are just a dumb display with an accelerometer, and work extremely well.
Frame is obviously the main headline here, but they've also launching a new SteamOS mini-PC and a new controller.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller
No prices listed for any of them yet, as far as I can tell.
Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.
6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.
What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy/build any mini PC? There's plenty of options for that
A good while back I abandoned PC gaming because I was sick of driver issues, compatibility, and always having to update hardware to play the next game. Instead, I embraced consoles and haven't considered PC gaming since then. This, however, has me reconsidering that. I want it to "just work". When I want to play games, I don't want to deal with all of that other crap. I'm old, ain't nobody got time for that.
It's wild how experiences can vary so wildly. That's the nature of PC's though I suppose that you are trying to avoid.
I've had no driver or compatibility issues in longer than I can remember. Maybe Vista?
I also rarely upgrade because playing at console level settings means I can easily get effectively the same lifetime out of my hardware. Though I do tend to upgrade a little earlier than console users still leaning a bit more towards the enthusiast side.
I guess you abandoned PC gaming some time in the early 2000s?
I'm guessing you have a very positive experience with gaming PCs; I wish I could say the same. My Windows PC:
These are just the issues I can think of off the top of my head. I've been playing PC games for like 15 years and this is just par for the course for my experience.Definitely an outlier. Windows has generally been very very solid since about Windows 7. Certainly since Windows 10.
Linux is still quite far behind in terms of desktop stability in my experience. But I guess if Valve fully controls the hardware they can avoid janky driver issues (it sounds like suspend will work reliably!), so this might actually make a good desktop Linux option.
You are also definitely an outlier. In my experience, Linux has been 5x as stable as Windows (and more performant, too). SteamOS is just Arch Linux with the KDE desktop, the actual desktop stability wont be different from the same setup on a normal PC.
I also had frequent BSOD issues because of a Focusrite audio interface, lol. I've since thrown it out and gotten an alternative brand product and have never had the issues again.
I'm quite confused too, that doesn't align with my experience in the last couple years as well. There's notably been a few very good and long lived video cards and also as time goes on there's an ever deepening library of older games that can be played with very affordable cards.
I'm wondering when and with what hardware they had that bad experience.
Drivers are not an issue for quite some time (but its always good to have latest nvidia ones for example for optimizations focused on given game).
But its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet. I have roughly 20 of them installed currently (why the heck?) and earlier versions would happily get installed over already-installed version of same for example as part of game installation process, not a stellar workmanship on MS side. Whats wrong with having latest being backward compatible with all of previous ones, like ie Java achieved 25 years ago?
Talking about fully updated windows 10 and say official steam distros of the games.
> Drivers are not an issue for quite some time
> its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet.
Thanks for making my point for me.
I can't speak for the other poster, but I actually recently "abandoned" PC gaming. For me, it wasn't a deliberate decision but more of a change in behavior that occurred over time. I suspect the key event was picking up a PS5 Pro. For me, it's the first console that's felt powerful enough to scratch a similar itch as PC gaming -- except I could just plug it into our Atmos-equipped "home theater" set up and have it not only work flawlessly but be easily accessible to everyone, not just me. Since picking it up, between the PS5 Pro and handheld gaming devices, I just have not played a game on my gaming PC a single time and am currently planning on retiring it as a result.
There may be a connection here with age and the type of games I play too. I'm in my mid-30s now and am not interested in competitive twitch shooters like Call of Duty. In many cases, the games I've been interested in have actually been PS5 exclusives or were a mostly equivalent experience on PS5 Pro vs. PC or were actually arguably better on PS5 Pro (e.g., Jedi Survivor). In some cases, like with Doom: The Dark Ages, I've been surprised at how much I enjoyed something I previously would've only considered playing on PC -- the PS5 Pro version still manages to offer both 60 FPS and ray tracing. In other cases, like Diablo IV, I started playing on PC but gradually over time my playtime naturally transitioned almost entirely to PS5 Pro. The last time I played Diablo IV on my PC, which has a 4090, I was shocked at how unstable and stutter-filled the game was with ray tracing enabled, whereas it's comparatively much more stable on PS5 Pro while still offering ray tracing (albeit at 30 FPS -- but I've come to prefer stability > raw FPS in all but the most latency-sensitive games).
One benefit of this approach if you live with someone else or have a family, etc., is that investments in your setup can be experienced by everyone, even non-gamers. For instance, rather than spending thousands of dollars on a gaming PC that only I would use, I've instead been in the market for an upgraded and larger TV for the "home theater", which everyone can use both for gaming and non-gaming purposes.
Something else very cool but still quite niche and poorly understood, even amongst tech circles, is that it's possible to stream PS5 games into the Vision Pro. There are a few ways of doing this, but my preferred method has been using an app called Portal. This is a truly unique experience because of the Vision Pro's combination of high-end displays and quality full-color passthrough / mixed reality. You can essentially get a 4K 120"+ curved screen floating in space in the middle of your room at perfect eye level, with zero glare regardless of any lighting conditions in the room, while still using your surround sound system for audio. The only downside is that streaming does introduce some input latency. I wouldn't play Doom this way, but something like Astro Bot is just phenomenal. This all works flawlessly out of the box with no configuration.
I mean I just don't see the difference between this and getting any PC and slapping SteamOS on it.
There's not currently a way to officially put SteamOS on Steam* hardware. Plenty of people have done it but there's the usual compatibility issues where the image is built for the very specific hardware Valve installs it on so there's often wake from sleep and fan control issues. All solvable but it's not the level of turn key of even a mainline linux distro.
Too late to edit and I think it's clear from context but I meant non-Steam* hardware.
probably the "slapping steamOS" part of that
As someone who has been building my PCs for decades, I have to admit seeing some appeal here:
It's apparently small, quiet, capable, and easy.
I'll keep building my own, but most people don't, and the value of saved time and reduced hassle should not be underestimated.
If comparing this device to other pre-built systems, consider that this one is likely to be a first class target for game developers, while others are not.
Some people really don't want to spend time exchanging parts when the memory they buy turns out to be incompatible or that the GPU doesn't fit the sleek mITX case. There's a lot of research to ensure all parts are compatible and optimal when building a PC - for some it's time that could be better spent on using the PC instead of building one.
You can still buy prebuilt though and slap SteamOS on it and youre there.
Dont get me wrong this looks very a nice product, but its nothing revolutionary.
The hardware is not, but the implications are pretty close (major gaming company is pushing a first party product of open hardware + open software with a linux box). It is literally the year of linux desktop.
This thing is meant for a living room media center. A prebuilt PC with discrete GPU is a much bigger profile (and probably cost). You could say, fine, go buy a small Mini PC. But a system with the current best AMD Strix 890m GPU not only is expensive at $700-1000, but would only have half the performance of the Steam Box if its conjectured performance is similar to an RX 7600.
It's tiny. It runs SteamOS which is built to be used with a controller on a TV. And it will probably be a performance target for many developers.
But I think the biggest feature might be the quick suspend and resume. Every modern console has that, but not PCs. You can try to put a computer to sleep, but many games won't like that.
My Windows desktop doesn’t like that. It wakes instantly, no idea why.
Not to mention windows laptops waking up in bags or backpacks in the middle of the night seemingly for the only purpose of burning themselves up.
It's a console basically. It comes ready to play without much maintenance needed from the user.
One can argue consoles are pcs that the manufacturers try super hard to not allow you to root them.
This steam machine here is a PC with steam preinstalled for a console-like setup and direct boot to your game library - but it’s still a pc.
The point is, computers are computers I guess ;)
I love SFF PCs, but you can’t get the same density as a manufacturer doing a fully bespoke design. Just look at those innards: no space is wasted.
Yeah the heatsink filling the whole silicon-less volume is… something.
i've spent plenty of time building custom PCs, but life changes and that's really not something i have any interest in doing any more.
there's plenty of people who just want to play games without researching what CPU and video card to buy.
For me it would be the small size and CEC capability. A custom built PC can't currently use CEC on HDMI to have a seamless experience the entire home theater like a console can.
The experience of using a custom build is terrible.
The best experience you can get atm is to use Steams big picture mode, and that doesn't give you pause/resume, and you will sometimes need to use keyb & mouse to solve issues, plus you need to manage the whole OS yourself etc.
Valves SteamOS which already runs on the Steam Deck gives you all the QoL that you expect out of a console. Pause / resume with power button press, complete control via controller, fully managed OS.
What's missing are "in experience" native apps like Netflix/AppleTV/etc. as well as support for certain games which are blocked on anti-cheat.
My wife is a research scientist who uses linux with her day job, but she isn't interested in dealing with any nonsense when she's relaxing at the end of the day. The Steam Deck has been a wonder for her - suddenly she's playing the same games as me with none of the hassle. The Steam Machine will suddenly open a bunch of my friends and family up to PC games as well.
It won't be long until you can put SteamOS on any machine you make yourself, but the Steam Machine will serve as reference and "default" hardware for the majority.
Lots of companies tried to recreate the Steam Deck and quite frankly, they're just not as good as the original.
SteamOS is a super controller-friendly desktop that would be right at home in a living room. Like the Deck, the Steam Machine could become a target profile for developers.
PC gaming on the couch at last
Snapdragon doesn't really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.
Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.
I know but the Frame supports regular x86 games as well in standalone mode.
you run FEX, not direct ARM games
That doesn't magically fix the Qualcomm GPU or the drivers.
The GPU is fine and the drivers Valve are using, if their past hardware is any indication, will be open source. Doesn't magically fix them, but it does allow for Valve to fix them.
If valve can convince Qualcomm to open source their GPU drivers I will eat a banana peel. They would need to write a new one from scratch (or reuse freedreno, but those are going to have performance issues).
Not the first time Valve funded the development of FOSS drivers. They've already done so with Intel's Vulkan stack on Linux, AMD (AMDGPU) and Nvidia (NVK).
SteamOS's core functionality leans heavily on Mesa and there's been a lot of commits for the Adreno 750 lately, mostly coming from Linaro.
Fair enough. The problem is usually in terms of getting enough documentation and help to do this in a cost effective manner. If they manage to pull it off, I will start to second guess every phone OEM who seems to not go down this road.
I don’t think you will be on latest nightly. LTS are good and stable, if FEX is targeting those specs I don’t see a stability issue.
It kinda does. Qualcomm's DirectX drivers were the big issue, and Valve is using Mesa instead.
Real shame it’s only 60Hz at 4k. There’s a gap for good 120Hz@4k streaming.
Hoping the next Apple TV will do it.
