Top
Best
New

Posted by Philpax 10 hours ago

Steam Frame(store.steampowered.com)
1062 points | 390 comments
modeless 8 hours ago|
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.

bigiain 4 hours ago||
> 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.

zeroq 2 hours ago|||
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.

m463 49 minutes ago||
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

zeroq 27 minutes ago||
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.

intrasight 5 minutes ago||
> 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.

m463 53 minutes ago|||
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.

dagmx 7 hours ago|||
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.
anvuong 3 hours ago|||
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.

dagmx 45 minutes ago|||
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
entropicdrifter 3 hours ago|||
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.
eptcyka 5 hours ago|||
I think it works really well to pump the same amount of pixels, just focusing them on the more important parts.
Psillisp 5 hours ago||
Always PIP, Pump Important Pixels
xeonmc 8 hours ago|||
> 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?

potatolicious 8 hours ago|||
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.

giobox 7 hours ago||
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

numpad0 4 hours ago|||
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).
potatolicious 7 hours ago||||
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.

andybak 6 hours ago||
Most people in what age group?

I'm 53 and the Quest 3 is perfectly good as a monitor replacement.

gruturo 6 hours ago|||
I'm in the same boat. Due to my vision not being perfect even after correction, a Quest 3 is entirely sufficient.
pdpi 4 hours ago||
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.
froggit 6 hours ago|||
Are you saying ppd requirements for comfortable usage vary with age?
whycome 5 hours ago|||
We get by with lower resolution monitors with lower pixel density all the time.
big_toast 5 hours ago|||
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.

giobox 5 hours ago|||
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!

modeless 8 hours ago||||
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.
whycome 5 hours ago|||
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.
Fernicia 8 hours ago|||
Couldn't you get around that by having a "zoom" feature on a very large but distant monitor?
wongarsu 8 hours ago|||
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

potatolicious 6 hours ago||||
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.

rtkwe 6 hours ago|||
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.
jayd16 7 hours ago|||
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.
rtkwe 6 hours ago||
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...

monocasa 8 hours ago|||
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.

rebeccaskinner 7 hours ago|||
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.

monocasa 7 hours ago||
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.
cube2222 8 hours ago||||
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.

monocasa 8 hours ago||
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.
zamadatix 6 hours ago|||
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.

esseph 8 hours ago|||
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.

monocasa 8 hours ago|||
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.

cube2222 7 hours ago|||
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.

monocasa 7 hours ago||
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.

cube2222 7 hours ago|||
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.

monocasa 6 hours ago||
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?

cube2222 5 hours ago||
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.

ncallaway 12 minutes ago||
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.

entropicdrifter 5 hours ago|||
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
esseph 5 hours ago|||
MU-MIMO is very nice.
cyberax 7 hours ago|||
The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.
brian-armstrong 7 hours ago|||
Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.
esseph 5 hours ago|||
Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.

Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.

cyberax 41 minutes ago||
Here's the overview: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/senate-gop-budge...
rtkwe 6 hours ago||||
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...

omneity 8 hours ago||||
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.

adgjlsfhk1 6 hours ago|||
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.
nabakin 6 hours ago|||
And foveated streaming has a 1-2ms wireless latency on modern GPUs according to LTT. Insane.
tshaddox 4 hours ago|||
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.

CobrastanJorji 6 hours ago|||
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.

redrblackr 5 hours ago|||
No, thats between 0.06 and 0.12 frame latency on 60fps. It's not even a frame on 144Hz (1s/144≈7ms)
bspammer 5 hours ago||||
Much less than, 1 frame is 16ms
sph 5 hours ago|||
60 fps is 16.67 ms per frame.
nixpulvis 2 hours ago|||
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.

TheOtherHobbes 1 hour ago||
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.

nixpulvis 1 hour ago||
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.
regularfry 3 hours ago|||
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.
cedws 8 hours ago|||
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?
modeless 8 hours ago|||
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.

robotnikman 7 hours ago||
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.

girvo 5 hours ago||
> 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/

cube2222 7 hours ago||||
If you mean foveated streaming - It’s available on the Quest Pro with Steam Link.
jayd16 7 hours ago|||
What do you mean? What part have they not tried?
MetaWhirledPeas 8 hours ago|||
> 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.

bluescrn 7 hours ago|||
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)

wat10000 5 hours ago||||
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.

cesarb 3 hours ago||
> 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.)

refulgentis 7 hours ago||||
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,)

