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Posted by Philpax 16 hours ago

Steam Frame(store.steampowered.com)
1327 points | 494 commentspage 4
fra 4 hours ago|
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.
arduinomancer 2 hours ago|
It’s not foveated rendering, it’s foveated streaming
AaronAPU 14 hours ago||
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?
cruano 10 hours ago||
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.

ChicagoBoy11 11 hours ago|||
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.
ehnto 5 hours ago|||
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.

mrguyorama 5 hours ago|||
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.

ehnto 5 hours ago||
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.

ghosty141 13 hours ago|||
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.

CobrastanJorji 12 hours ago|||
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.

riskable 12 hours ago|||
Beat Saber is the ultimate VR game, IMHO. It's what enabled me to create this masterpiece:

https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=20010657

:D

cholantesh 5 hours ago|||
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.
tianreyma 13 hours ago|||
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.

JulesRosser 13 hours ago|||
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,
sergiotapia 12 hours ago|||
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

ehnto 5 hours ago|||
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.
mrguyorama 5 hours ago|||
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.

foresto 8 hours ago||
I've heard that Elite Dangerous is nice in VR.
aezart 14 hours ago||
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.
klipklop 14 hours ago|
There will be.
jayd16 3 hours ago||
So are we getting a Steam Phone? If not, why not?
nick49488171 13 hours ago|||
2160x2160 in each eye for the headset
moffkalast 11 hours ago|
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.
hinkley 10 hours ago||
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.

lynnharry 8 hours ago|||
Have you tried rimless glasses? I don't think you need eye sight correction for your peripheral vision.
reliabilityguy 9 hours ago|||
> 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?

hinkley 7 hours ago|||
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.

embedding-shape 7 hours ago|||
> 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".

quux0r 5 hours ago||
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.
vadansky 14 hours ago||
>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.

archi42 14 hours ago|
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.
ghosty141 13 hours ago|||
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
charcircuit 11 hours ago||
That is micro OLED and is more expensive than regular OLED.
asadotzler 13 hours ago|||
Several. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Meganex 8K, and more coming like Crystal Super / Dream Air.
koolala 3 hours ago||
LinuxVR on this + the Steam Machine will be awesome.
taeric 15 hours ago||
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.
dzonga 14 hours ago|
kudos to them for using AA batteries for the controller.

will help the hardware last longer. cz non-removable lithium batteries suck.

SchemaLoad 9 hours ago|
Maybe, but I've seen more controllers destroyed by AA batteries that leaked and corroded the contacts than internal batteries that failed.
arduinomancer 1 hour ago|||
I’ve never seen that in my entire life
jackvalentine 9 hours ago||||
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.

foresto 8 hours ago|||
Let me guess: were they alkaline batteries, left in the device while not in use for several weeks or months?
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