Edit - updated specs claim it can do this, but it’s limited to HDMI 2.0
(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)
Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it's limited to HDMI 2.0 it will have to rely on 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to get there. Unfortunately the lack of HDMI 2.1 might be down to politics, the RDNA3 GPU they're using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
It seems it supports DP 1.4 as well, so perhaps you could get an adapter if your display only supports HDMI 2.1
I'm not sure that would work. From what I can tell, the adapters are basically dumb straight through cables, they aren't converting anything. And it's the actual GPU that's outputting a HDMI signal over the Displayport connector, which the adapter than rewires in to a HDMI shaped connector.
> And it's the actual GPU that's outputting a HDMI signal over the Displayport connector, which the adapter than rewires in to a HDMI shaped connector.
There are two kinds of DP to HDMI adapters. The passive ones are like you said, they need special support on the GPU (these ports are usually labelled as DP++), IIRC they only do some voltage level shifting. The active ones work on any DP port (they don't need AFAIK any special support on the GPU), and they do the full protocol conversion.
Caveat: the good active ones aren’t exactly cheap.
I was able to use this adapter to get my 2070s DisplayPort output to send 4k120hz to my TV, which only has HDMI ports.
Club 3D active adapter: https://www.amazon.com/Club-3D-DisplayPort1-4-Adapter-CAC-10...
It will, I’m doing DP to HDMI 4:4:4 4K@120Hz (and expecting HDR in the near future) from an RX 7900XTX to an LG C3 on Linux.
I’m using the Club3D active adapter, which is the only one I found in reviews to reliably work. And it does, 0 problems whatsoever.
... but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
It seems to me the wireless is pretty important. I have an MQ3 and I have the link cable. For software development I pretty much have to plug the MQ3 into my PC and it is not so bad to wander around the living room looking in a Mars boulder from all sides and such.
For games and apps that involve moving around, particularly things like Beat Saber or Supernatural the standalone headset has a huge advantage of having no cable. If I have a choice between buying a game on Steam or the MQ3 store I'm likely to buy the MQ3 game because of the convenience and freedom of standalone. A really good wireless link changes that.
> but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
I'm talking about the Steam Machine here. In theory you could pipe 4k120 to the headset assuming there's enough wireless bandwidth, yeah.
So, in the specs for the mini-pc, it claims the video out can do 4K @ 120Hz (even faster if displayport). I assume the 4K @ 60Hz you saw is from the "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" line.
I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.
Interesting. I also saw HDMI 2.0 - I guess it’s technically possible but with subsampling?
Considering how much they talk about Foveated rendering, I think it might not be constrained by the traditional limitations of screens - instead of sending a fixed resolution image at whatever frequency, it'll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.
Or that's what I think I may be completely wrong.
This is not true, from the specs:
HDMI 2.0
Up to 4K @ 120Hz
Supports HDR, FreeSync, and CEC
I have zero doubts the device can do 4k @ 120Hz streaming Hardware wise. In the end it is just a normal Linux desktop.
Where are you getting this number? I'm not seeing it on the specs page.
it's confusing rn because on the steam machine post people are commenting on the frame and vice-versa here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
This is for the steam machine, not the headset. Mentioned in the CPU & GPU section.
I am incredibly excited for the new controller. The og steam controller for me was unmatched as a controller, I could never play any first person game on anything else other than mouse and keyboard, not to mention it allows playing rts or point and clicks from the couch.
When they cancelled production I bought 8.
The controller looks pretty cool for sure, my biggest fear is the dpad though. I hope they go for a clicky feel like on the latest xbox controllers, and not the mushy feel you've got on the Dualshock 5 or even the 8BitDo Pro 2, which, for me, really is the only think missing from those. I'm more of a "Dpad in the top left" kind of guy, but I want it to be clicky like on the Xbox controllers :( We'll see!
I'm with you on the dpad. For me I've never found better dpads outside of retro focused controllers from companies like 8bitdo, so when I want to play a retro game with dpad I just grab one of those and use my steam controller for everything else.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
Mac Mini m4: 127 x 127 x 50 mm = 0.8 L
Steam Machine: 156 x 162 x 152 = 3.8 L
That's 4.76 times more volume.
> Obviously comparing apples to oranges
Or is it “comparing apples to steam engines”?
Given that Valve are the ones who released the Orange Box, methinks the original comparison is valid
It's only a little bigger than Mac Studio.
9.5 x 19.7 x 19.7 cm = 3,687 cm³
and half the size of my SFFPC @ 8.3L
> Frame is obviously the main headline here
Why? VR headsets are a dying fad of the 2020s. Way more excited for SteamOS on ARM.
... which likely wouldn't have happened if they didn't want a computer inside their VR headset. The steam machine is x86 considering it's an AMD processor.
This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.
The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.
I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.
Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.
Valve kinda shows how a well-managed private business ought to run: respect your customers, find a cash cow and use it for slowly expand into related markets to your niche, develop good products over a long period (SteamOS took many years to become something actually useful) without focusing on the mentality of hyper-growth, keep the stereotypical contemporary MBA thinking away, have a small but competent team.
There are, of course, the issues with lootboxes but even there they've kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.
It's a very well oiled machine, I had another VR headset ordered for sim racing, immediately canceled it when saw the Frame announcement because even if specs-wise it's a bit of a downgrade, I want to buy what Valve is selling.
> There are, of course, the issues with lootboxes but even there they've kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.
They do seem to get a pretty big pass on that. Wonder what it is about.
Almost every other aspect of the company I find great, and I do wish they would release more games. Maybe Alyx 2 will come out with the headset? Could be what HLX has been this whole time, where people think it is HL3.
On sim racing in VR, absolute game changer. I would never go back to screens, it's the perfect application for VR.
I'm hoping for L4D3 in my lifetime lol. L4D2 is still my most played game of all time (~3000 hours in that game). I love it.
Back4blood is more or less l4d3
That's sacrilege, that game doesn't even come close to the quality of Left 4 dead series and suffers from just about every problem that plagues so many modern games.
Back 4 blood was just another "live service" game that stirred up hype, released in an extremely buggy state, poorly balanced, with terrible AI that was never fixed, without mod support or community servers. They cashed in on the initial surge of popularity, cashed in on the DLCs, and then it quickly died off because it didn't have any of the charm or reply value of the games they claimed to improve upon.
Word is they're aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it'll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.
See "cheaper than index": https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...
Thanks for the article link. Nice quote from the article:
> Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don't have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.
I was disappointed seeing no hand grip straps. I've never used a Valve Index but they seemed very useful. Very glad that they will still be available.
As an Index controler and Pico user: The back straps are pretty much essential for any serious use; the controller purportedly includes finger tracking (capacitive) but you can't really open your hand without dropping the controller unless you have the strap.
If as I currently intend I end up purchasing this device, I will definitely endeavour to obtain the controller straps as well as the top strap for the headset at the same time, and I recommend others do the same.
Genuine question, if you already own an Index, why would you also get this? Wireless functionality, or something else?
I only own Index controllers, not the headset. I have a mixed tracking Pico 4 setup and wireless functionality is definitely one of the pluses; the higher resolution panels also make a significant difference (the Frame and the Pico 4 seem to have the same resolution). This is basically an open Steam-backed Pico 4 that's superior to my hardware and definitely superior to the Index. Here's a comparison:
https://vr-compare.com/compare?h1=0jLuwg808-j&h2=w8xCM-oPA
The 1000hz tracking frequency is from the Lighthouse tracking system, which the Frame loses. For that and other reasons, I am not convinced the controllers are better than the Index controllers. Personally I think it's likely I will keep using the Index controllers, since I have the whole lighthouse setup and I own trackers as well.
Thanks!
Wireless, weight, no lighthouses, standalone use, more polished rendering. It won't be prefect, but it'll be a heck of a lot better experience than what came before.
It also includes the spacer for wearing glasses.
You're gonna love where VR is at right now. If you had been holding off until it's good enough, then I think you've timed it well. The Quest 3 from an experience point of view was the watershed headset for me, but the ecosystem being Meta makes it less good from a privacy and ownership point of view.
But this headset solves the ecosystem aspect and brings that visual experience with it.
They've cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it'll be any thing close to $1k.
I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.
Still hoping that you’re right, though.
I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.
I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.
Seconding this, I love my Quest 1 but at this point it's looking more and more like it'll turn into a brick at some point. The Frame looks like the next best non-meta alternative, and a damn good one at that.
Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.
I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception
I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.
Only question is if 2160px is enough.
If the lenses are good, it's enough. Just have to up the font size a bit and give up some information density compared to, say, a 16-17 inch laptop.
The Quest 3 is already close to good enough to spend decent chunks of time in reading text. Just have breaks every 30m to avoid mild strain.
To me, the sweaty face issue is the main annoyance with working in these types of headsets.
I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.
I somewhat agree except that you can still make the screen however big you want, and the pixel density is the same across the new area.
Clarity has been totally fine for work reading text on, if I were inclined to code in VR that would totally work for me.
> at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest
Having the headset also be a PC (and not essentially a phone OS) is worth a premium of >$250 at least. You can build desktop apps/games on this thing, it can (hopefully) do just about anything a normal PC can.
The Quest is impressive in many ways, but it's a much narrower-use device. I don't think Valve's pricing needs to be in that same bracket to still sell.
> The fact that this can run standalone
Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.
Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about. Not having high hopes due to it being only 2160px, but… a man can dream
> Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about
This. The combination of this being from Valve, and the fact it's highly likely to be an open Linux machine you can strap to your face, I'm looking to finally bite the bullet on a headset and the one thing I need to know is, can I use it for productivity, I'm used to working on 27"+ 4k monitors, _how much_ clarity am I going to sacrifice with this.
We just need a terminal with stereo rendered distance field font.
plug me into the matrix already so I can do without any screen at all
"I don't even see the code anymore... I see Steam, Proton, Fex..."
Sure, but there are already quite a few pretty nice looking games on Quest 3 running locally, so it can be done and should not be discounted as a gimmick.
It has pretty important benefits - lowest possible latency & being able to just pick the headset any play anywhere.
I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you're moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.
from your keyboard to GabeN's ears. I've spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.
At 2.5x fewer pixels vs the Vision Pro it doesn’t make sense. That’s 12 million pixels per eye vs 4.5 million pixels. Feels like a much more inferior product. The games aren’t going to look great.
Financially, it makes sense. I don't need the absolute best of everything. The Steam Frame already has a very solid and comparable display. The Vision Pro is the one that's absolutely insane - and the only one on the market with those specs
Yeah, Frame already seems to do all the right tradeoffs for an early 2026 VR headset - has resolution similar to the Quest 3 AND has eye tracking, enabling very nice and useful eye tracking based optimizations for both rendering and streaming.
In comparison Meta might have cut down too much in Quest 3 by omitting eye tracking.
Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.
Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.
I wonder if this will be a VR trojan horse.
