Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Foveated rendering is complicated to implement with current rendering APIs in a way that actually improves performance, but foveated streaming seems like a much easier win that applies to all content automatically. And the dedicated 6 GHz dongle should do a much better job at streaming than typical wifi routers.
> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
It's an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate
Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I'd love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.
> Monochrome passthrough
So AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:
> User accessible front expansion port w/ Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) / PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)
Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?
One thing I don't see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That's something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.
More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There's an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I'm surprised it isn't standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index's "knuckles" controllers.
Foveated streaming is cool. FWIW the Vision Pro does that for their Mac virtual display as well, and it works really well to pump a lot more pixels through.
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low.
Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?
There's no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain.
> "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?"
Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly.
The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro.
There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels.
Even the vision pro at 35ppd simply isn't close to the PPD you can get from a good desktop monitor (we can calculate PPD for desktop monitors too, using size and viewing distance).
Apple's "retina" HiDPI monitors typically have PPD well beyond 35 at ordinary viewing distances, even a 1080p 24 inch monitor on your desk can exceed this.
For me personally, 35ppd feels about the minimum I would accept for emulating a monitor for text work in a VR headset, but it's still not good enough for me to even begin thinking about using it to replace any of my monitors.
Oh yeah for sure. Most people seem to accept that 35ppd is "good enough" but not actually at-par with a high quality high-dpi monitor.
I agree with you - I would personally consider 35ppd to be the floor for usability for this purpose. It's good in a pinch (need a nice workstation setup in a hotel room?) but I would not currently consider any extant hardware as full-time replacements for a good monitor.
I keep hearing this argument, and it baffles me. I find that, as I age and my vision gets worse, I need progressively finer text rendering. Using same-size displays (27") at the same distance, with text the same physical size on screen, 1440p gives me a much worse reading experience than 4k with 2x scaling.
I think part of getting by with a lower PPD is the IRL pixels are fixed and have hard boundaries that OS affordances have co-evolved with.
(pixel alignment via lots of rectangular things - windows, buttons; text rendering w/ that in mind; "pixel perfect" historical design philosophy)
The VR PPD is in arbitrary orientations which will lead to more aliasing. MacOS kinda killed their low-dpi experience via bad aliasing as they moved to the hi-dpi regime. Now we have svg-like rendering instead of screen-pixel-aligned baked rasterized UIs.
I'm not sure most of us do anymore - see my 1080p/24 inch example.
No one who has bought almost any MacBook in the last 10 years or so has had PPD this low either.
One can get by with almost anything in a pinch, it doesn't mean its desirable.
Pixel density != PPD either, although increasing it can certainly help PPD. Lower density desktop displays routinely have higher PPD than most VR headsets - viewing distance matters!
Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far.
This all sounds a bit like the “better horse” framing. Maybe richer content shouldn’t be consumed as primarily a virtualized page. Maybe mixing font sizes and over sized text can be a standard in itself.
Yes but that can create major motion sickness issues - motion that does not correspond top the user's actual physical movements create a dissonance that is expressed as motion sickness for a large portion of the population.
This is the main reason many VR games don't let you just walk around and opt for teleportation-based movement systems - your avatar moving while your body doesn't can be quite physically uncomfortable.
There are ways of minimizing this - for example some VR games give you "tunnel vision" by blacking out peripheral vision while the movement is happening. But overall there's a lot of ergo considerations here and no perfect solution. The equivalent for a virtual desktop might be to limit the size of the window while the user is zooming/panning.
Yes. You can make a low-resolution monitor (like 800x600px, once upon a time a usable resolution) and/or provide zoom and panning controls
I've tried that combination in an earlier iteration of Lenovo's smart glasses, and it technically works. But the experience you get is not fun or productive. If you need to do it (say to work on confidential documents in public) you can do it, but it's not something you'd do in a normal setup
For a small taste of what using that might be like turn on screen magnification on your existing computers. It's technically usable but not particularly productive or pleasant to use if you don't /have/ to use it.
It's just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup. Obviously it's enough for 80 char consoles but you'd need to dip into large fonts for a desktop.
I did the math on this site and I'd have to hunch less than a foot from the screen to hit 35 PPD on my work provided Thinkpad X1 Carbon with a 14" 1920x1200 screen. My usual distance is nearly double that so my ppd normally is more like 70 ppd, roughly.
Foveated streaming is wild to me. Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text, so guaranteeing that latency over 2.4Ghz seems Sisyphean.
I wonder if they have an ML model doing partial upscaling until the eyetracking state is propagated and the full resolution image under the new fovea position is available. It also makes me wonder if there's some way to do neural compression of the peripheral vision optimized for a nice balance between peripheral vision and hints in the embedding to allow for nicer upscaling.
I worked on a foveated video streaming system for 3D video back in 2008, and we used eye tracking and extrapolated a pretty simple motion vector for eyes and ignored saccades entirely. It worked well, you really don't notice the lower detail in the periphery and with a slightly over-sized high resolution focal area you can detect a change in gaze direction before the user's focus exits the high resolution area.
Anyway that was ages ago and we did it with like three people, some duct tape and a GPU, so I expect that it should work really well on modern equipment if they've put the effort into it.
Foveated rendering very clearly works well with a dedicated connection, wiht predictable latency. My question was more about the latency spikes inherent in a ISM general use band combined with foveated rendering, which would make the effects of the latency spikes even worse.
They're doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).
With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.
Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.
Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.
My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.
We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.
I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.
Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao
The real trick is not over complicating things. The goal is to have high fidelity rendering where the eye is currently focusing so to solve for saccades you just build a small buffer area around the idealized minimum high res center and the saccades will safely stay inside that area within the ability of the system to react to the larger overall movements.
At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn't seem like it would be a problem. If you can't get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they'll be on the floor vomiting.
It was hard for me to believe as well but streaming games wirelessly on a Quest 2 was totally possible and surprisingly latency-free once I upgraded to wifi 6 (few years ago)
It works a lot better than you’d expect at face value.
They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They've also bet more on standalone apps rather than streaming from a PC. These are reasonable tradeoffs. The next Quest may add eye tracking, who knows. Quest Pro had it but was discontinued for being too expensive.
We'll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don't expect them to match Meta's subsidies, so I'm betting on this being more expensive than Quest. I also think that streaming from a gaming PC will remain more of a niche thing despite Valve's focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86/Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.