MetaWhirledPeas 3 hours ago||
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!"
krzyk 7 hours ago|||
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.

potatolicious 6 hours ago|||
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.

rtkwe 6 hours ago||||
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.
MetaWhirledPeas 3 hours ago||
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.)
rtkwe 2 hours ago||
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.
archon810 6 hours ago|||
Have a look at this video by Dave2D. In his hands-on, he was very impressed with foveated streaming https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
JeremyNT 6 hours ago|||
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.

entropicdrifter 5 hours ago|||
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.
rpdillon 25 minutes ago||
Yeah, this is exactly what I've been waiting for for quite a long time. I'm very excited.
tfyoung 1 hour ago||||
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.
modeless 5 hours ago||||
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.
preisschild 5 hours ago||
That would probably add a lot of extra weight and it would need to make the device bigger.
modeless 5 hours ago||
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.
LarsDu88 5 hours ago||||
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.
rbits 4 hours ago||||
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.
preisschild 5 hours ago|||
I agree. Hopefully Bigscreen continues making hardware. I still have the original bigscreen beyond and im very happy with it besides the glare.
ch4s3 6 hours ago||
> Mouth tracking?

What a vile thought in the context of the steam… catalogue.

SchemaLoad 4 hours ago|||
I'm guessing it's main use case will be VR chat syncing mouths to avatars.
riskable 1 hour ago||
The porn industry disagrees.
willis936 2 hours ago||||
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

rtkwe 6 hours ago|||
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.
ch4s3 5 hours ago||
I gathered as much, but still.
arnaudsm 5 hours ago||
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.

IshKebab 5 hours ago||
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.

throwaway89201 4 hours ago|||
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...

wayeq 1 hour ago|||
> £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.

Razengan 4 hours ago||
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.

ehnto 1 hour ago|||
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.

krastanov 4 hours ago||||
I am currently writing this from an xreal one pro. I think it fits what you are asking for.
iddan 4 hours ago|||
There you go https://www.sightful.com/
jsheard 10 hours ago||
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.

phantasmish 9 hours ago||
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.

andoando 6 hours ago|||
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
baggachipz 6 hours ago|||
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.
barrkel 4 hours ago|||
I guess you abandoned PC gaming some time in the early 2000s?
rtkwe 2 hours ago||
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.

theshackleford 5 hours ago||||
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.

andoando 4 hours ago|||
I mean I just don't see the difference between this and getting any PC and slapping SteamOS on it.
rtkwe 2 hours ago|||
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.
kevinqi 2 hours ago|||
probably the "slapping steamOS" part of that
foresto 4 hours ago||||
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.

eptcyka 5 hours ago||||
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.
andoando 4 hours ago||
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.

_aavaa_ 9 minutes ago||
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.
remir 5 hours ago||||
It's a console basically. It comes ready to play without much maintenance needed from the user.
rbits 4 hours ago||||
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.

notatoad 2 hours ago||||
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.

archagon 3 hours ago|||
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.
torginus 8 hours ago|||
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.
phantasmish 8 hours ago|||
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.
torginus 8 hours ago||
I know but the Frame supports regular x86 games as well in standalone mode.
klohto 8 hours ago||
you run FEX, not direct ARM games
torginus 7 hours ago||
That doesn't magically fix the Qualcomm GPU or the drivers.
scheeseman486 7 hours ago|||
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.
bigyabai 3 hours ago||||
It kinda does. Qualcomm's DirectX drivers were the big issue, and Valve is using Mesa instead.
klohto 7 hours ago|||
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.
marcosscriven 9 hours ago|||
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

jsheard 9 hours ago|||
(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...

OGWhales 8 hours ago|||
It seems it supports DP 1.4 as well, so perhaps you could get an adapter if your display only supports HDMI 2.1
SchemaLoad 4 hours ago||
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.
cesarb 3 hours ago|||
> 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.

OGWhales 3 hours ago|||
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...

PaulHoule 9 hours ago|||
... 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.

jsheard 9 hours ago||
> 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.

srjek 9 hours ago||||
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.

marcosscriven 9 hours ago||
Interesting. I also saw HDMI 2.0 - I guess it’s technically possible but with subsampling?
torginus 8 hours ago||||
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.

skeaker 9 hours ago||||
Where are you getting this number? I'm not seeing it on the specs page.
4ndrewl 8 hours ago|||
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

marcosscriven 9 hours ago|||
This is for the steam machine, not the headset. Mentioned in the CPU & GPU section.
constantcrying 9 hours ago|||
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.

komali2 1 hour ago|||
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.

JBiserkov 9 hours ago||
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.

latexr 9 hours ago|||
> Obviously comparing apples to oranges

Or is it “comparing apples to steam engines”?

TuringTest 4 hours ago||
Given that Valve are the ones who released the Orange Box, methinks the original comparison is valid
bakies 9 hours ago|||
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

Insanity 8 hours ago||
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.

daemonologist 6 hours ago||
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...

rbits 4 hours ago||
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.

ehnto 1 hour ago|||
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.

lopis 6 hours ago|||
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.
piva00 3 hours ago||
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.

ehnto 1 hour ago||
> 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.

Insanity 15 minutes ago||
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.
vunderba 8 hours ago|||
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.
hadlock 7 hours ago|||
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.
aljgz 8 hours ago||||
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

lynndotpy 7 hours ago|||
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.

daemonologist 6 hours ago||
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.
ehnto 1 hour ago||
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.

esskay 7 hours ago|||
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.
wolfd 3 hours ago||
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.

jjcm 5 hours ago|||
> 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.

andoando 6 hours ago||
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.
RyJones 6 hours ago||
from your keyboard to GabeN's ears. I've spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.
vanadium1st 7 hours ago||
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.

modeless 6 hours ago||
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.
bsimpson 4 hours ago|||
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.

modeless 3 hours ago||
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.
vanadium1st 6 hours ago||||
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.
delusional 5 hours ago|||
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.

modeless 5 hours ago||
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.
ricardobeat 3 hours ago|||
> 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.

cruano 5 hours ago|||
> 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.

madsushi 6 hours ago|||
There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.
hadlock 5 hours ago|||
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.
theshackleford 5 hours ago||
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.
Night_Thastus 9 hours ago||
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.

pixelpoet 8 hours ago||
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.

jasonjmcghee 8 hours ago|||
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)

ehnto 1 hour ago||||
That's quite harsh, and definitely not accurate.
Night_Thastus 8 hours ago|||
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)

ziml77 7 hours ago|||
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.
scld 7 hours ago||||
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.
pixelpoet 5 hours ago|||
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...

modeless 8 hours ago|||
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.
ghosty141 7 hours ago|||
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.
ynx 5 hours ago|||
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.

rowanG077 9 hours ago||
There is a LTT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU3ru09HTng

Linus says he cannot tell it is actually foveated streaming.

Night_Thastus 9 hours ago|||
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.
stetrain 9 hours ago||
Norm from Tested said the same in his video.

https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU

potatolicious 8 hours ago||
The Verge reports similarly - can't tell foveated streaming. Seems like Valve really cracked the code with this one.
nabakin 6 hours ago||
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.
ehnto 1 hour ago|||
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.
stetrain 6 hours ago|||
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.
nabakin 6 hours ago||
I haven't bought a VR headset since the Oculus Rift CV1, but this might do it for me
birdman3131 7 hours ago||||
Thats not what he said. What he said was even rapidly moving his eyes around he could not spot the lower resolution part.
stetrain 6 hours ago|||
How is that meaningfully different than not being able to tell that it's foveated?
rowanG077 6 hours ago||||
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.
archon810 6 hours ago|||
Same with Dave2D https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
nabakin 6 hours ago|||
Also mentions 1-2ms latency on a modern GPU
skeaker 9 hours ago||
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.
stetrain 9 hours ago||
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.

Philpax 8 hours ago|||
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.)
stetrain 7 hours ago||
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.
skeaker 4 hours ago||||
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.
wayeq 1 hour ago|||
> This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.

neither is the Apple Vision Pro

taeric 9 hours ago|||
Well, that and being squarely focused on gaming.

I also trust the Steam ecosystem far more than I probably should...

mavamaarten 6 hours ago|||
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.

crooked-v 9 hours ago||
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.
seabombs 5 hours ago||
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.

cube2222 8 hours ago||
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.

ge0n111 6 hours ago|
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.

ehnto 1 hour ago||
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.

tym0 8 hours ago|
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

robhlt 6 hours ago||
It's running SteamOS according to the tech specs on the store page, not Android.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe

zzsshh 6 hours ago|||
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.
TGower 5 hours ago|||
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...
tym0 5 hours ago||
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?

rbits 4 hours ago||
Probably Waydroid [1]. It's been around for a while and apparently works very well.

[1] https://waydro.id

SSLy 5 hours ago||
this has nothing to do with Android
More comments...