The Steam Deck was wildly popular for a non-Nintendo device. It's got Linux up to 3% of total Steam playtime. If this has a similar draw (play every game on Steam without having to buy a TV), maybe the install base of VR will grow to a point where it's more feasible to make games that support it.
It also makes SteamVR relevant again in a world where Oculus has been eating a lot of the mindshare by releasing affordable headsets and buying the most successful game studios.
It will be more expensive than Quest 3s and so is unlikely to grow the VR market significantly beyond what Meta has achieved so far IMO. I'd love to be wrong.
I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.
The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.
The headsets that have AR cameras don't use them for tracking AFAIK. They all have monochrome cameras for that. The AR cameras are an additional cost that is only used for AR.
I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs. Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.
I'm sure they did their market research. For me it's the exact opposite. Performance is absolutely key to me, and AR is just a fad in my eyes. All it does for me is give a glimpse into the real world if I'm about to bump into something. AR games are scarce and have never truly impressed me.
AR is a gimmick. VR has real games people spend many hours in. People don't want to see their boring surroundings unless it's to find the couch or a bag of chips.
The real reason the Frame is monochrome AR is because the cameras are also used for IR tracking which is better in monochrome. You can use the Frame in the dark or a dimly lit room - Quest 3 you can't. For real VR users the trade off is worth it.
> You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both.
You clear the area within the boundaries, leave a little buffer space to the walls, and respect the boundary warnings in game. No problems. You do need a few square meters without any furniture to do this.
Boxing and ping pong feel just as great in VR as they do in AR. It's more a matter of the level of immersion: AR works well for table tennis, but fantasy games are severely limited in what they can do. The most impressive experiences are always in VR - "flying in space" doesn't work while looking at your living room walls.
> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.
That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.
> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.
There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.
I have little to no interest in AR and i'm glad they didnt waste more money or resources on it. I don't use it on my Q3 and I wouldnt use it on this.
Exactly. Performance is welcome for everyone. AR is, right now, a gimmick that would eat into performance if you kept the price point the same. Good choice by Valve imo.
Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.
What pass-through apps are you using for all this? I tried pass-through pingpong but it didn't fit in my room so it clipped through the wall uncomfortably. There is AR golf?
Home Sports is a collection of five sports that includes amazing AR pickleball and badminton, and a pretty good AR mini-golf. So I would recommend starting with it. But it does need quite a bit of space—about 2 × 1.5 m. I had to rearrange my room to make it fit.
I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.
Most important one is so subjective. I don't care for AR a bit
The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.
I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.
There's an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
Linus the shrill/yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.
When you full screen this, it's crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it's like an inch or inch and a half on a 32 inch 4k display at a normal seated position.
(If I move my head closer it gets larger, further and it gets smaller)
That's crazy. I feel dumb for initial thinking it was somehow doing eye tracking to achieve this, despite having no such hardware installed.
I would be curious to see a similar thing that includes flashing. Anecdotally, my peripheral vision seems to be highly sensitive to flashing/strobing even if it is evidently poor at seeing fine details. Make me think compression in the time domain (e.g. reducing frame rate) will be less effective. But I wonder if the flashing would "wake up" the peripheral vision to changes it can't normally detect.
Not sure what the random jab at Linus is about.
It’s normal to be "more sensitive" to brightness differences in the peripheral areas compared to the fovea. The fovea has more color receptors, in the other areas, there are comparatively more monochromatic receptors (brightness). The general density of the fovea is also much larger.
It is doing eye tracking for the foveated rendering - it has 2 cameras inside the visor for it.
They're referring to the shadertoy linked above. The illusion simulates foveated rendering on your device without eye tracking.
That's quite harsh, and definitely not accurate.
Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.
It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)
Foveated rendering is already a thing. But since it needs to be coded for in the game, it's not really being used on PC games. Games designed for Playstation with the PS VR 2 in mind do use foveated rendering since they know their games are being played with hardware that provides eye tracking.
That's foveated rendering. Foveated streaming, which is newly presented here, is a more general approach which can apply to any video signal, be it from a game, movie or desktop environment.
They are complementary things. Foveated rendering means your GPU has to do less work which means higher frame rates for the same resolution/quality settings. Foveated streaming is more about just being able get video data across from the rendering device to the headset. You need both things to get great results as either rendering or video transport could be a bottleneck.
Game rendering is what they're talking about here. John Carmack has talked about this a bunch if you'd like to seed a google search.
Not quite: you can use it for games rendering, but with a Wifi adapter you more importantly want to use it for the video signal, and only transfer highres in the area you're looking at. A 4k game (2048*2048*2 screens) is 25gbit uncompressed at 100fps, which would stress even Wifi-7. With foveated rendering you can probably get that down to 8gbit easy.
Not just stress WiFi 7, even if the theoretical limit is 23Gbps, you’re not getting anywhere close to that sending to just one device.
Valve is applying it to the streamed view from the computer to reduce the bandwidth requirements it's not actually doing foveated rendering in the game itself because not all games support it.
Foveated streaming is just a bandwidth hack and doesn't reduce the graphic requirements on the host computer the same way foveated rendering does.
As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.
While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.
TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)
[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/variableratesh...
[1] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2010-06...
I think you could do foveated rendering efficiently with rasterization if you "simply" render twice at 2 different resolutions. A low resolution render over the entire FOV, and a higher resolution render in the fovea region. You would have overlap but overall it should be less pixels rendered.
I believe the standard way is to downgrade the sampling density outside the area you're looking, see https://docs.vulkan.org/samples/latest/samples/extensions/fr... . Optimally you could attach multiple buffers with different resolutions covering different parts of clipspace, saving vram bandwidth. Sadly this is not supported currently to my knowledge, so you have to write to a single giant buffer with lower sample resolution outside the detail area, and then just downsample it for the coarse layer.
Foveated streaming should be much easier to implement than foveated rendering. Just encode two streams, a low res one and a high res one, and move the high res one around.
There is a LTT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU3ru09HTng
Linus says he cannot tell it is actually foveated streaming.
I believe in Linus very little. I'll keep my eyes peeled to see what others say. It's certainly possible though, Valve has the chops to pull it off.
Norm from Tested said the same in his video.
https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU
The Verge reports similarly - can't tell foveated streaming. Seems like Valve really cracked the code with this one.
I don't think a lot of people realize how big of a deal this is. You used to have to choose between wireless and slow or wired and fast. Now you can have both wireless and fast. It's insane.
Yep, that basically guarantees this as a purchase for me. It's basically a Quest 3 with some improvements, an open non-Meta OS, and the various WiFi and Streaming app issues fixed to make it nearly as good as a wired headset.
I haven't bought a VR headset since the Oculus Rift CV1, but this might do it for me
If you are lucky enough to have wired as an option anyway, especially in linux this has been shaky. But with Steam continuing to push into linux and VR I have no doubt this will change quickly.
Thats not what he said. What he said was even rapidly moving his eyes around he could not spot the lower resolution part.
If you are going to be pedantic then at least do it right. Because that's also not what he said. He said that no matter how fast he moved his eyes he wasn't able to catch it.
How is that meaningfully different than not being able to tell that it's foveated?
Same with Dave2D https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
Also mentions 1-2ms latency on a modern GPU
I'm super curious how they will implement it, if it's a general api in steam vr that headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond could use or if it's more tailored towards the Frame. I hope it's the first as to me it sounds like all you need is eye input and the two streams, the rest could be done by steam-vr.
If you use a Quest Pro and use Steam Link with a WiFi 6E access point, that should accurately represent the experience of using it.
It's close to imperceptible in normal usage.
The dedicated communication dongle between the PC and the headset sounds like a real game changer.
Right now getting fast enough and reliable wireless connection means either tweaking to death one's setup or spending car money on the entire setup. In particular normal people usually don't realize how crappy their wi-fi and assume it's all the same, which would end in blaming the poor perf on the headset.
Reminds me of Apple's AWDL, a similar workaround for crappy networks when the devices need a high speed low latency network. I do wonder if the headset here will do similar channel hoping tricks to join both the dongle's network and the normal wifi network.
As I understand it it's two separate radio and stack to have continuous link to both.
This is fantastic!
A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".
And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:
- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now
- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution
- pancake lenses
- inside-out tracking
In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.
Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.
I think they made the right choice with Snapdragon chip... it will drop in and work as a dev kit for all the android toolchains that support quest3, devs will easily port quest3 games etc... so it's basically a non-spyware quest3 which is what everyone wants at this point. Custom drivers on the wifi 6 dongle are going to likely offer the best wireless experience, which again is what everyone wants.
I'm curious how meta responds imo the only way to compete is on price/ease of use but i'm not interested in another quest the 'social features' are just an excuse to collect data.
100%, a non-spyware Quest 3 is what I wanted. The Q3 is a fantastic headset, easily the best amalgamation of features at the right level of performance. Very pragmatic.
But Meta basically having access to my room in 3D, full audio, is not ideal. The very last company I want to invite into my home.
This being a whole system that will allow you to put whatever software you want onto it makes me think that it might actually succeed at being what the Vision Pro wanted to be.
This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.
The pass-through video is monochrome and the screens have about 40% of the pixels compared to the Vision Pro.
The Samsung Galaxy XR is much closer to being a Vision Pro competitor.
The Steam Frame is very focused on playing games locally and streamed from a PC.
I'd be willing to take the L on the hardware in order to be able to actually run the software I care about. (I own a Vision Pro and barely use it because the pejorative description of "an iPad on your face" is more accurate than I would like to admit.)
I don’t know exactly how open the Android XR system on the Galaxy XR is, but it is likely better than the Vison Pro in that regard.
Monochrome is rough, but I think pixel count is a few orders of magnitude less important than being able to actually use the damn thing. The Vision Pro has been out for over a year and I haven't seen a single notable application that takes advantage of the hardware, and it seems that that's largely in part due to it being nigh impossible to develop and run software on it.
> This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.
neither is the Apple Vision Pro
Well, that and being squarely focused on gaming.
I also trust the Steam ecosystem far more than I probably should...
Vision Pro wants to be an iPad on your face. The hardware's just not good enough (in the sense of general manufacturing capabilities, not lack of investment from Apple) to make that an enticing product yet.
I would agree, but I'm a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I'm fearful that because of its great computing specs it's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.
I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it'd be a step up but not a huge one. I've seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.
Now that they've ported Steam to Android with FEX + Proton [0] (what this is running), the question is will they release it for the rest of Android devices? There is a ton of Android gaming handhelds and people are already experimenting with things like Winlator [1] but having well supported way could be awesome.
[0] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
[1] https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
It's running SteamOS according to the tech specs on the store page, not Android.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe
Google has also agreed to officially open up to competing app stores from the next version(https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-...), so the time is ideal for this. Valve, if you're reading this, please release Steam for Android.
Unfortunately not, at least outside of the Linux VM shipping in new Android versions https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ#Will_FEX-Emu_.28Linux...
It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.
Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?
Probably Waydroid [1]. It's been around for a while and apparently works very well.
[1] https://waydro.id
this has nothing to do with Android
It really cannot be understated how big of a deal this is. The tech here is impressive AND they're not trying to lock you in. Practically speaking it's the only VR headset that holds real-world appeal for the vast majority of gamers, because it plays the games they're already playing.
At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!
Whoo - first party support - including a graphics stack on ARM!
I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.
Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn't compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.
I'm still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this'll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.
Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting Australian pricing details (and release dates...) but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too.
Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.
Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.
I really hope it's not going to take years to be sold in Australia, like the Steam Deck took.
I'm fairly sure/wishful thinking that the reason the last round of Valve hardware was very late/absent in Australia was because it was the time that the ACCC took Valve to court for its no refunds policy (and won). Now that Valve has rectified that and are in good standing in Australia, I'm hoping we see all this new hardware ASAP, alongside the rest of the world.
The VR base stations and controllers were/are also hard to get.
I've actually just recently started using my Quest 3 again through virtual desktop. I found the sharpening feature to actually make text look good enough that I'm able to work in it for hours uninterrupted, mostly writing papers and coding.
I'm super excited for this launch and for all the crazy open source builds, mods, and fun that are going to come from an open VR system (or at least that's my hope).
I am unable to parse announcements such as for this Valve product. Could I use this as a thing through which to spawn multiple monitors and code / read papers?
Definitely. There will be apps that will allow this (Virtual Desktop Classic is on steam already), and I foresee some neat things coming from its more open environment.
On the other hand, it will be highly subjective. I have found that the sharpening algorithms they have put into apps like Virtual Desktop to be sufficient for me to read text with, but it will probably bother some people. The Quest 3 and Valve’s will have very similar resolutions.
And although it looks like this Valve product will actually be quite light, the weight could be another factor in its use over many hours.
For some people, XR glasses with OLED screens might provide a better experience as well if you are looking solely for monitor or tv support. I kind of like going to an entirely new environment to work in for a while, so I appreciate the VR aspect, but if you are looking only for screen support, XR glasses may be the better choice (there are quite a few models, though, and I unfortunately don’t know the market well enough to make suggestions on that).
One of the most interesting parts of this to me that not many people are talking about is what their approach will be to making Steam games work on ARM…
I assume they will have put a lot of work into an emulation layer (maybe an existing one like FEX) to make it usable similar to what they did with Proton? This could be really good for the Linux ARM ecosystem in general
Apparently they are heavily funding FEX-emu now and are using that
Yes! Steam on ARM finally! I hope it works well
Steam Frame is running SteamOS on ARM, and is capable of playing games standalone, which implies ARM support in Steam. Through granted, it could be in a limited form.
They'll need that either way if they want to get back onto macOS, even if it's separate binaries and not a translation layer. At this point I think Steam basically doesn't work on Mac? Since the x64 Macs are legacy and the new ones are aarch64
It technically works since ARM macs can still run x86 binaries. But it's so slow and buggy, and the selection of playable games so slim that there is almost no point.
I doubt fex-emu works on macos.
But isnt that what Rosetta2 is for on mac anyway?
Rosetta2 will be discontinued.
they are porting FEX to Proton, and according to the VRUpload article linked it has "shockingly little performance impact". This could be fun.
https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
Nice to finally have a hackable headset on the market. I’ve been using the dji goggles for fpv flying because of vendor lock in. I wonder I could use these with OpenIPC to fly fpv with a fully open video stack.
I'm looking forward to seeing what hacks get done to the devices and what software is dreamed up.
I'm surprised no one is talking about the fact that the headset is ARM and that valve has been heavily contributing to the translation layer FEX.
I love my steam deck, but lately find myself reaching for emulation handhelds like the Retroid Pocket 5 more due to smaller size, especially when I'm leaving the house. There's already projects like GameNative that try to hack steam onto these devices, but if valve offers an official client on Android and other arm devices that would be incredible.
Edit: Some interesting insights in the FEX FAQ about why it's not a great fit for Android right now [0]. Interested to see if this ARM version of steamos is installable on other devices though. RP5 can already run alternatives like Rocknix
[0] https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ
> Steam Frame Controllers: Powered by AA batteries (rated 40 hours)
Yes, I want to see standard batteries being used more. Too bad they didn't go with this on the Steam Controller.
I actually prefer rechargeable batteries.
But rechargeable lithium batteries in AA form factor are cheap and cheerful. Even low quality ones will get 20 hours in that situation. So I have no more room to complain.
Valve is weirdly good at making controllers efficient. The original steam controller could get 80 hours out of two AAs if you turn off rumble.
Why? It is a bummer to keep them, buy them when suddently they stop working, etc.
While chargeable needs just a usb-c socket.
Devices with internal batteries basically have embedded expiration dates.
Standard AAA or AA can be rechargeable so you don’t need to keep buying more. I’d suggest buying like a 100 pack or something, they’re not expensive.
The ideal would be rechargeable AA battery support with a built-in USB-C that would natively support charging said AA battery.
AA batteries have lots of different chemistries and they require different chargers or can't be charged at all.
At this point so many battery packs use the 2 double-a batteries side-by-side, I wish they just sold those as a usb-c rechargeable cartridge, that would make a lot of sense
You can also get a USB charger for them which is very convenient.
Check this out
https://addison-electronique.com/en/aaa-li-poly-rechargeable...
Has technology gone too far
I’ve seen mice with rechargeable AA batteries. Plugging in the mouse recharged the battery (the mouse is basically a battery charger). But you can also quickly swap them in and out if the cable is inconvenient. Best of both worlds.
Allow me to recommend low self-discharge NiMH batteries (Eneloop brand is excellent) and a good charger made for that chemistry.
It felt like the headset hardware had reached a sweet spot for the moment, but with this announcement the software situation is now also going to be reaching a similar place. Now we have a continuity of freedom with a PC OS on the headset away from home as well as the full mobility of a untethered headset display with the full power of a stationary PC at home. Can't wait to see what dev's do with this.
This feels like a really great headset. It was going to be an instant buy for me until I realised it has LCDs instead of OLEDs. I'll wait for reviews. I don't really want to buy these if they release another OLED version down the line.
Also, if this is arm and it has steam in it, that means we can finally run steam on arm, which means we can finally install steam "natively" on android Linux, specially now that we have the terminal app on android 16.
Can't wait for graphical acceleration to be fully merged to the terminal app and we have Linux running on android with near native performance and steam.
OLEDs have problems in VR with glare, persistence, refresh rate, power usage, heat, etc.. the LCDs in the Frame can hit 144 hertz - that's what you really want for VR gaming.
Can the miniature OLEDs not go to 144Hz yet? Or is it because of power/heat density?
Apparently there's something to do with phosphor afterglow in OLEDs, the persistence after a pixel was turned off? No one seem to talk about it in the public but it seems to be a known issue among VR device designers.
That mini pc... one more nail in the coffin of the xbox hardware business. Ouch.
I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I'm stuck with it and can't upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it's one more nail in my wallet :)
Deckard at last! https://isvalvedeckardout.com/
What a weird site. Am i getting it right that this "Deckard" was the code name for the Frame, it's out now, but the makers of the site went through all that trouble make a dotcom and a pedantic design but can't be bothered update it now that it is, indeed, out?
The timeline on the site you're critiquing says the project was confirmed in 2021. So they've been waiting a while.
And it's not out, it was "revealed" today with "early 2026" estimate for availability. No price yet.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
The site has been updated, it says "Announced on Steam — not out yet."
The headset isn't being released until early 2026.
> it's out now
It's not out, just announced.
The only really incredible VR experience I have had so far was Half-life Alyx. Is there anything that tier or even better these days?
On the PlayStation VR 2, there is Resident Evil 4 and 8. I'd never cared for those games until I tried them in VR. I'd argue is more like a good game with decent VR support rather than a good "VR" game though. That's also the case for things like Hitman, No Man's Sky, Metro Awakening and such.
And then there are the racing sims. I find these are such an immersive experience it reaches an uncanny-valley type feeling for me, where my body is expecting G-forces that never come, or gets confused with the steering wheel not being the exact same size as my eyes are seeing. It's great though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy cars at all.
Driving sims with the right setup are truly breathtaking gaming experiences. For driving, especially, even things like the weight of a headset almost add to the experience since in the real thing you are wearing a helmet. But it is a way to have a legit, e-sports level gaming experience with real-to-life controls with total VR immersion.
I once played a custom Japanese Highway map in Assetto Corsa made for nighttime cruising and was a little high and I forgot what reality was.
I used to do a lot of GoKarting at a local course before the Pandemic, and VR racing is the single most immersive video game experience that you can have. The only thing you are missing is the physical exertion and G-Forces. Even the feel of the helmet and reduced field of view is emulated by the headset. Even cheap wheels have force feedback, and you can feel the weight shifting around. You can intuitively glance around for situational awareness. If you have experience, you will naturally fall into the look at where you want to go style of skid recovery, and you will feel the tires about to skid and feel in the wheel when they line back up with your vector of motion. It all transfers so well, even real race car drivers enjoy it.
You can feel your body freak out when you hit a wall at 200mph because you misjudged the distance because you're not a real racecar driver.
Driving an open cockpit car like an old F1 car is insane. You feel like you are just hanging out in the open air. I guess we didn't have survival instincts back then.
If you have a few thousand extra dollars, you can even fix the lack of physical exertion and G-Forces!
Shooting games are super fun too because it feels rewarding to be good at actually aiming, rather than stupid mouse twitches I have never been that good at. Also because Pavlov VR mods let me play Halo 1 Blood Gulch for real and that's magic.
VR Chat is also a pretty incredible experience. When the pandemic first hit, I actually spent several weekends clubbing in VR Chat clubs.
I have driven on tracks in real life and then the same track in VR, and all the spatial cues map perfectly. It's so close to "the same thing" that I really don't mind driving in VR more and then only paying for the occasional real life track day.
My partner also likes that I can't actually die in VR, though sometimes I still close my eyes just before an impact.
Agreed, if you have all the sim racing equipment already adding in VR brings you basically "there". The sim rig is a rabbit hole of immersive technologies of its own, but even just a basic wheel and pedal plus a headset will get you an incredible experience.
I believe sim flight people would have the same opinions on that side of simming too. It's a uniquely ideal situation for VR. Seated with full tactile controls.
I'm a huge fan of the "I Expect You To Die" series. They're basically a series of small escape rooms. The game's designed to be played seated.
You play James Bond, except that for various silly reasons you find yourself stationary, and you have psychic powers to reach far away stuff because, again, stationary. "They've trapped Bond in a bathysphere!" "You're in a car in a jet ful of poisonous gas that's going to explode!" Each level will kill you quickly and hilariously over and over until you figure out a sequence of steps to survive.
I'll never forget the hilarious moment when given a grenade with a missing pin, I opened various cupboards to find a replacement pin only for more grenades to pile out.
"I Expect You To Die" is a very funny game. Great for when you have spectators too, everyone can pitch in with ideas for the person playing to try.
I totally agree with you, I'm actually doing another Alyx run after only playing it on my Index. It actually please extremely well on the Quest 3 with the Steam Link app. Seamless.
This guy on X gave me some suggestions of top tier VR games:
Hubris, Into The Radius, Wanderer, Blade & Sorcery, RE4 Remake, Modded Skyrim VR, Modded Minecraft, Vertigo 2, Arken Age, Half Life 1 & 2 VR, UNDERDOGS, Hitman VR, Pixel Ripped Series, Walking Dead, Propagation Paradise Hotel
Various random and unexpected indie games exist. Like the Indie community has fully embraced VR and it is full of unique and experimental and awesome and garbage games.
Euro and American Truck Simulator still have VR support and it's more fun and satisfying than it should be.
Load up Google Earth VR, plop yourself in front of your childhood home and feel more than you expected.
If you like modern air combat: VTOL VR and DCS. If you like WW2 fighter combat, IL-2 Sturmovik.
Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades for the ultimate American Freedom simulator.
Project Wingman for Ace Combat 7 in VR. Star Wars Squadrons is fully playable in VR. War thunder has VR
BeamNG has unofficial VR
Rec Room if you want to get absolutely schooled by 13 year olds at laser tag and paintball and other games.
Hyperbolica is an exploring and puzzle game about non-euclidean space, where walking in a straight line doesn't work like you expect and apparently it has VR
Pulsar Lost Colony is a game about being a star trek captain with your friends and also can be played without VR.
Phasmaphobia is a game about getting the shit scared out of you and you can do it in VR if you do not fear death
An upcoming game about "Be an artemis astronaut". There was also one to explore a Google Earth style of the ISS. Also Kerbal Space Program at one time had a VR mod.
Fair warning about rec room: That game is quite possibly slightly too immersive. Playing frisbee I dented the ceiling, and playing paintball I managed to dive head-first into a closet.
Hitman is amazing insofar as the worlds are so well realised and the gameplay is excellent. But the controls are a bit pants, and I had an issue on Quest three where it was applying a foveated rendering but the mask was off (and the quest 3 doesn't have eye tracking). So it was blurry within my field of view, and sharp just next to it.
There are some games yes but in my opinion right now the best VR experiences are simulators. Assetto Corsa, iRacing, DCS, MSFS etc.
I bought a Bigscreen Beyond 2 + 5090 gpu basically just to play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator, a flight sim with full fidelity figher jets that you can even fly in PvP multiplayer) and it's the coolest thing VR has to offer for me. All my relatives and friends who tried it were stunned too.
Beat Saber is the ultimate VR game, IMHO. It's what enabled me to create this masterpiece:
https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=20010657
:D
Well done, that must've been really fun to watch from an outsider perspective, unlike almost all other vr games in a social setting!
People forget that Beat Saber replays are performances! Do some dancing, all you ACC robots! :D
I've heard that Elite Dangerous is nice in VR.
On my own system I've played a lot of modded Beat Saber. Arizona Sunshine was good but not very long. Other than that mostly just mini game type things like The Lab.
One of my friends also has a KAT Walk C2 and I've played Skyrim VR on that. It takes a bit to get used to but it's a lot of fun.
Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it's unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it's incredible,
I have close to 150 hours in Skyrim VR. What makes it unplayable without mods?
I wish the answer was Thief: Legacy of Shadow but considering the war crime that was Eidos Montreal's previous outing on the franchise, I doubt it.
That's gonna be one expensive BeatSaber machine, but after having owned an Index (and really feeling how nice that headset was when I got my current Quest 2), there's no way I'm not gonna get one.
Kind of weird using AA batteries, I'd imagine something else would be better suited for this?
AA means they don’t have to handle battery replacements; and it’s not too-too hard to get rechargeable batteries.
I would prefer batteries in machine, too; but this does have some sustainability and repairability (by not needing it) advantages.
You're right that it's "not too-too hard" to get them, but it's also "not too-too easy" to actually use them in comparison just plugging a USB-C cable into the device. The process you will have to go through to recharge this will become incredibly annoying for something that will eat through batteries as quickly as a VR headset. Think of all the criticisms Apple has received over the years due to the Magic Mouses charging port being on the bottom and that only needs a charge every couple months, this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
> this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
I think you're mixing up the controller and headset batteries. The controllers use AA batteries and should last for potentially months of use.
The headset itself uses a rechargeable 21.6 Wh Li-ion battery with 45W charging over USB-C.
Thanks for the correction. Still annoying, but obviously less so.
There are 1.5V AA li-ion batteries on the market. I bought a few to power children's toys and they have comparable capacity to alkaline batteries. At high currents they actually perform better.
Cost is about 10x that of their non-rechargeable brethren, but obviously there's return on that investment.
I wasn't denying their existence. I was comparing the process of opening your device, taking out the batteries, finding their proprietary charger or hooking each individual battery up to a USB cable depending on the specific variety of battery, and them putting them back into your device is more annoying than just plugging the device into one of the half dozen USB-C chargers we all have scattered around our homes.
I doubt this would be a dealbreaker for most people, but it's a choice that will provide a consistent small annoyance for users.
Why would I want to go the route of having to plug in the controllers and not be able to use them while I charge them versus just swapping in a set of spare, charged batteries? Rechargeable AAs have been around for decades! It's the same setup my quest 1 and 2 have, and it has never failed me, I got 4 batteries total, 2 in the charger, 2 in the headset, I swap them around when they eventually (after a looooong time) run out.
True, but you can just swap in a spare set of charged batteries and you are back online instantly.
To me the greater annoyance would be to have to wait until the device charges, should it lose power mid-game.
The controller is the only part that uses AA. The computer/headset portion uses USB-C recharging.
I would hazard a guess that the battery in the controller will have a life measured in weeks if not months.
AA’s are only used for the controllers and they’ve got a claimed 40 hours of battery life on those AAs.
Batteries in machine leads to having to wait 30 minutes for them to charge. Replaceable rechargeable batteries means you can instantly get a full new set. This is ideal
The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can't say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made "battery replacements" a cinch.
I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA/AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don't have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.
User replaceable batteries are... fine? Expected; preferred even? 40 hours on a single charge is more than adequate, imo, and if the controllers were too light that might actually bother some players.
Nothing against user-replaceable batteries, just that they use AA batteries. I was expecting something a bit more long lasting and rechargeable via USB.
https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/shop/product/lithium-ion_batt...
I'm not trying to sell you on these in particular, it's just that I am struggling to find "non-German" results. Go search for them on ebay or a local store.
Those are cool but it does seem like they are forced to have that form factor to fit in most existing devices.
While a brand new device could employ something more apt? Even say something larger which can store more energy, dunno. It just feel off to still have AA batteries (which are generally not rechargeable) in a new product in 2025 which is not targeted to elderlies.
Maybe I'm just old but I bought some Eneloop rechargable batteries in 2008 and then some more Amazon branded rechargable batteries in like 2015 and a single charger and they've been powering devices consistently for over a decade. Half of my toddler's toys run on AA or AAA batteries. Calling them old fashioned feels like complaining the form factor of a 12 oz/330ml soda can is old; technically you're right but it's been around for 50 years because it works exceptionally well.
>AA batteries (which are generally not rechargeable)
I can't recall the last time I saw single use batteries in use, except maybe in a brand new remote control bundled with a TV, which was quickly swapped for rechargable. I don't even think of this most months, from where I'm siting I can see my battery chager and there's two sets of AA and a set of AAA sitting on there fully charged, ready to go. I think I paid $12 for the charger in 2008, very low barrier to entry.
I think it's a lot better. Rechargeable batteries built into a device degrade over time. The vast majority of people will discard a device as a result of battery degradation.
I swapped all my AA and AAA batteries for Enelooops. The cheaper white ones are the best for most applications.
I'm frustrated by the error rate on my Eneloops over the years. I have dozens of them and I swear every other time I recharge them, one more starts blinking and refuses to recharge.
Also I would recommend switching to the IKEA rechargeable batteries which are supposedly the same thing except cheaper.
I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I'd expect there will be third party options to replace the cover/battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.
Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove/insert then it wouldn't surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).
Why? You can use rechargeable AA batteries and if you want you can swap them out and basically never have downtime for charging. Also all embedded batteries degrade over time which is a non issue here
Why not replaceable batteries which are not AA? Like any li-on batteries.
Also if the stand is also a charger then the hot-swap is mostly a non-issue. Playing with this for more than X hours should not be the default usage.
Makes me happy. Instant swap when you run out of power.
I just buy rechargeable batteries and keep a charger nearby. When batteries die, they come out and straight into the charger. Always ready to go.
This looks fantastic. The only negative I see so far it is only monochrome passthrough. The full color passthrough on the Quest 3 is pretty killer, it sucks to go backwards on that.
I guess we're in a minority but I'm in full agreement. Color passthrough really felt like a game-changer, and I've long wished for a more open, non-Meta alternative. Guess we'll be waiting a bit longer
I think the passthrough is more useful when there's a VR OS to take advantage of it (map your real room/hands/kb/screen onto VR, let you pin stuff, etc.) and I'm not sure Valve is even planning to do that, or anyone is on the Linux side of things (?)
There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.
It's so you can use it in a dimly lit room or even the dark. The Quest 3 doesn't work in either of those environments.
I have a quest 2 where the passthrough is laughable. Would you really use it for anything other than getting a glimpse of the outside world? I sure don't, but that may be because of the shitty camera's. But I never saw the appeal of passthrough anyways, isn't the point of a VR headset to see a different reality? Like, not the real world?
I have both a quest 2 and quest 3 and you are right, the quest 2 is laughable. The quest 3 is WAY better, and is way closer to making it feel like you are just looking through glass (not quite, but on the way).
Eh, I don't use it for augmented reality a TON, but there are some fun apps that my kids and I like to use that use the passthrough for augmented reality... one is a virtual aquarium thing where you can draw 'windows' on your wall that become a window to the ocean, with things swimming around. It is pretty cool.
I mostly use it, though, for short term moving around things, like to pick up something in the real world or to figure out where I am. I guess that can work in monotone, but it really feels cool in full color.
with the galaxy xr, you don't have to choose. sometimes it's good to have windows in your reality, other times you can go to a fully immersive mode with different environments
A resolution of 2160@110° is kind of low normally, effectively being around 20 pixels per degree. I wonder if they could pull off something like what the engineers behind the Simula VR headset did, where they shift the outer resolution to the centre of the lens, up to 35.5 PPD, higher than the Apple Vision Pro. Last I checked, it was difficult to find off-the-shelf VR displays suitable for pancake lenses with a resolution above 2160, so this might be the best option.
https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
This explains why alyssa rosenzweig (from asahi linux) was paid for so long by Valve. She worked on FEX.
What's fex? I wasn't able to google search it (didn't try too hard admittedly)
https://fex-emu.com/
x86 to arm compatibility layer they are using to run windows games on the machine/frame
Steam Machine is x86_64
The VR headset isn't and it's cable of both running games standalone and displaying games through the dongle from whatever PC you run.
Will the eye tracking data be directly available to developers?
Also, can I hack the OS? Specifically interested in direct VR rendering (other headsets don't allow to bypass compositor).
Pretty sure the OS is just the same old Steam-flavored Linux distro "SteamOS" with ARM support and some new graphics pipeline stuff for the VR portion, though we don't know until it's actually out.
Though Valve has put a focus on developer ease and very low software lockdown in the recent years with their hardware, so I'd say the chances on direct rendering are quite good!
Wondering what window/desktop manager will valve ship with the new steam frame. Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently? Will that be a mod of kde or something?
> Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently?
The best known is perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass but there's many others, at varying stages of development. It will be interesting to see if custom OS/UX development is made available for this device. We'd also need quite a bit of custom development to make the OS comprehensively usable with gamepad-like controllers alone (no mouse or keyboard required). The existing work on "10-ft." media center interfaces can provide a useful starting point for this but it's far from covering all possible uses.
Wonder if/when prescription lenses will be available for it. I had to get some for my index since my glasses were too big to fit inside the headset.
There will be.
YouTube just happened to show me Gamers Nexus Lossless Scaling & Lossless Frame Generation video just now. [1]
Which, I can't help but wonder. If this ran on the Frame... To aid in streaming from your desktop... In conjunction with Foveated Streaming...
What's even more bonkers to me is the idea that this could really be baked in to the streaming, if you think about it.
Server generates 100 beautiful frames in one second.
The streaming hardware reminds the server that with the current network conditions, that it can only handle X bits per second.
The Frame says, "Hey, here's where the eyes were looking, here's where they are looking, here's where they're projected to look."
The Server knows how many actual frames it can send in a second.
But the Server can run the same Lossless Scaling & Lossless Frame Generation that the client will run.
The Server can then compare the predicted frames against the actual frames, and it can send the delta needed to correct the predictions. Especially in areas close to where the eyes are looking.
The Client consumes the stream, predicts frames, applies the delta, and ends up with better framerate and quality...
Can you do this all low latency, too? I suspect so.
Add it all up, and this is pretty bonkers. I mean, it's kind of obvious that that's how streaming "should work," but I think I hadn't really put it all together yet in my mind. My mental model was too "off the shelf." It didn't include how much effort the client could do... And that the server could then also do, to help the client... It's really a beautiful pairing, when you think about it.
What's really bonkers is that Steam could learn what final images are supposed to look like, for a given game, and train AI specifically for that game. Update the server and the client, and bam, everyone gets better quality. With zero developer interaction.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_Hqngky0s
This would solve the problem of bandwidth which is not a problem (250MB/s is enough, Valve says)
This immediately made me wonder about a Steam Machine driving multiple Steam Frames for multiplayer games.
That could be super easy for a developer to make, all in one process, with no networking requirement for the game logic...
kudos to them for using AA batteries for the controller.
will help the hardware last longer. cz non-removable lithium batteries suck.
Maybe, but I've seen more controllers destroyed by AA batteries that leaked and corroded the contacts than internal batteries that failed.
It’s good that we have decent NiMH batteries that I don’t think leak like alkaline ones do (I’ve never seen one!).
Lower voltages, but flatter discharge curve so pretty much everything works with them.
Let me guess: were they alkaline batteries, left in the device while not in use for several weeks or months?
I’ve never seen that in my entire life
It is unfortunate that it doesn't have a strap that goes over the top of your head. It is extremely irritating that almost every headset does this, then charges extra for an actually usable strap that takes the pressure off of your face.
In the LTT Video they showed an optional top strap from Valve. So it's a thing!
Yeah I noticed that as well. There is no material that can defy the physics, top strap is the best.
>2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye)
Here's hoping it will be like the Deck and we get Frame OLED in a year or so.
Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.
I have the Bigscreen Beyond 2 which is OLED + pancake fine. But only if you have the perfect light seal that the BSB face gasket ensures. Your eyes just adjust to it and I never thought about it while using it. The upside of having perfect blacks is sooooo worth it in my opinion. Flight sims in VR at night are an amazing experience
That is micro OLED and is more expensive than regular OLED.
Several. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Meganex 8K, and more coming like Crystal Super / Dream Air.
It's interesting to see them putting more attention on playing traditional games with this. I have long thought that the most broadly viable use for VR headsets in gaming is giving users a big screen to play their regular games. There just doesn't actually appear to be much market for true VR games considering all the complicating factors like motion sickness or requiring a big play area. It reminds me of the Nintendo Wii. Taking turns playing Beat Saber with a few of your friends is fun just like Wii Sports was, but in the end people are going to spend a lot more time sitting on their couch to play something more traditional like Mario Kart.
If it all launches with Half-Life 3 that works seamlessly across all 3 Steam platforms then we're living in the best timeline...
I am beginning to wonder if the rumoured HLX is actuallya VR native experience, perhaps Alyx 2. All the leaks have pointed toward increased focus on systems like objects having physical properties that would really add to immersion in VR.
> then we're living in the best timeline...
Needs to run GNU Hurd for that.
If we're going that route, it should really be Lisp :)
I'm unreasonably excited on all things Steam nowadays. I still like my PS5. And the PSVR2 is quite amazing for the games it has. But Steam has been amazing in getting back into games for me in ways that I did not anticipate.
2160x2160 in each eye for the headset
110 deg fov is a bit on the low side but I guess it'll have to do. I hate how 90% of VR headsets are designed to feel like you have binoculars strapped to your face, absolutely zero peripheral vision.
One of the reasons I put off getting corrective lenses for a long time and kept trying to use contacts despite how horrible they make my eyeballs feel, is that I have an extremely wide peripheral vision. I can see my fingers wiggle behind the plane defined by my shoulders, I will react to motion out there.
Having my FoV dumbed down to 90º sounds like hell, especially in a game where we are looking for opponents.
Playing Doom on a widescreen monitor with the FoV modifications made it a lot less annoying. I want that even more today.
Have you tried rimless glasses? I don't think you need eye sight correction for your peripheral vision.
> I can see my fingers wiggle behind the plane defined by my shoulders
I am a bit confused: you can see your shoulders while you are looking forward?
The normal human field of vision is about 190°, which mine is just about. If you don’t have a stoop that will catch the front edge of your shoulders. Fingers wiggling with your shoulders slightly overextended is just easier to see than a shoulder shrug.
It’s the amount of compute power that my brain allows for peripheral vision that’s the only unusual thing. But it makes video games feel claustrophobic to an unpleasant degree.
> I am a bit confused: you can see your shoulders while you are looking forward?
I can just about see my shoulders when i look forward, I'd probably also say my field of vision to be "the plane of view defined by my shoulders".
It's not that they're "designed to feel like", it's that the technology for better than 110 degrees just isn't there yet.
There are tons of pro level headsets that go up to 170, the tech definitely exists, it's just not as cheap cause you need larger displays if you want to maintain dpi.
Yesss. I will never buy anything Meta so happy to see this.
Are there any real-world tests or reviews of foveated streaming in actual gameplay? I’m wondering how it holds up in fast shooters where you depend on tiny cues in your peripheral vision. Wouldn’t the lower-resolution periphery make it harder to notice subtle movement?
There are some reviews like LTT that talk about it's impact. I'm not sure about the subtle movement though. I think they're lowering the quality to what your peripheral vision is already, so I don't think it would effect anything negatively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU3ru09HTng
Not a single piece of footage with someone wearing glasses and the Steam Frame
I guess we get screwed over again :-(
I find it mind boggling that so many VR headsets cannot be used with glasses.
Imagine an engineering team and developers working on the device. There must be a pretty large proportion of folks with glasses. Does the fact that they cannot use their own product not raise a flag in any way!?
Anyway, for this particular model, others indicate that there may be an (optional?) spacer.
“Optional” sounds kinda sucky. Someone buys the headset, has a friend over, and the friend can’t use it because support for glasses is optional? It’s not like glasses are a niche thing.
The LTT video on the Steam Frame mentions an optional spacer for glasses and that Valve is working on getting prescription lenses for the Steam Frame.
I'm in the same boat. But the specs do mention "Eye Glasses Max Width 140mm"
oh i missed that. nice, I'm hopeful.
Valve just defeated Meta and Xbox in one go. nice.
Steam does a lot of things right here, but also some things wrong, which is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.
I read the specs and got excited, until I read about the resolution. 2160x2160 is what I have now with the Pico 4, and while it's ok for entertainment, and acceptable for browsing and reading, it's far too low for professional work.
Linux would have been great, but I can't justify spending money on a headset with exactly the same low resolution as my current one.
Also, I've become used to color passthrough, and going back to monochrome would feel like a big regression.
To be fair its obviously not meant for professional work
Valve is a game company
I don't think any VR headset is good for professional work due to the focal plane mismatch which causes eye strain with long term use. Unless you like using a computer with a screen 4 feet away. For most people that's pretty uncomfortable for productivity work.
Interesting they went with the 8 Gen 3 instead of something like the X Elite. From what I’ve seen, the 8 Gen 3 actually outperforms the Elite in emulation and running PC games. I wonder if that factored into the decision.
Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan / burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.
Personally I much prefer OLED, especially for VR, and haven’t had any burn in issues with OLED in any form for years.
Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whuHuM9h88M
VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.
Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I'm using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).
> Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"):
Yes, but it's not degrading as fast as OLED haters makes you think. I spent days playing the same games (so HUD is in the static place) on multiple OLED screens I owned for years. No noticeable burn-in and still looks better than my only IPS screen.
OLED only burns in if the content is static for hours. If your head is that stable while using VR, I give you $5.
OLED is always burning in as a feature of it. It’s just much less noticeable when it’s:
But it is still always losing durability in a steady way.I used colorcontrol to enter the service menu of my LG C2 and disable all anti-burn-in features. No auto dimming, no auto picture level, no anti-logo, etc. The only one I kept is pixel shift because it's only noticeable if you're looking at the edge of the screen when it moves, it's a tiny movement. I skip the "pixel cleaning" prompt every time it wants me to wait. When I'm gaming in HDR, I use filters to increase the exposure to get the maximum brightness range of the panel. Been using it like that for ~8hrs/day for over 2 years now. Zero detectable hint of burn-in.