It will be interesting to see how the X86 emulation plays out. In the Verge review of the headset they mentioned stutters when playing on the headset due to having to 'recompile x86 game code on the fly', but they may offer precompiled versions which can be downloaded ahead of time, similar to the precompiled shaders the Steam Deck downloads.
If they get everything working well I'm guessing we could see an ARM powered Steam Deck in the future.
Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
> Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
I think it should: we have Linux support/custom operating systems on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices right now today, and the 8 Gen 3 has upstream support already AFAIK
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use.
The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.
The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.
The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.
There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.
Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.
To your point, I'd use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
Your 2K monitor occupies something like a 20-degree field of view from a normal sitting position/distance. The 2K resolution in a VR headset covers the entire field of view.
So effectively your 1080p monitor has ~6x the pixel density of the VR headset.
The problem is that 2k square is spread across the whole FOV of the headset so when it's replicating a monitor unless it's ridiculously close to your face a lot of those pixels are 'wasted' in comparison to a monitor with similar stats.
I guess there's a market for this but I'm personally disappointed that they've gone with the "cram a computer into the headset" route. I'd much rather have a simpler, more compact dumb device like the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which in exchange should prove much lighter and more comfortable to wear for long time periods.
The bulk and added component cost of the "all in one" PC/headset models is just unnecessary if you already have a gaming PC.
I was worried about the built in computer as well, but then I found out it's only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it's still pretty light.
I'm personally quite hyped to see the first commercially available Linux-based standalone VR headset announced. This thing is quite a bit lighter than any of the existing "cram a computer in" solutions.
You can get a Beyond if that's what you want. It's an amazing device, and will be far more comfortable and higher resolution than this one. Valve has supported Bigscreen in integrating Lighthouse tracking, and I hope that they continue that support by somehow allowing them to integrate the inside-out tracking they've developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.
I don't think it would be too bad. Cameras are tiny. The processing would still happen on the PC, and you could delete the lighthouse tracking sensors. I guess the hardest part would be sending that much camera data back to the PC over the cable.
They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta's offerings, this is indeed an actual computer you can run linux on. Perhaps even do standard computer stuff inside the headset like text editing, Blender modeling, or more.
They're probably thinking of it in comparison to the Apple Pro which attempts to do some facial tracking of the bottom of your face to inform their 'Personas', it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can't see the bottom half of the face well.
This is the first standalone headset with an open ecosystem. That's a big deal.
Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
I just want a "dumb" headset that I can use as a portable private display for my laptop.
That's it.
I don't need 3D, I don't need VR, I don't need weirdass controllers trying to be special. Just give me a damn simple monitor the size of my eyes.
Fuck off with your XR OSes and "vision" for XR, not even Apple could get it right, the people in charge everywhere are too out of touch and have no clue where the fuck to go after smartphones.
Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting pricing details but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too.
Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.
Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.
Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.
6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.
What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy/build any mini PC? There's plenty of options for that
It's tiny. It runs SteamOS which is built to be used with a controller on a TV. And it will probably be a performance target for many developers.
But I think the biggest feature might be the quick suspend and resume. Every modern console has that, but not PCs. You can try to put a computer to sleep, but many games won't like that.
A good while back I abandoned PC gaming because I was sick of driver issues, compatibility, and always having to update hardware to play the next game. Instead, I embraced consoles and haven't considered PC gaming since then. This, however, has me reconsidering that. I want it to "just work". When I want to play games, I don't want to deal with all of that other crap. I'm old, ain't nobody got time for that.
It's wild how experiences can vary so wildly. That's the nature of PC's though I suppose that you are trying to avoid.
I've had no driver or compatibility issues in longer than I can remember. Maybe Vista?
I also rarely upgrade because playing at console level settings means I can easily get effectively the same lifetime out of my hardware. Though I do tend to upgrade a little earlier than console users still leaning a bit more towards the enthusiast side.
Some people really don't want to spend time exchanging parts when the memory they buy turns out to be incompatible or that the GPU doesn't fit the sleek mITX case. There's a lot of research to ensure all parts are compatible and optimal when building a PC - for some it's time that could be better spent on using the PC instead of building one.
Snapdragon doesn't really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.
Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.
The GPU is fine and the drivers Valve are using, if their past hardware is any indication, will be open source. Doesn't magically fix them, but it does allow for Valve to fix them.
(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)
Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it's limited to HDMI 2.0 it will have to rely on 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to get there. Unfortunately the lack of HDMI 2.1 might be down to politics, the RDNA3 GPU they're using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.
... but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
It seems to me the wireless is pretty important. I have an MQ3 and I have the link cable. For software development I pretty much have to plug the MQ3 into my PC and it is not so bad to wander around the living room looking in a Mars boulder from all sides and such.
For games and apps that involve moving around, particularly things like Beat Saber or Supernatural the standalone headset has a huge advantage of having no cable. If I have a choice between buying a game on Steam or the MQ3 store I'm likely to buy the MQ3 game because of the convenience and freedom of standalone. A really good wireless link changes that.
So, in the specs for the mini-pc, it claims the video out can do 4K @ 120Hz (even faster if displayport). I assume the 4K @ 60Hz you saw is from the "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" line.
I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.
Considering how much they talk about Foveated rendering, I think it might not be constrained by the traditional limitations of screens - instead of sending a fixed resolution image at whatever frequency, it'll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.
Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.
I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs.
Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.
I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.
The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.
The headsets that have AR cameras don't use them for tracking AFAIK. They all have monochrome cameras for that. The AR cameras are an additional cost that is only used for AR.
> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.
That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.
> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.
There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.
Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.
The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.
I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.
Word is they're aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it'll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.
Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.
I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.
Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.
I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception
I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.
I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.
Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.
I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you're moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.
They've cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it'll be any thing close to $1k.
The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.
I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.
When you full screen this, it's crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it's like an inch or inch and a half on a 32 inch 4k display at a normal seated position.
(If I move my head closer it gets larger, further and it gets smaller)
Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.
It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)
Foveated rendering is already a thing. But since it needs to be coded for in the game, it's not really being used on PC games. Games designed for Playstation with the PS VR 2 in mind do use foveated rendering since they know their games are being played with hardware that provides eye tracking.
As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.
While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.
TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)
Foveated streaming should be much easier to implement than foveated rendering. Just encode two streams, a low res one and a high res one, and move the high res one around.
I'm super curious how they will implement it, if it's a general api in steam vr that headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond could use or if it's more tailored towards the Frame. I hope it's the first as to me it sounds like all you need is eye input and the two streams, the rest could be done by steam-vr.
