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Ask HN: VR/AR – Current State of the Art

4 points by Towaway69 ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I’m thinking of getting a Valve VR headset and was wondering if it’s on a par with the Quest headset?

Also I believe a Facebook account is a prerequisite for a Quest? Is there any such requirement for a Valve? I don’t want to get a headset that requires a social media account to run.

Any suggestions for alternative options?

Thanks in advance!

8 comments

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PaulHoule
You can use a Quest with a Quest account which is not linked to a Facebook account.

The Quest is a standalone headset that is basically an Android device, you can run applications and games on it, walk anywhere you want with it, etc. You can hook it up to a PC with a special cable and use it for PCVR

The Valve Index on the other hand is basically a monitor that you attach to your PC. It can support much bigger and graphically better experiences but you are always attached to your PC via a cable.

I don't know if it requires a Steam account, but the intention behind it is that you'll install games with Steam which requires an account.

Towaway69
Thanks for the explanation, Valve could actually be what I’m looking for.

I want to be using BabylonJS with the headset and won’t mind it connected to pc.

PaulHoule
You want the Valve, or secondly, the MQ3 with the PCVR cable.

The MQ3 has just 8GB of RAM (video & regular) some of which is eaten up by the web browser and operating system. The WebXR support is great but the memory limits really hurt. I've been wanting to make an art gallery with my stereograms and I'm sure that it's possible to make work on standalone but the texture memory is limited and I wanted to make a rich world I'd have to put a lot of effort into memory management. A friend of mine made a GLB model of a Mars rock which works fine on PCVR but is just too big to view on the MQ3.

Towaway69
Thanks for the heads up - that basically means my project would only work on the Valve or similar, i.e. PCVR.

The intention is to render (no complex textures) many pipes and objects in BabylonJS WebXR and be able to navigate that world using a VR headset. I've tried a smaller version on a Quest and basically it was not usable.

So at least my current approach will need a PC-backed VR headset.

LorenDB
Don't buy a Valve Index. It's pretty old at this point, and you'd be way better off getting a Bigscreen Beyond or PSVR2 if you just want tethered PCVR.

You might also want to look at https://vr-compare.com/ to help find headsets.

Towaway69
> You might also want to look at https://vr-compare.com/ to help find headsets.

Thanks so much for that, finally a complete overview of all possible options :+1:

LorenDB
Sure! If you have more questions, feel free to reach out: hn[at]lorendb[dot]dev
Towaway69
Thank you again, just sent you an reply :+1:

Ended up with the Quest 3S - probably the best combination between flexibility (standalone but PCVR possible), price and interoperability (seems to work on Linux with ALVR[1])

[1]: https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR