This does make me excited for the possibility, several years down the line of a Valve ARM Linux laptop with decent battery life. I wonder if anyone will rip out the compute unit out of the headset and try to use it as mini PC, just because you can, it seems like fun.
2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.
Quest 3 is cheap for the same reason that 80 inch TVs are sold at or below cost. If you value your privacy at zero and want to strap a surveilling, billboard on your face for pennies on the dollar be my guest.
This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.
I'm ready to pay it to not be forced into using Facebook's terrible desktop software that they frequently break the PC Link functionality of. The way it's Windows-only also sucks; it's one of the few things that's prevented me from switching my gaming PC to Linux.
And yes, I've tried third-party solutions like Virtual Desktop under Windows and ALVR under Linux. Even with some of the best WiFi 6E hardware available standing within 10ft of the router with the PC being wired into the network with ethernet, nothing has beat a tethered USB connection using the native Link functionality on my Quest 2.
Any SteamVR based solution fixes most of these issues and the Frame sounds like it might make wireless actually viable. Even if it doesn't, tethered with Valve software instead of with Facebook software is still a meaningful improvement.
The inability of Meta to write a simple working drivers to connect a USB cable from the Quest to my PC is probably the greatest opportunity for Valve here.
For some reason this never works on the Quest Pro I have (which I received for free from Meta). Works every time on the Pico 4 Ultra
Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.
Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.
> Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.
I'm on your side, but this kind of hyperbole weakens your argument. Tell me about the spyware in pytorch, react, zstd, or llama3.2:1b and how you shouldn't touch this except within a VM.
Took me a very small amount of time to figure out pytorch was a one man effort that actually was discouraged by Facebook initially, and the dev no longer works there
A charitable reading would be that gp is talking about products from Facebook where they have the technological ability to abuse you in whatever way they want, and not open source projects that they happen to have had some involvement in but which are fully auditable and known not to contain spyware.
Not having to faff about with Meta's developer program or whatever to side load my own homebrew stuff, and then get locked out, then have to do whatever hoop jumping six months later, is a huge bonus. I have an OG Quest 1 and the damn thing needs a new copy of meta quest ...whatever, installed every 2 weeks if I want to use it. It's exhausting.
There's an incredibly simple product case I think HN is missing: I bought a Vive and then an Index. This has higher resolution than the Index, lower mass (even with a battery!), and easier setup that can enable more spontaneous use. In addition, I now get the benefits of "standalone" headsets that I previously did not think were worth hundreds of dollars on their own.
Am I paying $1000 for a minor improvement? Yes. It's a hobby. It costs money sometimes. I don't do this for nearly anything else, like phones that other people seem fine for paying $1000 every other year. I expect this device to last until another 6 years when I can justify spending another $1000 on another iterative improvement. Similarly, I may spend $1000 on a new setup for simracing soon.
Spending $6k on a gaming PC, a VR headset, and wheels and pedals is an experience you otherwise cannot get. I would spend money on VR even if it only worked with one or two driving games and nothing else. For those of us in that niche, VR has been anything but a "Failure", that business people seem convinced it is because it couldn't be the next "Platform" to put an app store on.
But, that's the market for VR. It's a niche toy for people with expendable income. It's not a mass market to rival the smartphone.
The price is basically the same as the Index was at launch 7 years ago. With the devaluing of the currency, the increase in specs and capabilities, and the current component suppy crisis, it is a deal. Adjusted for inflation the Index would cost $1300 today, which now gets you a Frame with 1TB of internal storage.
Right, in terms of hardware and price, I've always been tempted by the Meta Quest, but the ecosystem and the fact that it's locked down has always been the major blocker for me. It does suck that this more than twice as much (although some of it is obviously the current surge pricing), but for hardware that I own, it's well worth it.
There is much more - people use it to communicate (VRchat), visit 3D scans of real places (3D Gaussian splatting) or see future concepts, like space colonies or massive starship concepts from their won PoV. Really, a lot of stuff is happening & possible with modern VR. :)
The quality can varies a lot, so I suggest checking for number of favorites & visits to see the best scanned worlds or to go by author once you find the good ones. :)
In general, 3D gaussian splatting is not the only way you can use to reproduce a real world location in VR - you can also just do it manually, modeling the structure & possibly using textures from photos. A good example of such manual reconstruction is Gion Street from Fins:
https://vrclist.com/world/859459
As for trying it out - all of the VRchat worlds can be explored in flat screen mode on a PC & VRChat can be installed from Steam or from their website. VRChat is also free, so the only thing needed is to register & it is possible to just use a Steam account as well.
Then just get one of the URLs & there is a launch URL. Alternatively you can search the worlds by name from the VRChat UI. :)
No, but take other applications with a grain of salt. Everybody gets excited about the idea of having a dozen large virtual monitors floating around your desk, but even really great resolution has just not been good enough to make those displays look crisp. Also, a lot of folks still get pretty bad headaches when they use VR or AR. So MOSTLY it's for games and movies, but people remain convinced that there's a big killer app here somewhere that we just need to figure out.
I appreciate that the review goes into the privacy issues and legal disclaimers with each. I don't doubt that everyone expects the Meta product to be much worse there, but wow it's a stark contrast.
Meta are objectively worse than Valve because Valve don't allow or offer advertising services, but that's really only part of the privacy story each app/game usually has its own data collection and usage on top.
Plus Valve also says they don't sell any data the collect to anyone else.
But the idea that games have data collection outside of the platform (e.g., Steam) is surprising to me. Would this be VR games only or a particular type of game, like ones with online multiplayer? I don't own a VR headset and don't really play multiplayer games these days. Of the games I have played (mostly indie), I've come across very few that have a EULA or anything that would imply any data collection of any sort.
It's nothing to do with VR in particular. This is the top-10 from https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US, half of them are collecting data to share (and one to sell) to advertisers. The fact that this is surprising you is kind of the point, Valve's not providing enough transparency or doing enough (any?) policing of this. You won't even find the disclosures in the EULAs, at best they link to a separate privacy policy.
"In the last 12 months, Take-Two has sold and/or shared unique identifiers, IP address, as well as Internet/Electronic Activity and Profile Inferences with third-party advertising providers to enable us to provide personalized advertising to you and others like you. We may sell or share personal information about users that we know are under the age of 18 (or older, in certain locations) with their (or depending on age, their parent's) settings or permission."
"Some advertising we engage in may be “targeted advertising,” which is the practice of showing you more relevant or personalized ads based on your activity over time and across non-affiliated services. Targeted advertising often involves us incorporating third party tracking technologies into our Service or disclosing (often hashed) identifiers, such as email addresses or Ad IDs, with third parties. These third parties then match our data with their own (or their partners’ data) to deliver ads to you or similar audiences. For example, we may incorporate the Meta pixel on our website to serve ads to Meta audiences based on the data we provide.
We also use audience modeling services, where we and a partner each disclose (often hashed) identifiers to a technology provider. The technology provider then matches common factors between our and the partner’s data to help us understand audience overlap and improve campaign performance."
"We disclose this personal information to: Online marketing or advertising partners including on our mobile games These partners may combine this personal information with information that they have collected about you when you use their services (or the websites and services of third parties) to personalize your experience or to improve the accuracy of their analytics, targeting, and measurement systems."
"We also may share information relating to your device and your use of our Services with our third-party advertising partners so they may deliver targeted adverti...
Thanks for breaking that down. I actually did think on Steam that if there was anything like this Steam would mark it as having a EULA. I don't tend to play games from big companies like that, but the use and sale of your info when you don't even agree to or even know about it is disturbing. All this stuff should be marked up front before you even purchase or interact with the game.
I do hope Valve's work on ARM64 for this, alongside improvements to performance in Honeykrisp, make for a dramatically better experience with Linux on Apple Silicon Macs.
They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.
If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go.
With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.
Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes?
Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.
Im not too familiar with the term Glasshole, but on long dark plane rides, if I want to use my laptop I feel like a lighthouse, even with lowest screen brightness. If I look like a dork with it on while doing some light gaming or movie watching, that is an OK price to pay to not disturb others around me. But if you are talking about just general out in public, then it absolutely gives dorky vibes. On the train, or in a coffee shop or something, a laptop just looks much less conspicuous.
Is the Glasshole thing more geared towards recording people in public? This headset has 1. bad cameras but 2. a much better privacy posture than meta.
The Glasshole thing comes from when Google Glasses were new (sort of the ancestor to the modern Meta pervert glasses). When you saw someone wearing Google Glasses, you could see the camera pointed at you and that the screen was on and doing stuff. It made a lot of people uncomfortable.
What's icky about taking a laptop down to the park and getting some work done while surrounded by nature?
Although, I do agree, I would find it odd to go down to the park and see someone wandering around with a VR headset tuning out the world and waving controllers around. I'm more addressing the "cowork in public spaces" part of that. I think their statement about "while traveling" is more like while seated on a several hour plane trip or relaxing at a hotel or things along those lines. Not like wearing the device while ordering a latte or something along those lines.
I don't really get the ick about wearing these kinds of things in public, but, having tried to wear XR glasses in public has shown me that the bigger issue is that these things are at a whole other level of distracting compared even to phones. It'd probably be worse with a full face headset, since at least with glasses you have your full field of view.
Even despite pinning the display in a corner, I noticed I was very distracted when crossing streets. Made me stop wearing them like that, instead prefering to carry them in my backpack and use them on train rides or flights.
At least with my phone I can just slip it back in my pocket when I need to pay attention to my surroundings.
I don't think using a display when walking around is a good idea or even just safe to do. On the other hand, I think it makes perfect sense to have something a like a fighter jet HUD - important information in static places (time/location/notification status/etc.) with possibly some highlights (showing where is the next bus in AR, annotating things when you look at them, seamless translation of text, etc.).
Yeah, I used to think that it'd be fine if the content was pinned off screen but turns out it's worse because I find myself looking away from where I'm walking.
The “glasshole” vibe wasn’t antisocial; it was an understandably human reaction to the fact that you couldn’t tell whether the wearer (and/or google) was surveilling or recording you any time they so much as glanced in your direction in public.
That depends. Having had a Quest 2 and dealt...nay, put up with with Meta and their god awful ecosystem you couldn't pay me to touch another one of their headsets. I'll take an open linux based one over a Q3 any day. That alone makes the price difference worth it to me. Throw in the foveated streaming and the vastly superior quality and latency of streaming and it makes for a fairly decent offering.
Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.
HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.
TBH in terms of intensity it maybe the best single-player game for me. The experience is so different from non-VR games that I struggle to even put it into the same category.
I suspect that the current design of VR/AR is not likely to get cheap enough and light/small enough to catch on in a big way. Kind of seems like diminishing returns on headset improvements at this point.
The Xreal augmented reality sunglasses type designs look a lot more interesting. I’m sure they sacrifice a lot of visual quality compared to a full gaming headset, but the general pitch makes more sense.
Those are the ones I am keeping an eye on most closely. In a few generations they might be where they need to be for a "floating monitors" experience in AR.
Just my two cents, Xreal is a long way from a good product. There are other brands like Viture to consider which have more support for the limited software solutions out there. Make sure you do some looking into whether they are compatible with your setup. Or if any of the various features will work without buying additional hardware from the manufacturer.
The race/flight sim market is still going strong, but I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. It's extremely difficult to make a non-vehicle-based game that actually plays well in VR.
Incidentally I made a vehicle based game in VR (https://roguestargun.com), but currently I have no idea how to upload the APK to Steam to run on-device for the steam frame.
I'm looking forward to the modding community finally having full, unfettered access to a single hardware deploy target that will allow them to do a lot of interesting work that may be technically possible right now, but is very hard in a complicated and heterogeneous ecosystem, both because it is technically difficult to set up, and because the technical difficulty of doing the set up prevents any community from getting over the activation energy to grow and become self-sustaining.
In particular, I don't know if the Steam Frame will have the power for this, but something like a native ARM build of Dolphin (so no FEX) that exposes the 3D nature of polygonal games is very interesting to me. If you can cross your eyes to get stereo you can see what that would look like for something like Super Mario 3D Galaxy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgdqCL2toE (I find a conventional, unfolding phone to be a pretty good size for that. On a big monitor getting it small enough to cross eyes can be a challenge.) In general any emulation target that has 3D polygons is really interesting to me. I'm also pretty interested in what full 3D does to Skies of Arcadia (could be a complete disappointment, could be absolutely amazing) and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, where I feel like the game that was a bit crowded and struggling with being 2D in SD might just come alive. (Assuming they didn't play too many games with the distance that doesn't work if we see it in true 3D.)
I gather the modding community is already gearing up for modding more games to be true 3D in the VR space. That is, not necessarily VR (though there's a mod community for that as well), but having a visible screen floating in 3D VR space where the screen itself is fully 3D. There is also a wide variety of games from the past couple of decades that I suspect might be very difficult to "convert to VR" but might be relatively easy to trick into rendering full 3D instead of down to 2D.
Nothing really stops any of this from happening now, but I've tried to set it up before and I was unsuccessful with my current stack. Being able to give out instructions that say "Install the Dolphin3D Build from the Flatpak Store and load up your ROMs" rather than the current set of ad hoc complex instructions that I couldn't even get through successfully could be a game changer.
I will giggle like a schoolgirl if the reason why Steam Frames sell like hot cakes in six to twelve months is that they become recognized as the premier way to emulate 3D systems from the Playstation forward. Overclocking, texture packs, modding, all that's great, but how about all those things and true 3D for a lot of games?
Gonna try it out on my m1 mbp because of this comment. Been waiting to play alyx forever but I didn't know a way to get mac to work - theres a solution now.
Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.
Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.
Admittedly my VR glasses are older, but for me this is a really terrible experience. If a game lacks native VR support, it's far more comfortable to just use my widescreen monitor in the real world.
I'd agree even if the resolution is closer to a real monitor I'd really rather not have a headset strapped to my face to play the same games I could play on a tv or monitor.
Agreed, I think that's the big selling point: a private screen you can take with you.
But the Steam Frame specifically is not well suited for this. Something more minimal like the Big Screen Beyond 2 would be better, and XR-type glasses (like those from Viture) which present as standard monitors would be better still.
Same. I'd say it's ridiculous to even mention it as a feature, it's more like a compatibility fallback. A shitty monitor showing an even shittier monitor while you have a fat brick strapped to your face. Maybe this gen is better, but from what people say the practical hardware changes are very minimal.
No, you need a much higher res screen to do so. A 4k screen a meter away will have ridiculously higher pixel density per degree of vision than a 2K screen directly in front of your eye that will only ever be able to do very partial coverage. The effective angular res of the virtual screen would probably be comparable to 1080p at best. In Norm's review it's said that the default render res for flat screen is 720p.
There's a lot of mods (espescially for Unreal) that can graft VR support onto it, I'd say that's a more viable use case than virtual theatre screen.
I used to do this back in the day with VorpX. Playing the original bioshock via that was an incredible experience, seeing all the environmental storytelling. Utterly terrifying too.
Just used my Vision Pro nonstop on a 9hr flight. It’s a game changer for travel; you disappear into a private movie theater and come out at your destination.
Despite that experience that I’ve heard is lovely, it does compete with the $300 used iPad Air I bought years ago.
The screen on a used iPad Air really doesn’t look half bad, it is far smaller and lighter in a bag, and it can play movies for that entire flight without needing an external battery.
Although, speaking of used devices, the Vision Pro is looking delightfully depreciated on eBay.
It is 21.6 Wh capacity and charges at up to 45W, so it should take less than half an hour to fully charge from zero. Not sure where you got the 3-5 hours from?
On the GamersNexus review Valve says charging should take 90 minutes. But it took GamersNexus and other reviewers 3 hours. So it probably broke in a software update and a fix is likely coming. But if this is important to you, make sure to wait for the update to land before making a decision...
Reviews say around 4 hours when streaming anything from a desktop PC (game or otherwise), 1 hour is if you're gaming directly on the device with the graphics turned all the way up.
For the Quest 3 for example, you can get a Bobovr halo strap that has replaceable magnetically connected battery packs. If you have at least two, you can just swap them when one runs out and by the time the second one is empty, the first one is charged.
IIRC Valve is going to release something similar in a couple months & I am sure there will be other accessory developers chiming in as well. :)
It depends on the person. I can wear my Index on my head for like all day. I'm not sure what my longest Elite: Dangerous session was, but it was quite long. Other people find the same headset to be either too heavy or improperly balanced for wearing more than an hour or so at a time.
As far as motion sickness goes, it has been my experience that you can train yourself out of it. Recommendations:
1) If it doesn't do bad things to you, consume some Dramamine beforehand.
2) Don't play games that launch you through the air or otherwise induce a lot of mismatch between your virtual motion and your physical motion. Seated piloting (car or otherwise) games are one big exception to this recommendation, as most folks have a lot of brain training with "I'm sitting in a vehicle that's moving me around.", so one's brain doesn't freak out so much when presented with those visuals.
3) When you start getting nauseous, stop immediately. If you're still game, come back to play after the nausea is gone, but not before.
Newbies will attempt to power through the nausea, but it's not something you can power through... you'll just make it way worse, which sets back the whole "Convince your stupid brain that the minor mismatches between the visuals and the inner-ear sensations are not the result of poisoning, so it doesn't need to make you puke your toenails off" training that you're doing by easing into this and -if possible- using OTC anti-nausea drugs.
[0] For me, Dramamine is very helpful to prevent motion sickness.
Everyone I'm aware of adapts to it eventually unless they keep trying to power through the nausea. It's the basis for my
...which sets back the whole "Convince your stupid brain that the minor mismatches between the visuals and the inner-ear sensations are not the result of poisoning, so it doesn't need to make you puke your toenails off" training that you're doing...
statement. Having said that, I haven't met everyone... so it's totally possible that there are people who will never adapt.
My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.
And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.
Honestly as a VR enthusiast this is the least interesting feature by far.
If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.
Man GeForce now is surprisingly stable/smooth. I barely use it now (built a PC) but I got the $5 founders rate and have no intention of getting rid of it
Sorry I thought you were talking about the half-life ports.
I played the original "Luke Ross" Cyberpunk port but it was pretty horrible due to his mediocre alternate eye rendering and the lack of controller support.
I saw the new mod (dariulone?) but I didn't yet install it because it comes with a huge list of dependencies of other mods to install and I haven't had time for all that. I'm kinda hoping he makes a quick installer that packages everything :)
Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.
Honestly, with apps like Immersed, custom two-hand keyboards, and trackball mice, it is already feasible to lie comatose in bed with a VR headset strapped to your face and get through an entire day of software development.
I don’t know. I can’t even take a nap while having my glasses on, so the thought of lying down with a much weightier VR headset pressing down on my face doesn’t sound super comfortable.
> I know lots … and lots … of people that sleep in VR.
Funny how demographics work. I don't know a lot of people who use VR. In fact I don't know a single person who is remotely interested in that very niche technology.
I have an "image sorter" web application that works great on desktop, tablets, phones and... my meta quest 3. I can bum around the spare room on the couch and have three big windows hanging in the air. If your "click" targets conform with WCAG AAA standards such an app is easy to use with controllers.
It's particularly fun to watch 3d movies with the headset but with several decent TVs in the house I'd watch movies most of the time with one of them.
I don’t see that as the biggest point. I really don’t have much interest in playing normal games in VR.
I could see how a kid might want that on Quest when they don’t have their own TV. And it might be nice on a plane.
But $1000 is a lot for that. I know people say that watching video in the Vision Pro is really nice, I wasn’t that thrilled when I tried it, but it felt to me more like a “you can do this because you have the hardware“ not a“ this is why you buy it” feature.
Also only possible if you've got a power outlet (Surprisingly even today many long haul flights do not) as its only got just over an hour of battery life.
It has a 21.6 Wh battery. You can easily get a power bank 3+ times this capacity, thus can last 4x longer. If anything, I would rather have that weight in my pocket or backpack than on my head, all things considered.
Anecdotal, but on the last few flights that I've taken. I was told that you can use them, but you can't charge them on the flight. This was inside the US, American Airlines, and United. I can't speak to the other airlines.
The question here is whatever Steam Frame displays resolution is sufficient to work with text. So far only mass produced device that was really suitable is a Vision Pro.
So far all reviews I've seen been centered around gaming and not work.
I have tried this in the past and it wasn’t nearly sharp enough but I guess I see people using 1080p screens at work and those make me want to rip my eyeballs out.
For me personally the Quest 3 is absolutely unusable for any text work. Even small font in games looks shitty. This is so far off for what it ought to be for comfortable work that I'll wait for devices with at least double the resolution per axis, i.e. 4x the pixels of the Quest 3 screens to even bother trying again.
Edit: And I'm writing this on a 32" 2560x1440 display which looks just dandy to me, so it's not like I'm super sensitive or have above average eyesight (quite the opposite actually)
I guess from the comments we can draw conclusion that its different to everyone.
I had Quest 3 for a few months to play games and I feel okay playing, but every time I tried to open IDE and terminal after 10 minutes my brain just say full stop. I tried different fonts, themes and zoom levels, but it just feel wrong.
I feel similar feeling of discomfort as if I try to work on something not in computer in low light in real world. Might be it have something to do with my bad eyesight.
I honestly did not tested AVP enough. Its just good enough for me not to immediately want to stop using it, but again I have no idea what would really happen after a week of use for 3 hours. I did it once for a few hours and it felt amazing, but its Apple and there lots of other reasons not to buy their locked down hardware.
> every time I tried to open IDE and terminal after 10 minutes my brain just say full stop.
I'm wondering if it is because the screen was "flat" in front of you and you had no possibility to change your perspective. It would be interesting if the IDE had been in 3D space and you would look at it as if it was on your desk, capturing head movements etc.
This is certainly interesting idea, but I guess main problem isnt just UX and representation on 2D surface, but just pure amount of text data that you suppose to look at and understand what exactly it does.
When you have fiction or game dialogue text there is good bunch skimming going on so you dont care about every single symbol and or digit. So eyes dont get stuck looking at specific parts of text.
So yeah its very much possible that using VR as a virtual monitor setup it's just wrong aproach and there have to be paradigm shift in how we interact with dev environment to use it efficiently in VR.
It is said that human eyes can resolve down to 1 minute of arc(1 MOA or 1/60 degrees). Each eye has about 160 degrees of HFOV and 125 degrees of VFOV.
From there, you can work out requisite resolution for desktop replacing VR googles: 11K per eye.
The catch is that human eyes actually only have
~1 degree of full resolution area and ~30 degree of active area, and the full 200 degree HFOV is only realized by moving them around and subconsciously compositing images, so most of panels can bee left unlit, in theory.
But the panel resolution requirements is the same, and our technologies are just not there to make a true desktop replacement VR goggle, yet.
In constrained plane environments https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini works well and has long battery life. I fix the screen to the seat using adapted helping hands and use a wireless keyboard/mouse for input. Super comfy as long as your eyes can deal with the reduced distance (look down the aisle occasionally).
Magnifying style shop glsssed might actually be perfect for this. I use them for electronics repair (they also only focus close which is sort of a benefit here). Downside for me is they fit in a way that is too high (they are designed for looking straight ahead) that would be great for this
Maybe better for a train; the benefit is that when you unfold your bike for the last mile, you just put your work into partial transparency and navigate using the external cameras.
For me it's more that flights are extremely boring. I find watching any movies or TV shows on a plane to be a horrible experience. The noise of the plane can ruin even the best of movies.
Using it while flying will be complicated by the fact that all airlines have banned the use of power banks. If the onboard USB socket isn't very powerful then you'll only get an hours' use.
I can confirm that all the flights I have been on this year we were told not to use power banks. You can have one with you (well you have to since you're not allowed to check large lithium ion batteries) but you aren't allowed to actively use it.
100 W sockets? All the flights I've been on that provided power have had a really low current USB A port that can barely keep my phone from discharging when the screen is on.
I've flown on half a dozen different airlines this year and all have had exactly the same stance: no power banks in checked luggage, and if they're in hand luggage you must be able to see them at all times (not in overhead storage).
You're also not allowed to use them even if you do have them with you. This is all very strictly enforced with reminders at the check-in desk and several announcements before take-off.
Being able to comfortably sit back / lie down and work is an interesting proposition. The Apple Vision Pro is too bulky and expensive to carry that whole category on its own, they need an 'Android equivalent'. But I think Apple messed this up by creating an absolute patent minefield (some 5k patents for AVP features iirc).
That's the samsung galaxy xr which is cheaper and lighter but it's not good enough run high resolution content for long periods without thermal throttling
The thing is, the AVP has a ton of quality-of-life features, eg relating to gestures, and most of them locked behind patents. Looks like we'll have to wait 20 years before other devices will be able to match it (or whatever the expiry date on those patents).
afaik the AVP has a dedicated Lidar sensor for gesture detection. I'd say Apple has managed to patent more basic stuff than that (pinch-to-zoom, rounded corners,...)
That’s how it works with the Quest 3 on an updated OS. If you’re using hand tracking then you gaze + tap thumb and finger together to select, or pinch and hold to grab a corner for resizing or a border for dragging.
Step 1: Someone builds hardware with lots of capabilities because of the hardware it includes, even if they aren't capitalized on by the manufacturer or the software provider. Importantly, it's easy to run your own hardware on it.
Step 2: Open source projects implement whatever they want. Preferably, they provide a framework that allows high extensibility, if the software provider didn't already.
Step 3: People download and install open source plugins that violate stupid patents. It's still a patent violation, but as long as the people providing it aren't profiting monetarily, the ability to recoup damages from lost profits or royalties is very hard.
There's some nuance there, and different ways it could (and should) be done to avoid most consequences, but not so long ago (maybe still?) people commonly combined codecs and software from different parties for ffmpeg, which to get around some issues with distribution refused to compile the source and provide a binary, because that would make them a target, but just the source didn't (to a greater or lesser degree).
Where there's a will there's a way, and if a company is going to obtain stupidly simple patents which they often claim is to keep other companies at bay, we can put that to the test. If they go after individuals for usage, pressure them.
If we're lucky, what we're seeing is an ebb and flow between open source and the companies that capitalize on it, and we're in the ebb. I'm hoping for the flow.
In this case however, many of the patents have a hardware element to them. Gaze+tap is powered by an inside camera to track eye movements and a Lidar sensor at the bottom of the rim for motion detection. Not sure your playbook would work out there.
That's the "someone builds hardware with lots of capabilities because of the hardware it includes" aspect. The patent isn't on including a camera and lidar, it's how they're combined and used, and that's often software, or can be emulated at a cost in software. As a manufacturer you can't be sued for including non-patented hardware components that have other uses. Foveated rendering uses inside cameras too. Lidar sensors are useful for better hand and spatial tracking overall. Combining them with software that performs a specific purpose utilizing them is what seems to be patented here.
Well, I hope you're going to be right. My gut feeling, however, is that putting all the little bits that make up the AVP experience together would already have been too much to ask from other manufacturers in the absence of any patents. Just like how we can't seem to get Mac-quality hardware from other manufacturers even at Apple's (somewhat ridiculous) price points (and I say that as someone who doesn't like Apple for its proprietary practices). So the chances that someone is going to deliver a similar quality product, or arguably we'd require something even better (less bulky), in the hope of some gray-zone playbook to work out, don't seem great.
> Just like how we can't seem to get Mac-quality hardware from other manufacturers
I don't have too much experience with them, but I thought the ultrabook category was the answer of the rest of the market to the Air, at least.
I'm not sure the problem is that nobody makes the quality hardware, but that maybe it's just as pricey and that nobody trusts the companies that do the same as they do Apple to buy it at a large premium. Many companies have the ability to put together something of a similar quality and sell it (even if not at quite the profit, still probably some profit), but are you going to trust an Asus or MSI product that costs the same as the equivalent Apple product to have the same quality? Perception is important here. MSI or Asus could put out something better than Apple if they wanted to and didn't care about the cost, but I doubt anyone would actually believe that it was better even if they did (and even if they like it initially, they may suspect it won't hold up over time). Such is the power of the brand Apple has built, and that's in many ways more important than the actual quality they provide.
I'm looking forward to the day when we can implant a chip in our neck that will override the senses. Imagine having your body doing a hard workout session while your mind was at work or on vacation
If you think this is a joke and humanity can’t be that evil then look up the the „Brookes Ship“
> Brookes was reportedly allowed to stow 454 African captives, by allowing a space of 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man, 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each woman, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child. However, the poster's text alleges that a slave trader confessed that before the Act, Brookes had carried as many as 609 captives at one time.
The issue is that magnifying the screens to fill your vision makes reasonably sized text very hard to read. You have to make the entire screen/text in front of you fairly large to make it legible. There are many other headsets with identical resolution panels, you can find this info everywhere
This is one of the main selling points for me. I threw my CV1 in the trash when facebook required a login. I want to see what OpenXR apps are like. Is freecad and blender usable? I want to tinker with gaussian splatting. When finger tracking starts to develop can I reasonably use it for input without controllers? Could this ever be a practical replacement for a six monitor desk?
Also, my simracing seat has been very lonely. I'm so happy that there is an HMD running arch that gives the user root.
far from claiming they are as low as meta, but that is their business model which never gets mentioned in this comparison, leaving readers to confuse gabe newel with RMS as some freedom authority
DRM isn't really the story with Valve. Their business model is offer good service. Part of that is not being hostile to users. Users don't want to be spied on and have their data sold, so Valve doesn't do that. People want autonomy over their hardware, so they give them that. It's even in their marketing material for the steam machine. The frame is a computer running arch. If you want to 100% opt out of Steam and write your own driver stack, they're not standing in your way. That is uniquely pro-user and freedom in the tech industry. Also, their open source initiatives with proton and fex should not be discounted.
If there's a morally grey stone to turn over then imo it's the not-gambling-wink-microtransactions and even then it's no more predatory than what is common in the gaming industry.
There is a real danger if Valve ever gets sold in bad hands - the only hope is Gabe Newell living long enough or find a good successor who can continue having a majority stake in the company.
valve service is terrible!
they just have first mover monopoly advantage. absolutely fan boyism thinking they have good service.
steam was and always will be awful. they just publish whatever the game studio sends them. try installing gta V from steam... you get Two Launchers besides steam! all three ad ridden.
Valve’s DRM is just about the least invasive and easiest to crack DRM systems on the market. The only way to be less invasive is to not have DRM at all. Obviously that’s preferable, but Valve’s setup is one that keeps publishers on the platform: provide a basic DRM system and allow publishers to add more if they want. If you don’t like what someone like Ubisoft does on the platform you’ve got plenty of other options (and third party DRM is clearly labeled within Steam).
I don’t think people see Gabe Newell the way you describe. They just appreciate that Valve makes business decisions that have basic respect for their customer base. They are fully aware that he’s a billionaire yacht aficionado.
> Valve’s DRM is just about the least invasive and easiest to crack DRM systems on the market.
In fact, their own documentation spells this out specifically[0]:
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
Valves bread and butter has been their distribution channel. Before Valve, there was no major player that provided a seamless gaming download experience. Anyone who’ve gamed in early 2000s understand the pain point of downloading and correctly installing patches from a daemon site.
As much as I like gog and their game distribution model and buy most games there, this is a huge exaggeration and actually false. A game studio/publisher does not have to use DRM in steam and many of them don't. Examples are Larian (baldur's gate 3), cd project red (witcher, cyberpunk), and quite a few small and big studios that don't. Basically afaik most games that are in both gog and steam don't have DRM in steam. DRM is far from steam's fault, it is game studios/publishers that have pushed that, long before steam too.
And the built-in Steam DRM is laughably easy to bypass once you've bought the game, IIRC - just a small thing that responds with fake user id + license status.
No, EA etc decide to ship adware launchers and steam distributes them.
Plenty studios do not ship adware launchers, and steam does not inject adware into them or anything. Even if steam gets percentage from the ads or whatever (I dont even know if this is the case) EA anyway ships the same adware outside steam.
I do not like this but let's blame it to the ones actually doing it, than the ones that dont oppose it.
Blender works in VR (using any OpenXR compatible headset). To view scenes in VR, you can use the free built-in VR Scene Inspector addon. To edit and create scenes in VR, you can use the Freebird XR addon for Blender (https://freebirdxr.com/).
Fingers crossed for OpenXR working properly in Steam Frame! In which case Blender and other OpenXR-compatible apps will work too.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of Freebird XR, a VR editing addon for Blender.
Looking at the vendor page for that 5K colour camera, the page directly says they only support Windows and macOS. :( :( :(
> The Arcturus Vision apps include Arcturus Vision Camera for recording and playing 5K HDR spatial video, Arcturus Vision Gaussian XR for exploring 3D Gaussian splats, and Sync for transferring recordings to Windows or Mac (with conversion for other players on Mac).
It's an open Linux box, using standard interfaces. You can use ffmpeg and scp to transcode and transfer, or whatever else you're comfortable with. Even if Arcturus provided an app, most Linux users probably wouldn't use it.
I agree except for disparaging the AVP as not being a real computer while the steam frame is.
One lets you one-tap download native Microsoft Office, one runs it through a browser or via bespoke vm/wine configuration.
Instead, I'd say the difference is that both are consumer devices, AVP geared primarily toward computing while steam frame is geared primarily toward gaming, but the steam frame is open enough for you to develop upon and customize to meet whatever use case you desire.
Let's ignore that fact that you're saying "this isn't just a VR device" and then immediately describe the basic functionality of a VR device.
You really think people have been waiting to drop $1k for a device that lets them play games designed for a monitor inside of a headset rendering a larger virtual monitor with all of the additional complexity that brings?
For those priced out of getting an AVP at more than 3x the price on locked down hardware? You don't seem to think that market exists, but I think it does. $3,500 and Apple, or whatev but Facebook are total non-starters for some people while Valve and Linux are.
Yes, this ability at this price point is very attractive indeed. I currently do this with Vision Pro, but it involves a mac and a capture card in addition to the steam deck.
I was really hoping to realise the "Spatial Computing" dream of the Vision Pro, but was largely priced-out of the experience, considering it basically necessitates a MacBook to complete it too.
I would wager a simple browser and terminal session is probably all I need, so was looking forward to this device. However, the screen resolution is likely to be too small, I had done some experiments with Virtual Desktop, but the Rift S was too low-res, everything had to be like 48pt.
Reviews showing the desktop being fully accessible, does give quite a bit of hope, however.
I have both a Rift S and a Quest 3. The Quest 3's displays and optics blow the Rift out of the water! I've used it for coding using Immersed, and would be happy to use equivalent or slightly better (as the Steam Frame should be) for this purpose.
You can do this really well on $200 AR headsets that fit on your face like sunglasses and uses the battery of the device it's plugged into to last many hours.
If this is the biggest point, then I don't see why Xreal isn't more popular.
I think its performance is quite underappreciated. It has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
I have a tiny handheld with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and among many other things it plays GTA V and RDR2 almost perfectly, using FEX nonetheless. And because it's arm, battery life is so much better than on my laptop that I use it as a tiny mini linux laptop now.
I remember playing this on my Oculus Rift 1 I think. It was such a better game than the other games I'd played in VR that had you put it on my head in a darkened room and told me it was the newest hardware tech I would have believed you.
Just the metaphors and "magnetics" for fiddling and dealing with your gun were so good. The conveyance system was also just so much more intuitive. I think they even seemed to have done something to deal with the very mild nausea I felt with some title.
It's pretty good, but it would have been good enough as a non-VR title. The thought of digging out my VR headset to play it makes me shudder. I never even managed to finish it, played through most of it and then couldn't bring myself to get my VR headset out again.
I think without the VR-bait parts like the starting room I would consider it to be the worst Half-Life game. There were some people trying to make it run without VR but I don't remember how far they got.
For good reason. Last time I checked (this year), Alyx crashes Mesa (i.e. your Vulkan layer) when the player enters an in-game load zone. This happens with native linux and the proton windows version.
It doesn't just crash Mesa but freeze the entire GPU last I tried. Kinda surprised that Valve has cared so little to fix this considering how much effort they have been putting in those drivers and into the game in the first place.
I have a recommendation in a similar vein: Gran Turismo 7 in VR on PS5. I have a headseat graveyard and never really used my headsets except for that game. I've heard good things about Half-Life Alyx and now your comment has me absolutely intrigued.
Simulation games in general reached a whole other level with VR, just the added depth perception makes it impossible to go back to "flat" screens again. The degree of freedom to move your head to look around is underrated as well.
I dove into VR first with X-Plane 11 I think, which was janky at best, but nowadays Microsoft Flight Simulator has really good VR mode, and it's just such a great experience. Spaceflight simulators like Elite Dangerous are quite fun as well, but harder to relate to, so seems my brain doesn't get as fooled as more "real life sims".
Idk. After having THREE Quest 3s brick themselves within the extended warranty period, I really want an alternative. I can do normal cardio but rhythm games like Beat Saber and more are just such a better time of knocking out a decent hour of cardio several times a week for me. Beat Saber is more easily modded on PC and while the number of games I play is really low, this is worth it for me.
Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS.
Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently.
I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home.
There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset only a month ago.
Tangentially related: If I wanted to play Half-Life: Alyx, and spend as little money as possible whilst still having a good experience, what do I need? (I already own a beefy desktop computer)
I played it with a Quest 1 and VirtualDesktop to steam it from my PC. It worked well enough to blow my mind. Of course a Quest 3 would be much better than that nowadays. That's probably the cheapest good experience.
Probably Quest 3S, and unless things have improved with the native solution you'll want to pick up the "Virtual Desktop" app for better wireless streaming.
It's not very good resolution by today's standards but it's the cheap entry point. Quest 3 (non-S) has resolution comparable to the Steam Frame but costs $250 more.
If you only want to use it for streaming, you might look a used Quest 2, which has similar optics and screens as the 3S. I'm not sure the state of software support or whether its worse CPU/GPU matter for streaming performance. But I bet they're very cheap secondhand by now.
Quest 1, the built in native streaming, with a wired connection from the beefy desktop to a WiFi 5 AP on 5 GHz in a low noise environment worked sufficiently. I'd get at least a Quest 2 if you're getting something new (not sure if the 3 is better than the 2).
I played it with Playstation VR2 and it was great, cost me around 350 euros for the headset and the PC dongle during black friday some years ago, but it might be more expensive now.
I played a few hours of Alyx and, I'll be honest, it started to kinda freak me out. I noticed myself getting a bit of anxiety when putting the headset on to play, and a relief when I took it off to see the real world was still there! I've never experienced something so immersive, but I haven't picked it back up to finish it yet. Someday.
I also still mini golf regularly. It's such a fun, low effort way to hang out with friends and family that we wouldn't otherwise see all that often.
Even though its fairly cartoonish, when you see the life size gore of dead bodies with face huggers on them, etc - it hits really different in VR, at least at first.
Now imagine how intense that will become with even more realism. It could be actually seriously traumatic.
I used to feel like that when I was younger and playing intense games, it was hard to "get out" and "come back to real life". I guess VR brings some of that back.
You can even run Half-Life Alyx on Steam Frame itself (standalone mode), albeit at around 36FPS according to Tested https://youtu.be/C9JyWAVj94E?t=3330
SteamVR's frame interpolation and warping is extremely well-polished. I would go into VRChat clubs, enable everyone's full-detail avatar, and I could go down to about 20fps with head tracking still feeling comfortable. Not sure if the onboard processors can do as good of a job though.
I had the Quest 2 a while ago and did manage to play some games on it (PCVR through Virtual Desktop, cause they didn't have 1st party support for Intel Arc B580).
In regards to shooting games, while some of them were nice (especially modded H3VR, all of the guns you could build etc.), the shooting and movement always felt off - rounds not always going where you'd think they should regardless of the game, aiming being a bit clunky especially with scopes and so on, same with some RPG combat games. I also tried out Into the Radius VR, CONVRGENCE, SUPERHOT VR and Zero Caliber VR. There was something weird going on, like the world scale feeling off and even when adjusting through the SteamVR options, the experience still being odd, no matter what IPD or height offsets or other settings I'd try. Never really got used to it.
But let me tell you, vehicle games were on another level. It's perhaps the best way to fly in War Thunder because the proper depth perception completely changes the feel of it (if they'd fix the damn camera, I don't want to break my neck trying to look far back), same with VTOL VR and racing games like Dirt Rally and even Euro Truck Simulator 2. You'd think I'd get motion sickness or something but no, it just felt good and more proper than staring at a flat screen, despite the limited resolution and all else. Oh and oddly enough Derail Valley also felt nicer than the FPS games, despite you also moving around a bunch (though it's mostly a train game).
VR is definitely a cool novelty, if sadly underpopulated. There was also some cool productivity software like Immersed but they kinda ruined it by removing support for multiple physical monitors and also the Virtual Desktop program and SteamVR won't let you display like 4x1080p monitors all at the same time, what's even the point of being limited to just one or two in VR? You have 360 degrees around you (well, or however much your neck can comfortably do)!
2. There have been some big advances in converting traditional flat games to VR, especially UEVR (for Unreal games) and various custom mods. It takes a bit more work, but the experience is worth it, even for games you've played 1000 times before.
I said it when it came out, Alyx was the single best chance VR had to prove itself. It was going to be either the launching pad of the future or the high tide mark. 6 years on, it is looking like the high tide mark.
Unfortunately, it is a technical and artistic marvel but the relatively high cost to entry (decent PC and headset) meant that it was simply out of reach for most people. A high price takes it from an impulse purchase to try, and makes it a dedicated purchase and investment in the ecosystem. That killed any momentum.
I really suggest looking a bit into VRChat for some of the worlds people have created there - some of them are very complex & are telling stories by their environments that could be comparable to standalone VR games.
1:1 model of an Oneil Cylinder space colony that cna be fully explored:
https://vrclist.com/world/7780
(and Asagiris space/science worlds in general)
Far Future Propulsion˸ Museum of Nuclear Starflight
(1:1 models of space propulsion concepts all the way to Project Daedalus)
https://vrclist.com/world/1270747
Really, amazing things are being built in VRChat and most people even in the VR community itself are completely ignorant to that. At best they go "LOL SOCIAL VR APP" without actually checking what is possible with modern VRChat.
VRchat is what Zuckerberg wanted out of Meta. It is impressive but still suffers from the barrier to entry problem.
I think VR is in the same position the PC/Mac was in the mid 80's. It is finally technically capable enough to do some neat and useful things, it just struggles because of hardware costs. But I also said this about a decade back and progress has been neat but limited.
I've never understood the whole VR game ecosystem. There is a handful of titles (outside of Half Life Alyx, which even then looks pretty shit and clunky) that are worth playing on VR.
Most are short bursts of fun and don't really have any moat.
My biggest use case for the Quest 3 is Euro Truck Simulator 2. That is, until I got a wheel and pedals to replace the controller, at which point I got immediate motion sickness with the headset and had to go back to big screen and head tracking. Bit disappointing, and will keep me from jumping on the Steam Frame until I can try it properly
I have owned a quest 2 and now 3 and have always heard about that game but yet to try it. I forgot about it. I don't often get to play the quest as my kids seem to have taken over it. But there are definitely some gems out there. Echo VR was so fun it was sad to see it shut down. I also love Google Earth vr on the quest.
If you enjoyed alyx , and did not play anything else interesting on vr headset you likely missed the huge pc vr flat 2 vr comunity that let us play incredible vr expériences like cyberpunk 2077. The trend these days is some rabdom dev creating ok VR mods for a lot of games viecoding these things. Check reddit virtualreality sub to see each week many more awesome vr content don't miss uevr too with an extensive game list ready : https://myuevr.pages.dev/
I was wondering, what could I play with it. But besides Half-Life Alyx (never played any of HF games), No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous, I couldn't find anything bigger (well, there is also SUPERHOT: VR).
I wonder why there are not that many 3D shooters, or 3D RPGs that use VR. The idea sounds great. Never used any of VR headsets and I was wondering if I should try out Steam Frame and if I don't like it I assume I could resell it later.
Also I wonder how well it would work with my headless linux gaming rig that I use for Game on Whales/Moonlight playing on my 3060ti card.
On the other hand, I still have Steam Deck that I used to play about 3 games total, it is unused besides that. But the initial investment is pretty high (well, it is AFAIR +50% from the Steam Deck 512GB price when I bought)
I recently did a moon exploration in VR with a whole bunch of other people. They had a whole bunch of those pico headsets somehow syncing all their locations to each other, overwriting selective parts of the environment, and simultaneously showing the same location in English and Japanese. That was by far the best VR experience I’ve ever had.
I used a Rift for DCS and it was amazing graphically. Hard to go back to playing on a screen and using a HOTAS hat to capture your view (or head tracker).
But you better have your HOTAS controls memorized because it's a pain not having visibility of them.
Yes, I would probably try to do some kind of "point webcam at HOTAS" hack to try to obviate this hassle, at least until I get the muscle memory really nailed.
IMO VTOL VR is better than DCS in VR (albeit unavoidably more arcade-y) because it's designed for VR first, while DCS's screens and labels are much more difficult to read given the limited resoultion
I just want to clarify for others reading that the resolution is really mainly limited by your PC hardware, NOT VR headsets.
As in, it's totally possible to have completely clear text on DCS screens and labels even with an older lower res headset like the Valve Index, as long as you render the game at a sufficiently high resolution (via SteamVR settings or similar).
Just wanted to point this out, since a lot of folks aren't aware how drastically increasing the render resolution (even far past the native HMD panel resolution) affects image clarity.
Something to keep in mind that a lot of simmers (DCS specifically) don't get when they want to jump into VR:
Once you hit the advanced 3rd Gen or any 4th Gen fighter or attack aircraft (essentially anything where you go "heads down" for any significant portion of the aircrafts mission profile) VR becomes more of a liability than an asset.
For those aircraft being a pilot is secondary to being a systems operator.
Think of an F-14; you have the front seat who would want to be in VR because they fly the aircraft, but the RIO would NOT want to be because they have very little need to be, especially since it makes interfacing with their mission systems so much harder. AH-64's are the same split.
Now if you are the sole person in the aircraft and need to do both missions being able to operate the systems fluently and smoothly via dedicated interfaces FAR exceeds any benefit from being in VR.
I've done it all, and I far prefer flying in VR. But for accomplishing complex mission profiles multiscreen with each being an MFD and a rich control set far beat that immersion.
Perhaps the best mix is using a curved UW and trackir plus dedicated MFD screens. Once you get that setup its amazing for that advanced capability set.
All of this assumes you want to use the full capability set of an airframe, or use an attack profile at all. If all you want is to use them for A2A, then VR is wonderful as long as you have a full HOTAS set, understand the preset modes on everything, and memorize the controls and alternate control schemes properly for BVR to close in conversion, countermeasures, etc.
Personally I use physical MFDs in my simulator together with a VR headset, it works out great. Initially I thought I would need to get some kind of hand tracking cameras or passthrough in order to see what buttons I was pressing, but I found that you develop muscle memory super quickly, and seeing the buttons move in VR when you press them physically is good enough.
I wanna do all of the above, to the extent that a few sessions a week can be had, and yeah, my existing multi-monitor rig allows for a degree of MFD integration, with lots of controls (faderfoxes repurposed for it) alongside an admittedly kind of basic warthog HOTAS .. its more for the fun than anything else. No chance, ever, to fly some of these machines any other way, so its gonna be great ..
Does not seems like a very realistic simulation if you basically give both the pilot and operators their own home office. In reality that does not fit into a fighter jet & the idea being to simulate that experience as realistically as possible.
Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600.
Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.
Is it really that bad? The hardware processing and storage is effectively a S24 which retails for $800. Add the additional displays, cameras and controllers, an extra $250 doesn’t seem that out there.
Eh, I don't think that's how the maths works, especially for products that are in completely different categories. For starters, display costs relatively much more on a VR headset compared to a 6" phone screen, the unit cost is much lower for a phone that is sold in many millions, the marketing cost is different etc. There will likely be actual breakdowns that provide some perspective into this.
Sure, it's not one to one, so the fact that the headset is so close to the retail price of a presumably much cheaper per unit flagship phone is why I don't really think the pricing is that bad for what it is.
Whether it's a brutal price is separate from where it's fair for the hardware.
I don't want to buy that high end cell phone. First because I already have one (it would be very nice if I could have my phone handle compute from the back of my head or my pocket), second because I mostly want the headset to use with my desktop computer. $250 or $500 for a dumb headset with these features would be great.
Also charging 2-3x slower than you use the battery is very lame.
Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one.
I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today.
They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.
True but it stilled happened with the controller at least. But it also backfired. I would have impulse bought day one but they only just in the last week offered me the opportunity to purchase and I passed on it.
You might look at why it's out of stock. Here in the US, it looks like they're out of stock of the base stations, the right controller (but not the left!) and replacement face gaskets. [0]
> They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.
shrug I've little doubt that there were a great many periods between the Index release and now that you could have gotten a full set of equipment. It's understandable that you didn't care to check for availability every few months, but if you had, you would have found a time when a full kit was available.
The Index had the misfortune of being released during the start of The Global Plague when everyone with a sizable chunk of disposable cash found themselves with a great need for new toys to play while stuck at home... and global manufacturing got turbofucked by said plague, which didn't make it especially easy to ramp up production.
The Steam Frame has the misfortune of being released in the beginning of The Great Abandonment of The Consumer PC Market, which has just screwed the availability of parts and their price.
I'd say that neither of those things are Valve's fault, but what can I really know? They're a secretive private company, so maybe they engineered both catastrophes. ;)
[1] If you're inclined to emit some "How dare they sell something that they're not making anymore!" froth, do spare me. They're not taking your money and leaving you in limbo, they're very clearly indicating what is and is not in stock and not accepting money for the parts that are out of stock.
No better than the rest of the VR headsets that came before it and almost no-one wants them. These headsets will end up collecting dust with the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest Pro.
We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.
Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.
The current XReal models are very underwhelming. Very narrow FOV more or less equivalent to using a 27" monitor, lots of fuss with the cable, switching sound to headphones because the built in speakers are garbage. Issues with HDR support.
> Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets
Far into the future, perhaps. These glasses may be fine for short stints, but not for serious 8+hrs of productivity. I have a Viture Beast and I regret buying it. Even for short gaming stints, I still prefer my laptop or smartphone display as these glasses are such a downgrade.
I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).
One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.
For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.
For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)
That’s a big reason I’m buying it (along with the wireless freedom of movement). VRChat has been a godsend of socialization and authenticity, and I want to immerse myself into it more with FBT, ET, and FT/MT such that it feels like a proper digital self. I couldn’t do that in my apartment layout with lighthouses a la BSB or Index, but the Frame and modern SteamVR/OpenXR suggests this will be one of the best ways to immerse into VR experiences going forward.
The fact I can throw it into my bag and travel with it is a bonus.
vrchat is just weird enough (and for, maybe, weird people) plus the new user experience/children yelling slurs situation makes it hard to even bring up to general audiences
I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though
You're fooling yourself if the quest provides any advertising data value, let alone 600$ The device is simply just being sold for as a loss and is not a data harvesting operation.
Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.
I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?
There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.
I think the only way this is really compelling is if it's able to effectively function as a virtual Linux desktop with a reasonably clear floating monitor in front of you.
I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.
Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?
I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.
VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.
It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...
I’m somewhat surprised nobody has pointed one of those hacking models at a Rift CV1 and said “make it work without all the Facebook junk, preferably in Linux.”
> I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.
Unfortunately none of the current generation VR/AR/XR glasses come close to replacing a monitor full-time. They may be okay for using in a pinch (like if you're travelling and need a bigger/secondary/private display), but they suck for long term use.
Biggest issues:
- Screen resolution is still pretty low. At 2160x2160, it feels like you're just sitting really close to a 27" 720p monitor. You will see the pixels. It may not matter much for movies and some games, but you will notice it for productivity. If you have a decent monitor already, it's a very noticeable downgrade, even when compared to using any modern laptop display.
- They're just not comfortable for long term wear. I can work 8+ hours in front of a regular screen with almost no issues, but that's just impossible with current generation VR/AR/XR glasses.
- The big screen promise is a lie for productivity. You'd need to constantly move your head around to be able to see the whole screen; you can't see it all in one go, without dealing with blurry/distorted edges. If you do want to see the entire screen in one go then not only does the image become smaller (breaking the big screen promise), the clarity of text drops sharply.
So if you're considering getting any of the current generation glasses for long-term productivity: just don't.
you can even replace the whole computer if you tinker enough, since it runs Linux. whether or not that is a good idea in principle with _any_ vr headset is debatable.
AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.
You could do it, but the resolution isn't high enough for it to be a good experience. (2160x2160 per eye sounds like a lot, but with a 110 degree fov it's only ~19 pixels per degree. Which is like sitting very close to a 27" 720p monitor.)
You render lower quality and scale the images up to native resolution, with filters to reduce any jagged artifacts. It's not ideal, and so even running at the "same" resolution, the 2d monitor looks better then it does in the headset.
But the immersion is enough that you forget about it and just enjoy the content, as long as it's comfortable enough
It's absolutely wild to me that they didn't include, and have devs ship profiles for some of their games, SuperDepth3D or some other depth map shader officially in some form in the Steam UI for this. If a big focus is playing your pancake library on a huge screen (due to there not being not many native VR games), having that huge screen be 3D would be a huge value add. And they're big enough to get some developers to ship profiles for their games officially guaranteeing some form of workingness(?).
This. This is what I am looking for. I remember using iz3d years ago, with their anaglyph renderer. Playing Half Life 2, Halo and others in stereoscopic 3D was a great experience. Dead Space was particularly nice, as the game uses no HUD.
You can already do a lot of it with ReShade shaders like the aforementioned SuperDepth3D, but it requires a game profile, tons of fiddling and non-incompatibility from the game. Having that shipped as dev-tested profiles with games would be the exact sort of thing that makes proton nice to use on the steam deck
Ars Technica's article put it at 1.5hrs in performance mode and over 2 in a power saving mode, but noted that the lower saving mode wasn't enjoyable. Of course it's I am sure that is going to be highly subjective to what you are doing.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadWill be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!
Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware
[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/
This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.
And yes, I've tried third-party solutions like Virtual Desktop under Windows and ALVR under Linux. Even with some of the best WiFi 6E hardware available standing within 10ft of the router with the PC being wired into the network with ethernet, nothing has beat a tethered USB connection using the native Link functionality on my Quest 2.
Any SteamVR based solution fixes most of these issues and the Frame sounds like it might make wireless actually viable. Even if it doesn't, tethered with Valve software instead of with Facebook software is still a meaningful improvement.
For some reason this never works on the Quest Pro I have (which I received for free from Meta). Works every time on the Pico 4 Ultra
Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.
Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.
I'm on your side, but this kind of hyperbole weakens your argument. Tell me about the spyware in pytorch, react, zstd, or llama3.2:1b and how you shouldn't touch this except within a VM.
Am I paying $1000 for a minor improvement? Yes. It's a hobby. It costs money sometimes. I don't do this for nearly anything else, like phones that other people seem fine for paying $1000 every other year. I expect this device to last until another 6 years when I can justify spending another $1000 on another iterative improvement. Similarly, I may spend $1000 on a new setup for simracing soon.
Spending $6k on a gaming PC, a VR headset, and wheels and pedals is an experience you otherwise cannot get. I would spend money on VR even if it only worked with one or two driving games and nothing else. For those of us in that niche, VR has been anything but a "Failure", that business people seem convinced it is because it couldn't be the next "Platform" to put an app store on.
But, that's the market for VR. It's a niche toy for people with expendable income. It's not a mass market to rival the smartphone.
I'm just not interested in closed ecosystems like Oculus.
That said, I have barely looked at VR so much that I'm not sure whether to bother with the Steam Frame.
Is it just for gaming/movies?
What communities do this? Can I do this on my laptop too to trial it?
Scan of a park in Japan with a steam locomotive on static display: https://vrclist.com/world/1191265
Scan of a park in Japan with blooming Sakura trees: https://vrclist.com/world/1216699
In general, you can see other 3D Gaussian splatting worlds using this tag: https://vrclist.com/?type=search&sort=recent&tags=3DGS
The quality can varies a lot, so I suggest checking for number of favorites & visits to see the best scanned worlds or to go by author once you find the good ones. :)
In general, 3D gaussian splatting is not the only way you can use to reproduce a real world location in VR - you can also just do it manually, modeling the structure & possibly using textures from photos. A good example of such manual reconstruction is Gion Street from Fins: https://vrclist.com/world/859459
As for trying it out - all of the VRchat worlds can be explored in flat screen mode on a PC & VRChat can be installed from Steam or from their website. VRChat is also free, so the only thing needed is to register & it is possible to just use a Steam account as well.
Then just get one of the URLs & there is a launch URL. Alternatively you can search the worlds by name from the VRChat UI. :)
Looks cool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g
But the idea that games have data collection outside of the platform (e.g., Steam) is surprising to me. Would this be VR games only or a particular type of game, like ones with online multiplayer? I don't own a VR headset and don't really play multiplayer games these days. Of the games I have played (mostly indie), I've come across very few that have a EULA or anything that would imply any data collection of any sort.
- WarDogs: not sharing/selling https://www.wardogs.com/privacy
- Marvel Rivals: not sharing/selling https://protocol.unisdk.easebar.com/release/latest_v475.html
- CounterStrike: is Valve's
- Borderlands 4: https://www.take2games.com/privacy/en-US/
"In the last 12 months, Take-Two has sold and/or shared unique identifiers, IP address, as well as Internet/Electronic Activity and Profile Inferences with third-party advertising providers to enable us to provide personalized advertising to you and others like you. We may sell or share personal information about users that we know are under the age of 18 (or older, in certain locations) with their (or depending on age, their parent's) settings or permission."
- Halloween: https://www.illfonic.com/privacy-policy-eula
"Some advertising we engage in may be “targeted advertising,” which is the practice of showing you more relevant or personalized ads based on your activity over time and across non-affiliated services. Targeted advertising often involves us incorporating third party tracking technologies into our Service or disclosing (often hashed) identifiers, such as email addresses or Ad IDs, with third parties. These third parties then match our data with their own (or their partners’ data) to deliver ads to you or similar audiences. For example, we may incorporate the Meta pixel on our website to serve ads to Meta audiences based on the data we provide.
We also use audience modeling services, where we and a partner each disclose (often hashed) identifiers to a technology provider. The technology provider then matches common factors between our and the partner’s data to help us understand audience overlap and improve campaign performance."
- Baldur's Gate 3: not sharing/selling https://larian.com/privacy
- Overwatch: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/legal/a4380ee5-5c8d-4e3b-83b7...
"We disclose this personal information to: Online marketing or advertising partners including on our mobile games These partners may combine this personal information with information that they have collected about you when you use their services (or the websites and services of third parties) to personalize your experience or to improve the accuracy of their analytics, targeting, and measurement systems."
- Apex Legends: https://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/
"We also may share information relating to your device and your use of our Services with our third-party advertising partners so they may deliver targeted adverti...
https://github.com/FreeXR/exploits is a good starting point for that. I think replacing the Android userland would be the tricky part here.
I have few rooted Quests, only some Quest2 still left unrooted.
They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.
I mean, you can comfortably play GTAV on this thing and it’s powered by a smartphone processor.
Your dreams are going to become true.
With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.
Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.
To be clear, wearing a full VR headset has an "I am an idiot" vibe.
Is the Glasshole thing more geared towards recording people in public? This headset has 1. bad cameras but 2. a much better privacy posture than meta.
Although, I do agree, I would find it odd to go down to the park and see someone wandering around with a VR headset tuning out the world and waving controllers around. I'm more addressing the "cowork in public spaces" part of that. I think their statement about "while traveling" is more like while seated on a several hour plane trip or relaxing at a hotel or things along those lines. Not like wearing the device while ordering a latte or something along those lines.
Even despite pinning the display in a corner, I noticed I was very distracted when crossing streets. Made me stop wearing them like that, instead prefering to carry them in my backpack and use them on train rides or flights.
At least with my phone I can just slip it back in my pocket when I need to pay attention to my surroundings.
Hey, looking at a few of your comments, we'll welcome you to Reddit any fucking day of the week. Respect, bro
That depends. Having had a Quest 2 and dealt...nay, put up with with Meta and their god awful ecosystem you couldn't pay me to touch another one of their headsets. I'll take an open linux based one over a Q3 any day. That alone makes the price difference worth it to me. Throw in the foveated streaming and the vastly superior quality and latency of streaming and it makes for a fairly decent offering.
https://www.timeextension.com/features/virtuality-gave-us-90...
Potentially related, IIUC Unity only has linux arm64 support for the embedded linux version. And to use that you have to contact sales.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamhardware/steamframe/...
In particular, I don't know if the Steam Frame will have the power for this, but something like a native ARM build of Dolphin (so no FEX) that exposes the 3D nature of polygonal games is very interesting to me. If you can cross your eyes to get stereo you can see what that would look like for something like Super Mario 3D Galaxy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgdqCL2toE (I find a conventional, unfolding phone to be a pretty good size for that. On a big monitor getting it small enough to cross eyes can be a challenge.) In general any emulation target that has 3D polygons is really interesting to me. I'm also pretty interested in what full 3D does to Skies of Arcadia (could be a complete disappointment, could be absolutely amazing) and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, where I feel like the game that was a bit crowded and struggling with being 2D in SD might just come alive. (Assuming they didn't play too many games with the distance that doesn't work if we see it in true 3D.)
I gather the modding community is already gearing up for modding more games to be true 3D in the VR space. That is, not necessarily VR (though there's a mod community for that as well), but having a visible screen floating in 3D VR space where the screen itself is fully 3D. There is also a wide variety of games from the past couple of decades that I suspect might be very difficult to "convert to VR" but might be relatively easy to trick into rendering full 3D instead of down to 2D.
Nothing really stops any of this from happening now, but I've tried to set it up before and I was unsuccessful with my current stack. Being able to give out instructions that say "Install the Dolphin3D Build from the Flatpak Store and load up your ROMs" rather than the current set of ad hoc complex instructions that I couldn't even get through successfully could be a game changer.
I will giggle like a schoolgirl if the reason why Steam Frames sell like hot cakes in six to twelve months is that they become recognized as the premier way to emulate 3D systems from the Playstation forward. Overclocking, texture packs, modding, all that's great, but how about all those things and true 3D for a lot of games?
Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.
But the Steam Frame specifically is not well suited for this. Something more minimal like the Big Screen Beyond 2 would be better, and XR-type glasses (like those from Viture) which present as standard monitors would be better still.
There's a lot of mods (espescially for Unreal) that can graft VR support onto it, I'd say that's a more viable use case than virtual theatre screen.
I used to do this back in the day with VorpX. Playing the original bioshock via that was an incredible experience, seeing all the environmental storytelling. Utterly terrifying too.
Without a tether to the PC (I have battery in my pocket) it’s pretty okay!
The screen on a used iPad Air really doesn’t look half bad, it is far smaller and lighter in a bag, and it can play movies for that entire flight without needing an external battery.
Although, speaking of used devices, the Vision Pro is looking delightfully depreciated on eBay.
IIRC Valve is going to release something similar in a couple months & I am sure there will be other accessory developers chiming in as well. :)
It depends on the person. I can wear my Index on my head for like all day. I'm not sure what my longest Elite: Dangerous session was, but it was quite long. Other people find the same headset to be either too heavy or improperly balanced for wearing more than an hour or so at a time.
As far as motion sickness goes, it has been my experience that you can train yourself out of it. Recommendations:
1) If it doesn't do bad things to you, consume some Dramamine beforehand.
2) Don't play games that launch you through the air or otherwise induce a lot of mismatch between your virtual motion and your physical motion. Seated piloting (car or otherwise) games are one big exception to this recommendation, as most folks have a lot of brain training with "I'm sitting in a vehicle that's moving me around.", so one's brain doesn't freak out so much when presented with those visuals.
3) When you start getting nauseous, stop immediately. If you're still game, come back to play after the nausea is gone, but not before.
Newbies will attempt to power through the nausea, but it's not something you can power through... you'll just make it way worse, which sets back the whole "Convince your stupid brain that the minor mismatches between the visuals and the inner-ear sensations are not the result of poisoning, so it doesn't need to make you puke your toenails off" training that you're doing by easing into this and -if possible- using OTC anti-nausea drugs.
[0] For me, Dramamine is very helpful to prevent motion sickness.
My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.
And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.
If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.
A flood of VR mods for popular games have been coming out lately.
But they were talking about playing on a virtual 2D screen which I have no interest in
I played the original "Luke Ross" Cyberpunk port but it was pretty horrible due to his mediocre alternate eye rendering and the lack of controller support.
I saw the new mod (dariulone?) but I didn't yet install it because it comes with a huge list of dependencies of other mods to install and I haven't had time for all that. I'm kinda hoping he makes a quick installer that packages everything :)
I'll try that soon. Right now it's still a bit too hot to be in VR anyway. It's more of a winter activity for me.
This product doesn’t look half bad for sleeping in VR for people that are used to doing so with other headsets. Definitely easier than some offerings.
Funny how demographics work. I don't know a lot of people who use VR. In fact I don't know a single person who is remotely interested in that very niche technology.
It's particularly fun to watch 3d movies with the headset but with several decent TVs in the house I'd watch movies most of the time with one of them.
Finally no need to let people leave for a 5 min bio every 1.5h.
Though with the current direction things are evolving towards, the biochamber might get replaced with the torment nexus.
I could see how a kid might want that on Quest when they don’t have their own TV. And it might be nice on a plane.
But $1000 is a lot for that. I know people say that watching video in the Vision Pro is really nice, I wasn’t that thrilled when I tried it, but it felt to me more like a “you can do this because you have the hardware“ not a“ this is why you buy it” feature.
It comes with a black and white passthrough camera but you can add on a 5K color one.
There's ongoing work for a full Plasma XR mode, so you aren't restricted to a "virtual desktop" experience: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8671
Unless you fly first class, using a laptop on a plane is painful.
So far all reviews I've seen been centered around gaming and not work.
How many hours a day you spend in it? How often do you use it?
Edit: And I'm writing this on a 32" 2560x1440 display which looks just dandy to me, so it's not like I'm super sensitive or have above average eyesight (quite the opposite actually)
I had Quest 3 for a few months to play games and I feel okay playing, but every time I tried to open IDE and terminal after 10 minutes my brain just say full stop. I tried different fonts, themes and zoom levels, but it just feel wrong.
I feel similar feeling of discomfort as if I try to work on something not in computer in low light in real world. Might be it have something to do with my bad eyesight.
I honestly did not tested AVP enough. Its just good enough for me not to immediately want to stop using it, but again I have no idea what would really happen after a week of use for 3 hours. I did it once for a few hours and it felt amazing, but its Apple and there lots of other reasons not to buy their locked down hardware.
I'm wondering if it is because the screen was "flat" in front of you and you had no possibility to change your perspective. It would be interesting if the IDE had been in 3D space and you would look at it as if it was on your desk, capturing head movements etc.
When you have fiction or game dialogue text there is good bunch skimming going on so you dont care about every single symbol and or digit. So eyes dont get stuck looking at specific parts of text.
So yeah its very much possible that using VR as a virtual monitor setup it's just wrong aproach and there have to be paradigm shift in how we interact with dev environment to use it efficiently in VR.
From there, you can work out requisite resolution for desktop replacing VR googles: 11K per eye.
The catch is that human eyes actually only have ~1 degree of full resolution area and ~30 degree of active area, and the full 200 degree HFOV is only realized by moving them around and subconsciously compositing images, so most of panels can bee left unlit, in theory.
But the panel resolution requirements is the same, and our technologies are just not there to make a true desktop replacement VR goggle, yet.
Last I checked I'm allowed 100Wh of power bank on a flight. And for flights where that's not enough I'm used to having a (~100W) socket.
You're also not allowed to use them even if you do have them with you. This is all very strictly enforced with reminders at the check-in desk and several announcements before take-off.
This is Compiz Fusion [1,] 20 years later.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR8x5Wb26ew
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lawkc3jH3ws
That's the samsung galaxy xr which is cheaper and lighter but it's not good enough run high resolution content for long periods without thermal throttling
What I was thinking of was on iPhone. It was Eye Tracking + Dwell for selecting.
Step 2: Open source projects implement whatever they want. Preferably, they provide a framework that allows high extensibility, if the software provider didn't already.
Step 3: People download and install open source plugins that violate stupid patents. It's still a patent violation, but as long as the people providing it aren't profiting monetarily, the ability to recoup damages from lost profits or royalties is very hard.
There's some nuance there, and different ways it could (and should) be done to avoid most consequences, but not so long ago (maybe still?) people commonly combined codecs and software from different parties for ffmpeg, which to get around some issues with distribution refused to compile the source and provide a binary, because that would make them a target, but just the source didn't (to a greater or lesser degree).
Where there's a will there's a way, and if a company is going to obtain stupidly simple patents which they often claim is to keep other companies at bay, we can put that to the test. If they go after individuals for usage, pressure them.
If we're lucky, what we're seeing is an ebb and flow between open source and the companies that capitalize on it, and we're in the ebb. I'm hoping for the flow.
I don't have too much experience with them, but I thought the ultrabook category was the answer of the rest of the market to the Air, at least.
I'm not sure the problem is that nobody makes the quality hardware, but that maybe it's just as pricey and that nobody trusts the companies that do the same as they do Apple to buy it at a large premium. Many companies have the ability to put together something of a similar quality and sell it (even if not at quite the profit, still probably some profit), but are you going to trust an Asus or MSI product that costs the same as the equivalent Apple product to have the same quality? Perception is important here. MSI or Asus could put out something better than Apple if they wanted to and didn't care about the cost, but I doubt anyone would actually believe that it was better even if they did (and even if they like it initially, they may suspect it won't hold up over time). Such is the power of the brand Apple has built, and that's in many ways more important than the actual quality they provide.
We meet in VR meeting rooms and at the end of the day, we’re safely delivered back to the parking lot via capsule shuttle.
> Brookes was reportedly allowed to stow 454 African captives, by allowing a space of 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man, 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each woman, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child. However, the poster's text alleges that a slave trader confessed that before the Act, Brookes had carried as many as 609 captives at one time.
We did "general computing" in 320x200 screens. I think the Frame's screen is a bit better than that.
Also, my simracing seat has been very lonely. I'm so happy that there is an HMD running arch that gives the user root.
far from claiming they are as low as meta, but that is their business model which never gets mentioned in this comparison, leaving readers to confuse gabe newel with RMS as some freedom authority
If there's a morally grey stone to turn over then imo it's the not-gambling-wink-microtransactions and even then it's no more predatory than what is common in the gaming industry.
steam was and always will be awful. they just publish whatever the game studio sends them. try installing gta V from steam... you get Two Launchers besides steam! all three ad ridden.
I don’t think people see Gabe Newell the way you describe. They just appreciate that Valve makes business decisions that have basic respect for their customer base. They are fully aware that he’s a billionaire yacht aficionado.
In fact, their own documentation spells this out specifically[0]:
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
0: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
As much as I like gog and their game distribution model and buy most games there, this is a huge exaggeration and actually false. A game studio/publisher does not have to use DRM in steam and many of them don't. Examples are Larian (baldur's gate 3), cd project red (witcher, cyberpunk), and quite a few small and big studios that don't. Basically afaik most games that are in both gog and steam don't have DRM in steam. DRM is far from steam's fault, it is game studios/publishers that have pushed that, long before steam too.
None of the crazy VM wrapping etc.
Plenty studios do not ship adware launchers, and steam does not inject adware into them or anything. Even if steam gets percentage from the ads or whatever (I dont even know if this is the case) EA anyway ships the same adware outside steam.
I do not like this but let's blame it to the ones actually doing it, than the ones that dont oppose it.
Blender works in VR (using any OpenXR compatible headset). To view scenes in VR, you can use the free built-in VR Scene Inspector addon. To edit and create scenes in VR, you can use the Freebird XR addon for Blender (https://freebirdxr.com/).
Fingers crossed for OpenXR working properly in Steam Frame! In which case Blender and other OpenXR-compatible apps will work too.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of Freebird XR, a VR editing addon for Blender.
> The Arcturus Vision apps include Arcturus Vision Camera for recording and playing 5K HDR spatial video, Arcturus Vision Gaussian XR for exploring 3D Gaussian splats, and Sync for transferring recordings to Windows or Mac (with conversion for other players on Mac).
https://arcturus.vision
One lets you one-tap download native Microsoft Office, one runs it through a browser or via bespoke vm/wine configuration.
Instead, I'd say the difference is that both are consumer devices, AVP geared primarily toward computing while steam frame is geared primarily toward gaming, but the steam frame is open enough for you to develop upon and customize to meet whatever use case you desire.
HL Alyx was awesome though, nothing else on VR has been worth it for me.
You really think people have been waiting to drop $1k for a device that lets them play games designed for a monitor inside of a headset rendering a larger virtual monitor with all of the additional complexity that brings?
I would wager a simple browser and terminal session is probably all I need, so was looking forward to this device. However, the screen resolution is likely to be too small, I had done some experiments with Virtual Desktop, but the Rift S was too low-res, everything had to be like 48pt.
Reviews showing the desktop being fully accessible, does give quite a bit of hope, however.
If this is the biggest point, then I don't see why Xreal isn't more popular.
As the form factor is already pretty bulky, keeping it as a single device helps a lot IMHO.
I have a tiny handheld with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and among many other things it plays GTA V and RDR2 almost perfectly, using FEX nonetheless. And because it's arm, battery life is so much better than on my laptop that I use it as a tiny mini linux laptop now.
Just the metaphors and "magnetics" for fiddling and dealing with your gun were so good. The conveyance system was also just so much more intuitive. I think they even seemed to have done something to deal with the very mild nausea I felt with some title.
Oh, and the game was fun.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/
Started by not-Valve in 1995
I don't have a windows machine for that. A bit disappointing.
I dove into VR first with X-Plane 11 I think, which was janky at best, but nowadays Microsoft Flight Simulator has really good VR mode, and it's just such a great experience. Spaceflight simulators like Elite Dangerous are quite fun as well, but harder to relate to, so seems my brain doesn't get as fooled as more "real life sims".
https://pcvrcentral.com/
Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS. Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently.
I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home.
There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset only a month ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VRGaming/
It's not very good resolution by today's standards but it's the cheap entry point. Quest 3 (non-S) has resolution comparable to the Steam Frame but costs $250 more.
If you only want to use it for streaming, you might look a used Quest 2, which has similar optics and screens as the 3S. I'm not sure the state of software support or whether its worse CPU/GPU matter for streaming performance. But I bet they're very cheap secondhand by now.
here's a great video about exactly this, might be outdated as it's 6 years old
I also still mini golf regularly. It's such a fun, low effort way to hang out with friends and family that we wouldn't otherwise see all that often.
Now imagine how intense that will become with even more realism. It could be actually seriously traumatic.
In regards to shooting games, while some of them were nice (especially modded H3VR, all of the guns you could build etc.), the shooting and movement always felt off - rounds not always going where you'd think they should regardless of the game, aiming being a bit clunky especially with scopes and so on, same with some RPG combat games. I also tried out Into the Radius VR, CONVRGENCE, SUPERHOT VR and Zero Caliber VR. There was something weird going on, like the world scale feeling off and even when adjusting through the SteamVR options, the experience still being odd, no matter what IPD or height offsets or other settings I'd try. Never really got used to it.
But let me tell you, vehicle games were on another level. It's perhaps the best way to fly in War Thunder because the proper depth perception completely changes the feel of it (if they'd fix the damn camera, I don't want to break my neck trying to look far back), same with VTOL VR and racing games like Dirt Rally and even Euro Truck Simulator 2. You'd think I'd get motion sickness or something but no, it just felt good and more proper than staring at a flat screen, despite the limited resolution and all else. Oh and oddly enough Derail Valley also felt nicer than the FPS games, despite you also moving around a bunch (though it's mostly a train game).
VR is definitely a cool novelty, if sadly underpopulated. There was also some cool productivity software like Immersed but they kinda ruined it by removing support for multiple physical monitors and also the Virtual Desktop program and SteamVR won't let you display like 4x1080p monitors all at the same time, what's even the point of being limited to just one or two in VR? You have 360 degrees around you (well, or however much your neck can comfortably do)!
https://youtu.be/SCrkZOx5Q1M
2. There have been some big advances in converting traditional flat games to VR, especially UEVR (for Unreal games) and various custom mods. It takes a bit more work, but the experience is worth it, even for games you've played 1000 times before.
Unfortunately, it is a technical and artistic marvel but the relatively high cost to entry (decent PC and headset) meant that it was simply out of reach for most people. A high price takes it from an impulse purchase to try, and makes it a dedicated purchase and investment in the ecosystem. That killed any momentum.
For some examples - PROJECT: SUMMER FLARE: https://vrclist.com/world/2924
Complex 7: https://vrclist.com/world/870431 (and Fins worlds in general)
1:1 model of an Oneil Cylinder space colony that cna be fully explored: https://vrclist.com/world/7780 (and Asagiris space/science worlds in general)
Far Future Propulsion˸ Museum of Nuclear Starflight (1:1 models of space propulsion concepts all the way to Project Daedalus) https://vrclist.com/world/1270747
Really, amazing things are being built in VRChat and most people even in the VR community itself are completely ignorant to that. At best they go "LOL SOCIAL VR APP" without actually checking what is possible with modern VRChat.
I think VR is in the same position the PC/Mac was in the mid 80's. It is finally technically capable enough to do some neat and useful things, it just struggles because of hardware costs. But I also said this about a decade back and progress has been neat but limited.
Most are short bursts of fun and don't really have any moat.
I wonder why there are not that many 3D shooters, or 3D RPGs that use VR. The idea sounds great. Never used any of VR headsets and I was wondering if I should try out Steam Frame and if I don't like it I assume I could resell it later.
Also I wonder how well it would work with my headless linux gaming rig that I use for Game on Whales/Moonlight playing on my 3060ti card.
On the other hand, I still have Steam Deck that I used to play about 3 games total, it is unused besides that. But the initial investment is pretty high (well, it is AFAIR +50% from the Steam Deck 512GB price when I bought)
Porn. This, like every other vr device, will see more use streaming 3d porn than it will vr games.
This is not unussual. Porn has often been at the forefront of the internet, from the first cc transactions to the first streaming video.
Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet?
I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.
But you better have your HOTAS controls memorized because it's a pain not having visibility of them.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/667970/VTOL_VR/
As in, it's totally possible to have completely clear text on DCS screens and labels even with an older lower res headset like the Valve Index, as long as you render the game at a sufficiently high resolution (via SteamVR settings or similar).
Just wanted to point this out, since a lot of folks aren't aware how drastically increasing the render resolution (even far past the native HMD panel resolution) affects image clarity.
Once you hit the advanced 3rd Gen or any 4th Gen fighter or attack aircraft (essentially anything where you go "heads down" for any significant portion of the aircrafts mission profile) VR becomes more of a liability than an asset.
For those aircraft being a pilot is secondary to being a systems operator.
Think of an F-14; you have the front seat who would want to be in VR because they fly the aircraft, but the RIO would NOT want to be because they have very little need to be, especially since it makes interfacing with their mission systems so much harder. AH-64's are the same split.
Now if you are the sole person in the aircraft and need to do both missions being able to operate the systems fluently and smoothly via dedicated interfaces FAR exceeds any benefit from being in VR.
I've done it all, and I far prefer flying in VR. But for accomplishing complex mission profiles multiscreen with each being an MFD and a rich control set far beat that immersion.
Perhaps the best mix is using a curved UW and trackir plus dedicated MFD screens. Once you get that setup its amazing for that advanced capability set.
All of this assumes you want to use the full capability set of an airframe, or use an attack profile at all. If all you want is to use them for A2A, then VR is wonderful as long as you have a full HOTAS set, understand the preset modes on everything, and memorize the controls and alternate control schemes properly for BVR to close in conversion, countermeasures, etc.
Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.
Yikes, what a terrible price.
I don't want to buy that high end cell phone. First because I already have one (it would be very nice if I could have my phone handle compute from the back of my head or my pocket), second because I mostly want the headset to use with my desktop computer. $250 or $500 for a dumb headset with these features would be great.
Also charging 2-3x slower than you use the battery is very lame.
You might look at why it's out of stock. Here in the US, it looks like they're out of stock of the base stations, the right controller (but not the left!) and replacement face gaskets. [0]
> They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.
shrug I've little doubt that there were a great many periods between the Index release and now that you could have gotten a full set of equipment. It's understandable that you didn't care to check for availability every few months, but if you had, you would have found a time when a full kit was available.
The Index had the misfortune of being released during the start of The Global Plague when everyone with a sizable chunk of disposable cash found themselves with a great need for new toys to play while stuck at home... and global manufacturing got turbofucked by said plague, which didn't make it especially easy to ramp up production.
The Steam Frame has the misfortune of being released in the beginning of The Great Abandonment of The Consumer PC Market, which has just screwed the availability of parts and their price.
I'd say that neither of those things are Valve's fault, but what can I really know? They're a secretive private company, so maybe they engineered both catastrophes. ;)
[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059530/Valve_Index_Heads...>
Ah, this announcement from the end of 2025 explains the recent dreadfully spotty availability: [0]
What a shame you never used any of the "alert me when this shit is in stock" buttons, which are what I used to get one of my own.
[0] <https://www.theverge.com/news/817967/valve-index-vr-headset-...> [1]
[1] If you're inclined to emit some "How dare they sell something that they're not making anymore!" froth, do spare me. They're not taking your money and leaving you in limbo, they're very clearly indicating what is and is not in stock and not accepting money for the parts that are out of stock.
We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.
Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.
Far into the future, perhaps. These glasses may be fine for short stints, but not for serious 8+hrs of productivity. I have a Viture Beast and I regret buying it. Even for short gaming stints, I still prefer my laptop or smartphone display as these glasses are such a downgrade.
One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.
For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.
The fact I can throw it into my bag and travel with it is a bonus.
I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though
Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.
I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?
There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.
I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.
Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?
I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.
VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.
It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...
Unfortunately none of the current generation VR/AR/XR glasses come close to replacing a monitor full-time. They may be okay for using in a pinch (like if you're travelling and need a bigger/secondary/private display), but they suck for long term use.
Biggest issues:
- Screen resolution is still pretty low. At 2160x2160, it feels like you're just sitting really close to a 27" 720p monitor. You will see the pixels. It may not matter much for movies and some games, but you will notice it for productivity. If you have a decent monitor already, it's a very noticeable downgrade, even when compared to using any modern laptop display.
- They're just not comfortable for long term wear. I can work 8+ hours in front of a regular screen with almost no issues, but that's just impossible with current generation VR/AR/XR glasses.
- The big screen promise is a lie for productivity. You'd need to constantly move your head around to be able to see the whole screen; you can't see it all in one go, without dealing with blurry/distorted edges. If you do want to see the entire screen in one go then not only does the image become smaller (breaking the big screen promise), the clarity of text drops sharply.
So if you're considering getting any of the current generation glasses for long-term productivity: just don't.
AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.
1440p (2560x1440) is 3,686,400 pixels.
2160p (2160x2160) is 4,665,600 pixels, per eye, so 9,331,200 pixels.
This headset will require a million more pixels to be rendered than 4K. 9 Million pixels @ 144hz is no easy task.
My RTX 4080 (9800X3D) struggles with 4K gaming.
But the immersion is enough that you forget about it and just enjoy the content, as long as it's comfortable enough
I guess most of it could run as a Vulkan layer?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/09/steam-frame-the-ars-t...