If you are going to be pedantic then at least do it right. Because that's also not what he said. He said that no matter how fast he moved his eyes he wasn't able to catch it.
I don't think a lot of people realize how big of a deal this is. You used to have to choose between wireless and slow or wired and fast. Now you can have both wireless and fast. It's insane.
Yep, that basically guarantees this as a purchase for me. It's basically a Quest 3 with some improvements, an open non-Meta OS, and the various WiFi and Streaming app issues fixed to make it nearly as good as a wired headset.
One of the most interesting parts of this to me that not many people are talking about is what their approach will be to making Steam games work on ARM…
I assume they will have put a lot of work into an emulation layer (maybe an existing one like FEX) to make it usable similar to what they did with Proton? This could be really good for the Linux ARM ecosystem in general
Now that they've ported Steam to Android with FEX + Proton [0] (what this is running), the question is will they release it for the rest of Android devices? There is a ton of Android gaming handhelds and people are already experimenting with things like Winlator [1] but having well supported way could be awesome.
It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.
Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?
Google has also agreed to officially open up to competing app stores from the next version(https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-...), so the time is ideal for this. Valve, if you're reading this, please release Steam for Android.
This being a whole system that will allow you to put whatever software you want onto it makes me think that it might actually succeed at being what the Vision Pro wanted to be.
I'd be willing to take the L on the hardware in order to be able to actually run the software I care about. (I own a Vision Pro and barely use it because the pejorative description of "an iPad on your face" is more accurate than I would like to admit.)
I would agree, but I'm a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I'm fearful that because of its great computing specs it's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.
I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it'd be a step up but not a huge one. I've seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.
Vision Pro wants to be an iPad on your face. The hardware's just not good enough (in the sense of general manufacturing capabilities, not lack of investment from Apple) to make that an enticing product yet.
At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!
Nice to finally have a hackable headset on the market. I’ve been using the dji goggles for fpv flying because of vendor lock in. I wonder I could use these with OpenIPC to fly fpv with a fully open video stack.
A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".
And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:
- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now
- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution
- pancake lenses
- inside-out tracking
In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.
Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.
I think they made the right choice with Snapdragon chip... it will drop in and work as a dev kit for all the android toolchains that support quest3, devs will easily port quest3 games etc... so it's basically a non-spyware quest3 which is what everyone wants at this point. Custom drivers on the wifi 6 dongle are going to likely offer the best wireless experience, which again is what everyone wants.
I'm curious how meta responds imo the only way to compete is on price/ease of use but i'm not interested in another quest the 'social features' are just an excuse to collect data.
Whoo - first party support - including a graphics stack on ARM!
I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.
Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn't compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.
I'm still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this'll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.
Steam Frame is running SteamOS on ARM, and is capable of playing games standalone, which implies ARM support in Steam. Through granted, it could be in a limited form.
They'll need that either way if they want to get back onto macOS, even if it's separate binaries and not a translation layer. At this point I think Steam basically doesn't work on Mac? Since the x64 Macs are legacy and the new ones are aarch64
What a weird site. Am i getting it right that this "Deckard" was the code name for the Frame, it's out now, but the makers of the site went through all that trouble make a dotcom and a pedantic design but can't be bothered update it now that it is, indeed, out?
I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I'm stuck with it and can't upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it's one more nail in my wallet :)
This looks fantastic. The only negative I see so far it is only monochrome passthrough. The full color passthrough on the Quest 3 is pretty killer, it sucks to go backwards on that.
I guess we're in a minority but I'm in full agreement. Color passthrough really felt like a game-changer, and I've long wished for a more open, non-Meta alternative. Guess we'll be waiting a bit longer
I have a quest 2 where the passthrough is laughable. Would you really use it for anything other than getting a glimpse of the outside world? I sure don't, but that may be because of the shitty camera's. But I never saw the appeal of passthrough anyways, isn't the point of a VR headset to see a different reality? Like, not the real world?
with the galaxy xr, you don't have to choose. sometimes it's good to have windows in your reality, other times you can go to a fully immersive mode with different environments
But rechargeable lithium batteries in AA form factor are cheap and cheerful. Even low quality ones will get 20 hours in that situation. So I have no more room to complain.
Valve is weirdly good at making controllers efficient. The original steam controller could get 80 hours out of two AAs if you turn off rumble.
You're right that it's "not too-too hard" to get them, but it's also "not too-too easy" to actually use them in comparison just plugging a USB-C cable into the device. The process you will have to go through to recharge this will become incredibly annoying for something that will eat through batteries as quickly as a VR headset. Think of all the criticisms Apple has received over the years due to the Magic Mouses charging port being on the bottom and that only needs a charge every couple months, this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
There are 1.5V AA li-ion batteries on the market. I bought a few to power children's toys and they have comparable capacity to alkaline batteries. At high currents they actually perform better.
Cost is about 10x that of their non-rechargeable brethren, but obviously there's return on that investment.
I wasn't denying their existence. I was comparing the process of opening your device, taking out the batteries, finding their proprietary charger or hooking each individual battery up to a USB cable depending on the specific variety of battery, and them putting them back into your device is more annoying than just plugging the device into one of the half dozen USB-C chargers we all have scattered around our homes.
I doubt this would be a dealbreaker for most people, but it's a choice that will provide a consistent small annoyance for users.
Batteries in machine leads to having to wait 30 minutes for them to charge. Replaceable rechargeable batteries means you can instantly get a full new set. This is ideal
The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can't say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made "battery replacements" a cinch.
User replaceable batteries are... fine? Expected; preferred even? 40 hours on a single charge is more than adequate, imo, and if the controllers were too light that might actually bother some players.
I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA/AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don't have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.
I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I'd expect there will be third party options to replace the cover/battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.
Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove/insert then it wouldn't surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).
I'm frustrated by the error rate on my Eneloops over the years. I have dozens of them and I swear every other time I recharge them, one more starts blinking and refuses to recharge.
Also I would recommend switching to the IKEA rechargeable batteries which are supposedly the same thing except cheaper.
I'm unreasonably excited on all things Steam nowadays. I still like my PS5. And the PSVR2 is quite amazing for the games it has. But Steam has been amazing in getting back into games for me in ways that I did not anticipate.
That's gonna be one expensive BeatSaber machine, but after having owned an Index (and really feeling how nice that headset was when I got my current Quest 2), there's no way I'm not gonna get one.
Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.
I have the Bigscreen Beyond 2 which is OLED + pancake fine. But only if you have the perfect light seal that the BSB face gasket ensures. Your eyes just adjust to it and I never thought about it while using it. The upside of having perfect blacks is sooooo worth it in my opinion. Flight sims in VR at night are an amazing experience
It's interesting to see them putting more attention on playing traditional games with this. I have long thought that the most broadly viable use for VR headsets in gaming is giving users a big screen to play their regular games. There just doesn't actually appear to be much market for true VR games considering all the complicating factors like motion sickness or requiring a big play area. It reminds me of the Nintendo Wii. Taking turns playing Beat Saber with a few of your friends is fun just like Wii Sports was, but in the end people are going to spend a lot more time sitting on their couch to play something more traditional like Mario Kart.
On the PlayStation VR 2, there is Resident Evil 4 and 8. I'd never cared for those games until I tried them in VR. I'd argue is more like a good game with decent VR support rather than a good "VR" game though. That's also the case for things like Hitman, No Man's Sky, Metro Awakening and such.
And then there are the racing sims. I find these are such an immersive experience it reaches an uncanny-valley type feeling for me, where my body is expecting G-forces that never come, or gets confused with the steering wheel not being the exact same size as my eyes are seeing. It's great though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy cars at all.
Driving sims with the right setup are truly breathtaking gaming experiences. For driving, especially, even things like the weight of a headset almost add to the experience since in the real thing you are wearing a helmet. But it is a way to have a legit, e-sports level gaming experience with real-to-life controls with total VR immersion.
There are some games yes but in my opinion right now the best VR experiences are simulators. Assetto Corsa, iRacing, DCS, MSFS etc.
I bought a Bigscreen Beyond 2 + 5090 gpu basically just to play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator, a flight sim with full fidelity figher jets that you can even fly in PvP multiplayer) and it's the coolest thing VR has to offer for me. All my relatives and friends who tried it were stunned too.
I'm a huge fan of the "I Expect You To Die" series. They're basically a series of small escape rooms. The game's designed to be played seated.
You play James Bond, except that for various silly reasons you find yourself stationary, and you have psychic powers to reach far away stuff because, again, stationary. "They've trapped Bond in a bathysphere!" "You're in a car in a jet ful of poisonous gas that's going to explode!" Each level will kill you quickly and hilariously over and over until you figure out a sequence of steps to survive.
On my own system I've played a lot of modded Beat Saber. Arizona Sunshine was good but not very long. Other than that mostly just mini game type things like The Lab.
One of my friends also has a KAT Walk C2 and I've played Skyrim VR on that. It takes a bit to get used to but it's a lot of fun.
Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it's unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it's incredible,
I totally agree with you, I'm actually doing another Alyx run after only playing it on my Index. It actually please extremely well on the Quest 3 with the Steam Link app. Seamless.
This guy on X gave me some suggestions of top tier VR games:
Hubris, Into The Radius, Wanderer, Blade & Sorcery, RE4 Remake, Modded Skyrim VR, Modded Minecraft, Vertigo 2, Arken Age, Half Life 1 & 2 VR, UNDERDOGS, Hitman VR, Pixel Ripped Series, Walking Dead, Propagation Paradise Hotel
Trying to decide if Steam Frame is going to be better than Apple Vision Pro + ALVR + lighthouses... AVP has higher resolution and OLED displays with higher PPD but obviously weighs a lot more.
There was a lot of discussion about some work they've done to minimize compression artifacts... that's the biggest drawback for me in terms of ALVR + AVP... I suppose time will tell.
Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.
> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.
Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.
Anybody know the limiting factor to providing lower IPDs on VR headsets? My wife had always struggled with this with an IPD in the 50s when we were exploring early gen VR headsets. The Frame bottoms out at 60.
Interesting they went with the 8 Gen 3 instead of something like the X Elite. From what I’ve seen, the 8 Gen 3 actually outperforms the Elite in emulation and running PC games. I wonder if that factored into the decision.
A resolution of 2160@110° is kind of low normally, effectively being around 20 pixels per degree. I wonder if they could pull off something like what the engineers behind the Simula VR headset did, where they shift the outer resolution to the centre of the lens, up to 35.5 PPD, higher than the Apple Vision Pro. Last I checked, it was difficult to find off-the-shelf VR displays suitable for pancake lenses with a resolution above 2160, so this might be the best option.
I'm disappointed it seems to have dropped lighthouse tracking with the previous Valve Index. Especially because with the Valve Knuckles controllers are my favorite with how they strap to your hand.
Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.
Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.
This is my main concern with the new headset.. hopefully they have a way to support lighthouse.. maybe as an "upgrade" to the tracking if you already have a lighthouse setup. I play a game called VTOLVR and it's atrocious on the quest with inside-out tracking, because the game VERY often has you looking in a direction where your arm is behind your back or behind your leg (from the VR's perspective) and it completely loses tracking.. literally killing you in game sometimes. Think "looking up and behind you for threats" while your hand is in the throttle/stick for a combat plane.
It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don't make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don't know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.
The controllers also have gyros, but from what I've read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn't reliable for extended periods.
Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan / burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.
I used colorcontrol to enter the service menu of my LG C2 and disable all anti-burn-in features. No auto dimming, no auto picture level, no anti-logo, etc. The only one I kept is pixel shift because it's only noticeable if you're looking at the edge of the screen when it moves, it's a tiny movement. I skip the "pixel cleaning" prompt every time it wants me to wait. When I'm gaming in HDR, I use filters to increase the exposure to get the maximum brightness range of the panel. Been using it like that for ~8hrs/day for over 2 years now. Zero detectable hint of burn-in.
If you want a different anecdote, I have a LG C1 that got burn in after a year of use, playing FFXIV. I can see a blue outline of where my minimap and hotbars are. HUD burn-in. The only thing I disabled was the dimming feature, because it's outright annoying to use, where every time i'd scroll it'd make the text on a page illegiblly dark. (Dark mode pages, white text becomes dark gray while scrolling then back to white when stopped... sometimes not!). I moved that TV to the living room and got a non oled samsung instead which is what I use now.
I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.
And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.
VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.
Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I'm using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).
> Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"):
Yes, but it's not degrading as fast as OLED haters makes you think. I spent days playing the same games (so HUD is in the static place) on multiple OLED screens I owned for years. No noticeable burn-in and still looks better than my only IPS screen.
I'm just not convinced it's really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it's on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).
Is the steam controller registering as a joystick and a mouse? It could be amazing to manage my current media center! As I cannot make KDE detect my current controller as a mouse
It seems the controller on steamdeck on windows detects as such when steam or whatever companion program is not running. Although in this state. You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself.
Although on Linux side. As far as i remembered, it's up to how kernel driver developer to map the device input into different class. It would be up to valve to decide what to do in this case.
Pretty sure the OS is just the same old Steam-flavored Linux distro "SteamOS" with ARM support and some new graphics pipeline stuff for the VR portion, though we don't know until it's actually out.
Though Valve has put a focus on developer ease and very low software lockdown in the recent years with their hardware, so I'd say the chances on direct rendering are quite good!
Wondering what window/desktop manager will valve ship with the new steam frame. Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently? Will that be a mod of kde or something?
> Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently?
The best known is perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass but there's many others, at varying stages of development. It will be interesting to see if custom OS/UX development is made available for this device. We'd also need quite a bit of custom development to make the OS comprehensively usable with gamepad-like controllers alone (no mouse or keyboard required). The existing work on "10-ft." media center interfaces can provide a useful starting point for this but it's far from covering all possible uses.
This is due to a video that has drm encoding and the browser trying to decode it. The drm blob contains the codec keys in our driver and the browser is supposed to negotiate this. It fails. At least on Nvidia for you. It fails for me on safari on iOS.
There's a devkit... I'm disappointed, that's the Sony method? I actually tried to do dev for the Meta Quest 2 the other week and was disappointed there because it's my son's, and he can't sign up for a Meta dev account (age), so there's no way for me to do anything with it without factory resetting the thing. This is more disappointing though. Why can't I dev games for the consumer headset?
The death of VR has been greatly exaggerated. The only thing that died is the hype, and the hype will not be missed. It's just nice to have so much less bullshit.
Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.
It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.
USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.
It is my second laptop I got from my employer (replacement every few years) and it also has just usb c ports. I hate plugging in usb-a adapter. I would at least expect adapter included for usb c.
I'st much less likely to break a usba dongle compare to usb c though.(the area is much mcuh bjgger) And I don't think the dongle really need the 40gb potential of a usbc port.
I mean.. my X670E motherboard (a high end, modern mobo!) has only ONE usb-c port.. it has, in comparison, 3 usb-a 10gbps ports and another 4x usb-a 5gbps ports. Given the headset's main use case to be plugged in is for PC-VR game streaming, it makes sense that they'd go with USB-A. Maybe in a few years they can switch but right now most desktop mobos barely even have usb-c.
I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)
The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.
It's both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
> But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
That's my experience streaming games to steam deck. I have central 2.4/5/6Ghz AP and 6Ghz-only APs in other rooms. Any sort of wireless streaming at my place is snappy.
Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Foveated rendering is complicated to implement with current rendering APIs in a way that actually improves performance, but foveated streaming seems like a much easier win that applies to all content automatically. And the dedicated 6 GHz dongle should do a much better job at streaming than typical wifi routers.
> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.
It's an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate
Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I'd love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.
> Monochrome passthrough
So AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:
> User accessible front expansion port w/ Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) / PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)
Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?
One thing I don't see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That's something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.
More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There's an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I'm surprised it isn't standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index's "knuckles" controllers.
Foveated streaming is cool. FWIW the Vision Pro does that for their Mac virtual display as well, and it works really well to pump a lot more pixels through.
I think it works really well to pump the same amount of pixels, just focusing them on the more important parts.
Always PIP, Pump Important Pixels
And foveated streaming has a 1-2ms wireless latency on modern GPUs according to LTT. Insane.
Wow, that's just 1 frame of latency at 60 fps.
Edit: Nevermind, I'm dumb. 1/60th of a second is 16 milliseconds, not 1.6 milliseconds.
No, thats between 0.06 and 0.12 frame latency on 60fps. It's not even a frame on 144Hz (1s/144≈7ms)
60 fps is 16.67 ms per frame.
Much less than, 1 frame is 16ms
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low.
Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?
There's no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain.
> "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?"
Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly.
The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro.
There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels.
Even the vision pro at 35ppd simply isn't close to the PPD you can get from a good desktop monitor (we can calculate PPD for desktop monitors too, using size and viewing distance).
Apple's "retina" HiDPI monitors typically have PPD well beyond 35 at ordinary viewing distances, even a 1080p 24 inch monitor on your desk can exceed this.
For me personally, 35ppd feels about the minimum I would accept for emulating a monitor for text work in a VR headset, but it's still not good enough for me to even begin thinking about using it to replace any of my monitors.
> https://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html
Oh yeah for sure. Most people seem to accept that 35ppd is "good enough" but not actually at-par with a high quality high-dpi monitor.
I agree with you - I would personally consider 35ppd to be the floor for usability for this purpose. It's good in a pinch (need a nice workstation setup in a hotel room?) but I would not currently consider any extant hardware as full-time replacements for a good monitor.
Most people in what age group?
I'm 53 and the Quest 3 is perfectly good as a monitor replacement.
I'm in the same boat. Due to my vision not being perfect even after correction, a Quest 3 is entirely sufficient.
I keep hearing this argument, and it baffles me. I find that, as I age and my vision gets worse, I need progressively finer text rendering. Using same-size displays (27") at the same distance, with text the same physical size on screen, 1440p gives me a much worse reading experience than 4k with 2x scaling.
Are you saying ppd requirements for comfortable usage vary with age?
We get by with lower resolution monitors with lower pixel density all the time.
I think part of getting by with a lower PPD is the IRL pixels are fixed and have hard boundaries that OS affordances have co-evolved with.
(pixel alignment via lots of rectangular things - windows, buttons; text rendering w/ that in mind; "pixel perfect" historical design philosophy)
The VR PPD is in arbitrary orientations which will lead to more aliasing. MacOS kinda killed their low-dpi experience via bad aliasing as they moved to the hi-dpi regime. Now we have svg-like rendering instead of screen-pixel-aligned baked rasterized UIs.
I'm not sure most of us do anymore - see my 1080p/24 inch example.
No one who has bought almost any MacBook in the last 10 years or so has had PPD this low either.
One can get by with almost anything in a pinch, it doesn't mean its desirable.
Pixel density != PPD either, although increasing it can certainly help PPD. Lower density desktop displays routinely have higher PPD than most VR headsets - viewing distance matters!
Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far.
This all sounds a bit like the “better horse” framing. Maybe richer content shouldn’t be consumed as primarily a virtualized page. Maybe mixing font sizes and over sized text can be a standard in itself.
Couldn't you get around that by having a "zoom" feature on a very large but distant monitor?
Yes but that can create major motion sickness issues - motion that does not correspond top the user's actual physical movements create a dissonance that is expressed as motion sickness for a large portion of the population.
This is the main reason many VR games don't let you just walk around and opt for teleportation-based movement systems - your avatar moving while your body doesn't can be quite physically uncomfortable.
There are ways of minimizing this - for example some VR games give you "tunnel vision" by blacking out peripheral vision while the movement is happening. But overall there's a lot of ergo considerations here and no perfect solution. The equivalent for a virtual desktop might be to limit the size of the window while the user is zooming/panning.
Yes. You can make a low-resolution monitor (like 800x600px, once upon a time a usable resolution) and/or provide zoom and panning controls
I've tried that combination in an earlier iteration of Lenovo's smart glasses, and it technically works. But the experience you get is not fun or productive. If you need to do it (say to work on confidential documents in public) you can do it, but it's not something you'd do in a normal setup
For a small taste of what using that might be like turn on screen magnification on your existing computers. It's technically usable but not particularly productive or pleasant to use if you don't /have/ to use it.
It's just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup. Obviously it's enough for 80 char consoles but you'd need to dip into large fonts for a desktop.
I did the math on this site and I'd have to hunch less than a foot from the screen to hit 35 PPD on my work provided Thinkpad X1 Carbon with a 14" 1920x1200 screen. My usual distance is nearly double that so my ppd normally is more like 70 ppd, roughly.
https://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html#find:dis...
Foveated streaming is wild to me. Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text, so guaranteeing that latency over 2.4Ghz seems Sisyphean.
I wonder if they have an ML model doing partial upscaling until the eyetracking state is propagated and the full resolution image under the new fovea position is available. It also makes me wonder if there's some way to do neural compression of the peripheral vision optimized for a nice balance between peripheral vision and hints in the embedding to allow for nicer upscaling.
I worked on a foveated video streaming system for 3D video back in 2008, and we used eye tracking and extrapolated a pretty simple motion vector for eyes and ignored saccades entirely. It worked well, you really don't notice the lower detail in the periphery and with a slightly over-sized high resolution focal area you can detect a change in gaze direction before the user's focus exits the high resolution area.
Anyway that was ages ago and we did it with like three people, some duct tape and a GPU, so I expect that it should work really well on modern equipment if they've put the effort into it.
Foveated rendering very clearly works well with a dedicated connection, wiht predictable latency. My question was more about the latency spikes inherent in a ISM general use band combined with foveated rendering, which would make the effects of the latency spikes even worse.
They're doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).
With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.
Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
You're talking about "Wi-Fi 6" not "6 GHz Wi-Fi".
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
Not so much of an issue when neighbors with paper thin walls see that 6ghz as a -87 signal
That said, in the US it is 1200MHz aka 5.925 GHz to 7.125 GHz.
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.
Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.
My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.
We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.
I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.
Enough bandwidth to absolve any latency issues over a wireless connection is not really a thing for a low latency use case like foveated rendering.
What do you do when another device on the main wifi network decides to eat 50ms of time in the channel you use for the eye tracking data return path?
I believe all communication with the dongle is on 6GHz - both the video and the return metadata.
So again, you just make sure the 6GHz band in the room is dedicated to the Frame and its dongle.
The 5GHz is for WiFi.
Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao
MU-MIMO is very nice.
The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.
Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.
Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.
Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.
The real trick is not over complicating things. The goal is to have high fidelity rendering where the eye is currently focusing so to solve for saccades you just build a small buffer area around the idealized minimum high res center and the saccades will safely stay inside that area within the ability of the system to react to the larger overall movements.
Picture demonstrating the large area that foveated rendering actually covers as high or mid res: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/66nfap/made_a_pic_t...
At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn't seem like it would be a problem. If you can't get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they'll be on the floor vomiting.
It was hard for me to believe as well but streaming games wirelessly on a Quest 2 was totally possible and surprisingly latency-free once I upgraded to wifi 6 (few years ago)
It works a lot better than you’d expect at face value.
Have a look at this video by Dave2D. In his hands-on, he was very impressed with foveated streaming https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
Why hasn't Meta tried this given the huge amount of R&D they've put into VR and they had literally John Carmack on the team in the past?
They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They've also bet more on standalone apps rather than streaming from a PC. These are reasonable tradeoffs. The next Quest may add eye tracking, who knows. Quest Pro had it but was discontinued for being too expensive.
We'll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don't expect them to match Meta's subsidies, so I'm betting on this being more expensive than Quest. I also think that streaming from a gaming PC will remain more of a niche thing despite Valve's focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86/Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.
It will be interesting to see how the X86 emulation plays out. In the Verge review of the headset they mentioned stutters when playing on the headset due to having to 'recompile x86 game code on the fly', but they may offer precompiled versions which can be downloaded ahead of time, similar to the precompiled shaders the Steam Deck downloads.
If they get everything working well I'm guessing we could see an ARM powered Steam Deck in the future.
Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
> Despite the fact it uses a Qualcomm chip, I'm curious on whether it retains the ability to load alternative OS's like other Steam hardware.
I think it should: we have Linux support/custom operating systems on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices right now today, and the 8 Gen 3 has upstream support already AFAIK
https://rocknix.org/devices/ayn/odin2/
If you mean foveated streaming - It’s available on the Quest Pro with Steam Link.
What do you mean? What part have they not tried?
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use.
The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.
VR does need a lot of resolution when trying to display text.
Can get away with less for games where text is minimized (or very large)
The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.
The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.
There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.
Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.
To your point, I'd use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
2k X 2k doesn't sound low res it is like full HD, but with twice vertical. My monitor is 1080p.
Never tried VR set, so I don't know if that translates similarly.
Your 2K monitor occupies something like a 20-degree field of view from a normal sitting position/distance. The 2K resolution in a VR headset covers the entire field of view.
So effectively your 1080p monitor has ~6x the pixel density of the VR headset.
The problem is that 2k square is spread across the whole FOV of the headset so when it's replicating a monitor unless it's ridiculously close to your face a lot of those pixels are 'wasted' in comparison to a monitor with similar stats.
I guess there's a market for this but I'm personally disappointed that they've gone with the "cram a computer into the headset" route. I'd much rather have a simpler, more compact dumb device like the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which in exchange should prove much lighter and more comfortable to wear for long time periods.
The bulk and added component cost of the "all in one" PC/headset models is just unnecessary if you already have a gaming PC.
I was worried about the built in computer as well, but then I found out it's only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it's still pretty light.
I'm personally quite hyped to see the first commercially available Linux-based standalone VR headset announced. This thing is quite a bit lighter than any of the existing "cram a computer in" solutions.
You can get a Beyond if that's what you want. It's an amazing device, and will be far more comfortable and higher resolution than this one. Valve has supported Bigscreen in integrating Lighthouse tracking, and I hope that they continue that support by somehow allowing them to integrate the inside-out tracking they've developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.
That would probably add a lot of extra weight and it would need to make the device bigger.
I don't think it would be too bad. Cameras are tiny. The processing would still happen on the PC, and you could delete the lighthouse tracking sensors. I guess the hardest part would be sending that much camera data back to the PC over the cable.
They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta's offerings, this is indeed an actual computer you can run linux on. Perhaps even do standard computer stuff inside the headset like text editing, Blender modeling, or more.
I agree. Hopefully Bigscreen continues making hardware. I still have the original bigscreen beyond and im very happy with it besides the glare.
> Mouth tracking?
What a vile thought in the context of the steam… catalogue.
They're probably thinking of it in comparison to the Apple Pro which attempts to do some facial tracking of the bottom of your face to inform their 'Personas', it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can't see the bottom half of the face well.
I gathered as much, but still.
This is the first standalone headset with an open ecosystem. That's a big deal.
Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
I just want a "dumb" headset that I can use as a portable private display for my laptop.
That's it.
I don't need 3D, I don't need VR, I don't need weirdass controllers trying to be special. Just give me a damn simple monitor the size of my eyes.
Fuck off with your XR OSes and "vision" for XR, not even Apple could get it right, the people in charge everywhere are too out of touch and have no clue where the fuck to go after smartphones.
Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting pricing details but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too.
Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.
Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.
Frame is obviously the main headline here, but they've also launching a new SteamOS mini-PC and a new controller.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller
No prices listed for any of them yet, as far as I can tell.
Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.
6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.
What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy/build any mini PC? There's plenty of options for that
It's tiny. It runs SteamOS which is built to be used with a controller on a TV. And it will probably be a performance target for many developers.
But I think the biggest feature might be the quick suspend and resume. Every modern console has that, but not PCs. You can try to put a computer to sleep, but many games won't like that.
A good while back I abandoned PC gaming because I was sick of driver issues, compatibility, and always having to update hardware to play the next game. Instead, I embraced consoles and haven't considered PC gaming since then. This, however, has me reconsidering that. I want it to "just work". When I want to play games, I don't want to deal with all of that other crap. I'm old, ain't nobody got time for that.
I guess you abandoned PC gaming some time in the early 2000s?
It's wild how experiences can vary so wildly. That's the nature of PC's though I suppose that you are trying to avoid.
I've had no driver or compatibility issues in longer than I can remember. Maybe Vista?
I also rarely upgrade because playing at console level settings means I can easily get effectively the same lifetime out of my hardware. Though I do tend to upgrade a little earlier than console users still leaning a bit more towards the enthusiast side.
Some people really don't want to spend time exchanging parts when the memory they buy turns out to be incompatible or that the GPU doesn't fit the sleek mITX case. There's a lot of research to ensure all parts are compatible and optimal when building a PC - for some it's time that could be better spent on using the PC instead of building one.
[delayed]
It's a console basically. It comes ready to play without much maintenance needed from the user.
Snapdragon doesn't really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.
Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.
I know but the Frame supports regular x86 games as well in standalone mode.
you run FEX, not direct ARM games
That doesn't magically fix the Qualcomm GPU or the drivers.
The GPU is fine and the drivers Valve are using, if their past hardware is any indication, will be open source. Doesn't magically fix them, but it does allow for Valve to fix them.
I don’t think you will be on latest nightly. LTS are good and stable, if FEX is targeting those specs I don’t see a stability issue.
Real shame it’s only 60Hz at 4k. There’s a gap for good 120Hz@4k streaming.
Hoping the next Apple TV will do it.
Edit - updated specs claim it can do this, but it’s limited to HDMI 2.0
(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)
Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it's limited to HDMI 2.0 it will have to rely on 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to get there. Unfortunately the lack of HDMI 2.1 might be down to politics, the RDNA3 GPU they're using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
It seems it supports DP 1.4 as well, so perhaps you could get an adapter if your display only supports HDMI 2.1
... but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
It seems to me the wireless is pretty important. I have an MQ3 and I have the link cable. For software development I pretty much have to plug the MQ3 into my PC and it is not so bad to wander around the living room looking in a Mars boulder from all sides and such.
For games and apps that involve moving around, particularly things like Beat Saber or Supernatural the standalone headset has a huge advantage of having no cable. If I have a choice between buying a game on Steam or the MQ3 store I'm likely to buy the MQ3 game because of the convenience and freedom of standalone. A really good wireless link changes that.
> but isn't it using a wireless dongle to connect to the headset to the PC so HDMI doesn't get involved?
I'm talking about the Steam Machine here. In theory you could pipe 4k120 to the headset assuming there's enough wireless bandwidth, yeah.
So, in the specs for the mini-pc, it claims the video out can do 4K @ 120Hz (even faster if displayport). I assume the 4K @ 60Hz you saw is from the "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" line.
I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.
Interesting. I also saw HDMI 2.0 - I guess it’s technically possible but with subsampling?
Considering how much they talk about Foveated rendering, I think it might not be constrained by the traditional limitations of screens - instead of sending a fixed resolution image at whatever frequency, it'll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.
Or that's what I think I may be completely wrong.
Where are you getting this number? I'm not seeing it on the specs page.
it's confusing rn because on the steam machine post people are commenting on the frame and vice-versa here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903404
This is for the steam machine, not the headset. Mentioned in the CPU & GPU section.
This is not true, from the specs:
HDMI 2.0
Up to 4K @ 120Hz
Supports HDR, FreeSync, and CEC
I have zero doubts the device can do 4k @ 120Hz streaming Hardware wise. In the end it is just a normal Linux desktop.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
Mac Mini m4: 127 x 127 x 50 mm = 0.8 L
Steam Machine: 156 x 162 x 152 = 3.8 L
That's 4.76 times more volume.