If you want a different anecdote, I have a LG C1 that got burn in after a year of use, playing FFXIV. I can see a blue outline of where my minimap and hotbars are. HUD burn-in. The only thing I disabled was the dimming feature, because it's outright annoying to use, where every time i'd scroll it'd make the text on a page illegiblly dark. (Dark mode pages, white text becomes dark gray while scrolling then back to white when stopped... sometimes not!). I moved that TV to the living room and got a non oled samsung instead which is what I use now.
Do your VR games not have static HUDs / UIs? It has been a long time since I picked up a VR game since I no longer have the room.
I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.
And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.
Not really, most HUDs are fixed to thigns like your hands, guns, etc. or don't exist at all.
Static objects in your view are VERY nauseating (at least in my experience).
I'm just not convinced it's really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it's on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).
Zero sense of burn in.
It will be strange to be playing on a big VR screen with your controller and it's colored and beautiful and everything around it is black and white.
I wonder what their solution to that is. Virtual environments?
They mention tracking the new Steam Controller, too.
Which makes me wonder if they'll make a new Steam Deck that has the IR emitters in it, so the Frame could track the Deck?
I wonder if the two working together could work well?
I wonder what the overhead is to stream from the headset or host PC to another monitor. VR is great but comes with a barrier of overcoming social isolation. Having the VR session on a screen would be a way to keep it social. Especially multiple VR slit screen. We want to engage the rest of people in the room beyond the players.
Watching various interviews, clearly it can be on another monitor.
I could see a Steam Frame OLED coming just like the Steam Deck OLED, but I wonder how long it will take. Like others here, this will be an instant buy for me and my first VR device, apart from Cardboard maybe. Looking forward to gaming on it.
Good engineering discussion from gamers nexus https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ
Is the steam controller registering as a joystick and a mouse? It could be amazing to manage my current media center! As I cannot make KDE detect my current controller as a mouse
It seems the controller on steamdeck on windows detects as such when steam or whatever companion program is not running. Although in this state. You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself.
Although on Linux side. As far as i remembered, it's up to how kernel driver developer to map the device input into different class. It would be up to valve to decide what to do in this case.
> You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself
The original steam controller’s LT and RT work as mouse buttons in mouse mode, too. Source: have 3 steam controllers
There won't be 'mode' if neither steam or other 3rd software is running though. So it must default to one of control layout. Fortunately, controller on steamdeck does have enough button to fit both.
Funnily enough, the Frame is running KDE Plasma so I bet it works pretty well.
Probably a dumb question, I might've missed it in the description somewhere, but I assume the onboard PC is mostly to facilitate the streaming functionality, and it will stream from your main machine to the headset right?
I'm very curious about the latency if that's the case. This might be the trigger for me to get into VR finally, but I'm worried that if there's noticeable lag in the stream that I'll basically cover myself in vomit from motion sickness lol
The latency introduced by the network link will be tiny compared to most games total frame latency. I would prefer a cable link just so I don't have to worry about charging it ever, but I think the wireless link will be fine from a lag perspective.
it supports standalone, may allow sideloading apks too, sounds more powerful than quest3 and also - no lag because the 6Ghz wifi doesn't go through the router, so long as you are close to the PCVR source - it's probably lag free. how did you do?
Will SteamFrame ARM support paired with Alyssa Rosenzweig's work - large amount of Steam games are very close to be able to run on mac hardware, right?
Give it a try: https://fex-emu.com/
Apple already has excellent x86 emulation. But Apple has locked-down GPU with a proprietary API that adds another unnecessary translation layer where it hurts more.
The main thing I dislike about VR is how uncomfortable it is on my head and how hard it is to adjust that comfort. Too much friction to enjoy. If I can just easily slip these on that would be perfect.
I also never got used to the feeling of being completely detached from my own world. I know that's the point of VR, for it to be completely immersive but it felt very jarring not knowing what was going on around me.
Wow this is perfect timing! I've dusted out my old Valve Index tuesday so my kids could try The Lab. It now shows a green pixels line on the right. Also the headset is too heavy for them and not easy to adjust, and I had to hold the cable so they don't trip over it. This new headset will be perfect for them.
From the spec sheet:
> Large FOV (up to 110 degrees)
Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.
> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.
Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.
I'm disappointed it seems to have dropped lighthouse tracking with the previous Valve Index. Especially because with the Valve Knuckles controllers are my favorite with how they strap to your hand.
Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.
Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.
[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=246 - timestampped @ controller section.
These new controllers look just like the Quest 3 controllers. Ergonomically I really like them, and they have capacitive touch for most surfaces as well.
Not to mention the insane precision (I believe it’s something like 1 or 2 mm).
This is my main concern with the new headset.. hopefully they have a way to support lighthouse.. maybe as an "upgrade" to the tracking if you already have a lighthouse setup. I play a game called VTOLVR and it's atrocious on the quest with inside-out tracking, because the game VERY often has you looking in a direction where your arm is behind your back or behind your leg (from the VR's perspective) and it completely loses tracking.. literally killing you in game sometimes. Think "looking up and behind you for threats" while your hand is in the throttle/stick for a combat plane.
It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don't make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don't know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.
The controllers also have gyros, but from what I've read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn't reliable for extended periods.
The controllers won't have lighthouse tracking though. The IR tracking is the headset tracking the controller's IR LEDs, which the Index controllers do not have. It might be possible to have the headset IR track the lighthouses, and then use the old Index controllers, which also track the lighthouses.
There's also tools to calibrate the different tracking methods together, but that seems less than ideal.
Good catch, I just saw IR tracking on the page and didn't investigate further. I can't wait to see some teardowns (physical and firmware) of the device, then we can get a better look at what it is truly capable of.
Though it wouldn't help the controllers, perhaps the expansion port on the headset could be used for a lighthouse-compatible tracker? (One can dream...)
I’m holding out hope that this could be utilized in a similar fashion to the Apple Vision Pro’s Remote Desktop. I’d love the chance to work in a coffee shop or plane and not need to look down for prolonged periods of time. I’m hoping that that dongle is able to be used as video pass through.
It's probably too low res. AVP is 3.4K, this is 2.1K spread over a wider FOV.
I would've never bet on an Arch being the one that won the gaming market, but here we are. Wild.
I am running Endeavour OS an Arch based distro, and it has been almost hassle free for games. Even less hassle than windows since I didn'teven have to download and install GPU drivers. Games with anti-cheat sometimes won't run, but that's not the fault of the OS.
I don't play just niche games either, AAA titles work too. Currently playing Arc Raiders without issue and that only just came out. Installed it via steam, started playing. 10 years ago I would never have seen this coming.
Steam is becoming what Google or Apple was in the past but much better, I like it.
It was so thoughtful of them to use IR tracking. Bed time gaming becomes much easier. I wonder if there was a choice between color passthrough and IR tracking and they chose the latter. Good choice!
Night vision computer goggles!
Anybody know the limiting factor to providing lower IPDs on VR headsets? My wife had always struggled with this with an IPD in the 50s when we were exploring early gen VR headsets. The Frame bottoms out at 60.
As you lower the IPD you're scrunching the displays and optics closer and closer together and at some point you mechanically run out of room. You'd need to reduce the FOV or add mirrors or something to get the lenses to fit.
There's probably also an element of it not being worth complicating the design to chase users in the long tail of IPDs. (My IPD is about 72, which is slightly outside the range on the other end for this and most other headsets, despite it being less of a mechanical challenge.)
I am wondering about this "dedicated 6 GHz dongle". So, I am gathering that this thing, just like the quest will be able to run things locally but is also supposed to be able to stream pcvr stuff from a connected pc where steam is running.
I would have thought they give you a wired connection for that. you know, like the quest. but with the option to do it wireless.
My question would be: given that the wireless solution in the quest apparently is a peer-to-peer pairing of the headset and the pc through the local networks wireless router, just much of a difference will this dedicated 6GHz dongle make?
Would I be kidding myself if I assumed using this dongle would give me the analog experience of when I am using a dedicated dongle to connect my xboy controller to my pc? I mean, I plug it in, the dongle automagically comes pre-paired with the headset, I start steam on pc, hit play on a VR title and I get to play right away? Because that is my current experience with my controller that is connected via a dedicated wireless dongle. I hated the bluetooth connection. But using this dongle is really making a difference here.
So, I wonder just how "painless" this will all be with the new headset. I held out on buying a quest because the wireless connection through my router would not be possible simply because I cant change my router at the moment and while it is fine for everything i use it for, it would not be enough to stream the quest data. Therefore I would have always wanted a "wired" connection, simply because my router wouldnt be able to do it.
Therefore I was a bit miffed when I learned that this new headset would not come with a wired option. But if this dongle can do everything a wired connection can do without having to go through my router then this would be absolutely game changing for me.
Stupid links insist on opening in the steam app on mobile. I do have it installed but my login expired years ago and I’m not renewing it.
Guess I won’t find out what this is about any time soon…
Opening it in private tabs should help, at least on iOS.
Trying to decide if Steam Frame is going to be better than Apple Vision Pro + ALVR + lighthouses... AVP has higher resolution and OLED displays with higher PPD but obviously weighs a lot more.
There was a lot of discussion about some work they've done to minimize compression artifacts... that's the biggest drawback for me in terms of ALVR + AVP... I suppose time will tell.
I own the Index and Vision and haven't tried this yet. I was considering buying PSVR2 controllers since they're officially supported but maybe I shouldn't bother?
i wonder if foveated streaming combined with foveated rendering could be used in the cloud gaming space?
if latency is low enough, then you could get a super high fidelity experience on a thin client VR display with low cost rendering server side.
Nvidia GeForce Now is already very impressive for streaming games at full field of view 4k.
thin client VR gives you longer battery life, lighter devices, lower entry cost. and with a cloud gaming service rendering the game, an even lower barrier to entry
These links open Steam app on my phone and crash immediately.
What the, this link also crashes KDE Plasma, when opening this link with Google Chrome. I had to reboot two times, just clicking this frame link.
Both times, first journalctl entry in the crash time is:
[drm:__nv_drm_gem_nvkms_map [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Failed to map NvKmsKapiMemory 0x0000000070a84e8b
Then KWIN dump etc.
Reminding me to buy AMD next.
This is due to a video that has drm encoding and the browser trying to decode it. The drm blob contains the codec keys in our driver and the browser is supposed to negotiate this. It fails. At least on Nvidia for you. It fails for me on safari on iOS.
DRM in context of that log message is Direct Rendering Manager which is a Linux subsystem for handling GPUs; it's unrelated to Digital Rights/Restrictions Management and there are no DRM-encumbered videos on that page.
Same here. Also happens when navigating there from within the all.
Open the website in your browser instead.
Crashes in the browser as well. Good job Valve.
Finally, a modern VR headset that doesn't hate you.
This is so much more interesting than the Apple Vision Pro/Quest for one main reason: An open builder-friendly platform.
> Steam Frame is a PC: ... Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
Always glad to see this.
It's the first VR device I consider buying.
Wow was absolutely not expecting this. I need this.
The death of VR has been greatly exaggerated. The only thing that died is the hype, and the hype will not be missed. It's just nice to have so much less bullshit.
They have been trying to make VR thing since the 90s. It has never reached mass appeal and never will.
I can't wear one of those headset (I get severe motion sickness).
Meta and Apple smothered VR almost to death. Valve is coming to set VR free.
Little disappointing its not got colour passthrough. I am not convinced this generation of headsets will really be the ones that AR breaks through but still its a bit disappointing and has been useful with the latest Quest headsets. Other than that it looks fairly solid.
It was noted in some articles that the "expansion port" could hypothetically be used for a color passthrough module later. But I also read that the Index had a similar port and never did much of anything with it, so that may never happen.
Definitely a cost measure to not include color passthrough, I'm not in the market to replace my Quest 3S but I'm very curious to see what price they hit with this.
Nice that it has a microSD slot so you can buy the low storage on and not be stuck with 256 GB forever.
Looks exciting! It would be amazing if the headset turns out to be useful for coding without a monitor. Say, in the park.
Being in the park kinda loses its lustre when you've got a headset strapped to your face - I'd prefer a laptop with a screen that's still visible in sunlight.
> I'd prefer a laptop with a screen that's still visible in sunlight.
I don't understand why Amazon worked so hard to replace their neutral gray Kindles with "Kindle PaperWhite".
Paper, the material, is so white that trying to read it in sunlight will hurt your eyes. Why would you want a white reading surface instead of a gray one?
The main shtick of Kindle Paperwhite, aside of the obvious ability to read in the dark, is not how white it is but rather how it can remove shadows when outside or in brightly lit rooms. You don't really notice this effect until you disable backlight and suddenly can notice the shadows cast by your fingers.
> aside of the obvious ability to read in the dark
My Kindle Keyboard came with a case that hooked into it to draw power for a nice, orange booklight. It was a much better reading-in-bed experience than the Kindle Oasis with its uniform glow. :(
It's not actually paper-white, though, thankfully. It's more just 'not as dingy gray'
Yeah I’d go a sunglasses-like setup - preferably driven by my phone. But big tech companies have yet to take a shine to that use case.
It's doable. But you need 8k per eye to read text comfortable. But what would you use for input?
A compact keyboard and an accelerometer based mouse replacement. All wireless of course. There are a few devices on the market that’d fit the bill.
Like a wii-mote kind of thing? Is there anything out that's good enough for general desktop usage? I'd be really interested if it's actually at a usable state.
https://www.tapwithus.com/
> Say, in the park.
But why not use a laptop?
So it connects to your PC via Wifi? I could use this anywhere in my house as far away from my computer as I want?
I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)
The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.
[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=445 - timestamped at wireless segment
I thought 6Ghz is not allowed world wide? For example Germany?
Are you sure it's not just wifi6?
Germany allowed it in 2021 or so.
The biggest variation is above 6 GHz: most of the world allows 5.9-6.4 but reserves 6.5-7 GHz for cellular or haven't decided yet if it'll be for wifi or cellular. There's a nice map on https://6ghz.info/
Ah, thanks for sharing.
It's both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
> But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
That's my experience streaming games to steam deck. I have central 2.4/5/6Ghz AP and 6Ghz-only APs in other rooms. Any sort of wireless streaming at my place is snappy.
And like the Steam Deck it will never be available in my region :) So much for globalization!
This will probably make me vomit as hard as any other vr headset i tried, right?
These new steam sites are non functional in Firefox iPhone.
It looks stunning, great design there
There's a devkit... I'm disappointed, that's the Sony method? I actually tried to do dev for the Meta Quest 2 the other week and was disappointed there because it's my son's, and he can't sign up for a Meta dev account (age), so there's no way for me to do anything with it without factory resetting the thing. This is more disappointing though. Why can't I dev games for the consumer headset?
It sounds like the dev kit is more of a way to get devices out to devs before the full launch, I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware. The Adam Savage Tested video had interviews with the Valve team and it was pretty clear that "it's your computer" was a core part of the philosophy.
I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware. I'm sure you can develop using the consumer hardware.
> It depends though. Some console's devkit have memory or vram larger than consumer device. So it will allow un-optimized dev version of the softwares to run without crash. (And allow you to check what part goes wrong later instead of immediately fix it) Although you will need to test the production build on retail device eventually, it will make development easier.
Ah okay, a bit confusing wording there. I really think they should make that clearer...
Have you tried adding a second user on the headset with your own account?
Yes that was the next thing I tried, but only the device "owner" can do development on it.
The only solutions were
1) factory reset and take ownership of my son's device
2) buy another Quest
Is this built by HTC, like the Vive is/was? Either way, RIP HTC.
Extremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
It’s not foveated rendering, it’s foveated streaming
Cool to see Valve committing to the ecosystem like this
LinuxVR on this + the Steam Machine will be awesome.
So are we getting a Steam Phone? If not, why not?
OK, so it's Valve's version of HP Reverb G2 just released 5 years later. It doesn't even match the best Pimax/HTC, not to mention Apple's one.
The IPD range is a bit on the lower side, which is unfortunate knowing it can make a VR headset unusable and that it is just a matter of design and not technology
I use glasses. Can I use it?
This looks really cool, but USB-A on the wireless adapter? Really?
Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.
It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.
USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.
It is my second laptop I got from my employer (replacement every few years) and it also has just usb c ports. I hate plugging in usb-a adapter. I would at least expect adapter included for usb c.
I'st much less likely to break a usba dongle compare to usb c though.(the area is much mcuh bjgger) And I don't think the dongle really need the 40gb potential of a usbc port.
I mean.. my X670E motherboard (a high end, modern mobo!) has only ONE usb-c port.. it has, in comparison, 3 usb-a 10gbps ports and another 4x usb-a 5gbps ports. Given the headset's main use case to be plugged in is for PC-VR game streaming, it makes sense that they'd go with USB-A. Maybe in a few years they can switch but right now most desktop mobos barely even have usb-c.
Some motherboard have a rear USB-C, but no internal front panel header.
Desktop is so far behind on ports.
USB-C requires additional "Type C Port Controller" which does increase complexity compared to USB-A
Sure, but no desktop motherboard is cheap nowadays. And laptops all get one or more USB-C ports.
It is still a major non-trivial difference between implementing USB-A header (super trivial, just wire up the lines) and implementing USB-C - needs additional TCPC with enough ports, located nearby enough, plus flash rom, plus possibly an extra interfacing chip per each port. And that's if you only want reasonable USB-C that does just USB with maybe a bit of Power Delivery (but not too much). And then you need to ensure firmware handles it right (and that's not including bugs like Intel "firmware quality" leading to broken flash roms on entire product lines with thunderbolt controllers).
There's a reason why USB-C ports on laptops are often very... "clustered", let's say. Makes it reasonably easy to route signals if you're routing just what's essentially USB+DP or USB4, and I2C, and put 2 port capable TCPC and necessary switching and support circuitry near the port.
I will buy. When is it out?
If it's anything like the Deck, they will eventually announce a more tangible release date (right now it's early 2026) and then announce a date for preorders to open. For the Deck unless you got into the preorder queue within ~1 minute you had to wait several months for it to be delivered to you.
Next question in my head...
Can we use one Steam Machine to drive, say, 4 to 16 Steam Frames.
Multiplayer gameplay, like Goldeneye. With the convenience that all of the state is in memory in one process, so there's no networking layer in the gameplay logic itself.
And you can't peak at the other players' screens.
GPU horsepower isn't there for that.
It depends entirely on the game.
For a AAA modern game, you're right - of course not.
But remember, they're saying this thing is six times as powerful as the Steam Deck.
That sounds like it might be able to handle 4 players running at about as good as on the Steam Deck.
And that's ignoring the whole idea of the server running on the Steam Machine, and custom clients running on everyone's Steam Frames. That would give you even more compute power.
I like the idea that the Steam Frame, in this "Living Room" scenario, doesn't even need to do network prediction. It just blasts game state to each of the clients.
So what, there's multi-player games on the same TV, like Goldeneye 64.
There's LAN games.
And now there's maybe a new category... Living Room, Multi-Screen games?
Annoying not to include price or release date.
Considering the quest 3 came out 2 entire years ago this feels too close in terms of hardware instead of feeling like a next generation headset.
Responses do seem fairly positive though. I wonder if this had been released as the quest 4 though would you all be reacting as positively?
I have a Quest 2 that I don't care for, so it's caught me somewhat offguard how much I want this. The whole set please. I thought I'd just want the controller, but everything here looks exciting to me.
any idea on price?
"below the index", according to the UploadVR article linked. So below 1000 USD
another slam dunk from Valve
[dead]
WHAT'S THE PRICE
GABEN
GABEN DON'T LEAVE ME HANGING WHAT IS THE PRICEEEEEEEE
People warn to not hold smartphones near the head for too long due to too strong signal strenghts...
Is it not a concern to strap such a powerful defive that receives super strong signals right onto the head for hours??
Cell phones and other mobile devices only transmit non-ionizing radiation (perfectly safe glorified invisible light), and studies have been done regarding this topic, returning inconclusive results. It's most likely perfectly safe.
No.
Saw that the Steam Frame was wireless and lost interest. Wireless is always an extra complication that never improves things. I've learned lots about framing to hardwire my home network. Sure, make it an option, but I won't pay for latency, battery life, battery weight, cost, or pairing issues of wireless solutions. Give me (replaceable, standard) cables anyday!
That said, there is hope, because if there is a wireless version and it takes off, it can't be hard to make a wired version.
It doesn't improve quality and latency, but for VR it absolutely improves not dealing with a cable that you can't see and will tangle yourself up with if you turn either direction more than once
Two notes on how Steam Frame is handling this
- It's a standalone headset, less demanding games run directly on the Steam Frame and the wireless connection doesn't factor in to anything.
- It makes two simultaneous wifi connections, one on 5 ghz for connecting to your wifi network / internet, and another on 6 ghz for connecting to your streaming PC. They include an official 6 ghz USB dongle for the PC so you don't have to deal with finding which 3rd party option will work reliably.
I agree with you for most things, but a VR headset is definitely something where the pros outweigh the cons vis a vis avoiding wires for me.
It's also wired, and you could even take out the battery for the weight.