> Obviously comparing apples to oranges
Or is it “comparing apples to steam engines”?
Given that Valve are the ones who released the Orange Box, methinks the original comparison is valid
It's only a little bigger than Mac Studio.
9.5 x 19.7 x 19.7 cm = 3,687 cm³
and half the size of my SFFPC @ 8.3L
Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.
In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.
The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.
But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.
Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.
I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs. Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.
I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.
The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.
The headsets that have AR cameras don't use them for tracking AFAIK. They all have monochrome cameras for that. The AR cameras are an additional cost that is only used for AR.
> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.
That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.
> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.
There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.
Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.
I have little to no interest in AR and i'm glad they didnt waste more money or resources on it. I don't use it on my Q3 and I wouldnt use it on this.
This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.
The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.
I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.
Word is they're aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it'll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.
See "cheaper than index": https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...
Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.
I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.
I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.
Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.
I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception
I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.
Only question is if 2160px is enough.
I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.
> The fact that this can run standalone
Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.
I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you're moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.
from your keyboard to GabeN's ears. I've spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.
They've cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it'll be any thing close to $1k.
The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.
I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.
There's an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
Linus the shrill/yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.
When you full screen this, it's crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it's like an inch or inch and a half on a 32 inch 4k display at a normal seated position.
(If I move my head closer it gets larger, further and it gets smaller)
Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.
It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)
Foveated rendering is already a thing. But since it needs to be coded for in the game, it's not really being used on PC games. Games designed for Playstation with the PS VR 2 in mind do use foveated rendering since they know their games are being played with hardware that provides eye tracking.
As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.
While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.
TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)
[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/variableratesh...
[1] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2010-06...
Game rendering is what they're talking about here. John Carmack has talked about this a bunch if you'd like to seed a google search.
Foveated streaming should be much easier to implement than foveated rendering. Just encode two streams, a low res one and a high res one, and move the high res one around.
If you use a Quest Pro and use Steam Link with a WiFi 6E access point, that should accurately represent the experience of using it.
It's close to imperceptible in normal usage.
I'm super curious how they will implement it, if it's a general api in steam vr that headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond could use or if it's more tailored towards the Frame. I hope it's the first as to me it sounds like all you need is eye input and the two streams, the rest could be done by steam-vr.
There is a LTT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU3ru09HTng
Linus says he cannot tell it is actually foveated streaming.
Thats not what he said. What he said was even rapidly moving his eyes around he could not spot the lower resolution part.
How is that meaningfully different than not being able to tell that it's foveated?
Same with Dave2D https://youtu.be/356rZ8IBCps.
If you are going to be pedantic then at least do it right. Because that's also not what he said. He said that no matter how fast he moved his eyes he wasn't able to catch it.
I believe in Linus very little. I'll keep my eyes peeled to see what others say. It's certainly possible though, Valve has the chops to pull it off.
Norm from Tested said the same in his video.
https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU
The Verge reports similarly - can't tell foveated streaming. Seems like Valve really cracked the code with this one.
I don't think a lot of people realize how big of a deal this is. You used to have to choose between wireless and slow or wired and fast. Now you can have both wireless and fast. It's insane.
Yep, that basically guarantees this as a purchase for me. It's basically a Quest 3 with some improvements, an open non-Meta OS, and the various WiFi and Streaming app issues fixed to make it nearly as good as a wired headset.
I haven't bought a VR headset since the Oculus Rift CV1, but this might do it for me
Also mentions 1-2ms latency on a modern GPU
One of the most interesting parts of this to me that not many people are talking about is what their approach will be to making Steam games work on ARM…
I assume they will have put a lot of work into an emulation layer (maybe an existing one like FEX) to make it usable similar to what they did with Proton? This could be really good for the Linux ARM ecosystem in general
Apparently they are heavily funding FEX-emu now and are using that
Now that they've ported Steam to Android with FEX + Proton [0] (what this is running), the question is will they release it for the rest of Android devices? There is a ton of Android gaming handhelds and people are already experimenting with things like Winlator [1] but having well supported way could be awesome.
[0] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
[1] https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
Unfortunately not, at least outside of the Linux VM shipping in new Android versions https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ#Will_FEX-Emu_.28Linux...
It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.
Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?
It's running SteamOS according to the tech specs on the store page, not Android.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe
Google has also agreed to officially open up to competing app stores from the next version(https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-...), so the time is ideal for this. Valve, if you're reading this, please release Steam for Android.
this has nothing to do with Android
This being a whole system that will allow you to put whatever software you want onto it makes me think that it might actually succeed at being what the Vision Pro wanted to be.
This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.
The pass-through video is monochrome and the screens have about 40% of the pixels compared to the Vision Pro.
The Samsung Galaxy XR is much closer to being a Vision Pro competitor.
The Steam Frame is very focused on playing games locally and streamed from a PC.
I'd be willing to take the L on the hardware in order to be able to actually run the software I care about. (I own a Vision Pro and barely use it because the pejorative description of "an iPad on your face" is more accurate than I would like to admit.)
I don’t know exactly how open the Android XR system on the Galaxy XR is, but it is likely better than the Vison Pro in that regard.
Well, that and being squarely focused on gaming.
I also trust the Steam ecosystem far more than I probably should...
I would agree, but I'm a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I'm fearful that because of its great computing specs it's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.
I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it'd be a step up but not a huge one. I've seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.
Vision Pro wants to be an iPad on your face. The hardware's just not good enough (in the sense of general manufacturing capabilities, not lack of investment from Apple) to make that an enticing product yet.
At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!
Nice to finally have a hackable headset on the market. I’ve been using the dji goggles for fpv flying because of vendor lock in. I wonder I could use these with OpenIPC to fly fpv with a fully open video stack.
This is fantastic!
A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".
And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:
- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now
- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution
- pancake lenses
- inside-out tracking
In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.
Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.
I think they made the right choice with Snapdragon chip... it will drop in and work as a dev kit for all the android toolchains that support quest3, devs will easily port quest3 games etc... so it's basically a non-spyware quest3 which is what everyone wants at this point. Custom drivers on the wifi 6 dongle are going to likely offer the best wireless experience, which again is what everyone wants.
I'm curious how meta responds imo the only way to compete is on price/ease of use but i'm not interested in another quest the 'social features' are just an excuse to collect data.
Whoo - first party support - including a graphics stack on ARM!
I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.
Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn't compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.
I'm still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this'll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.
Steam Frame is running SteamOS on ARM, and is capable of playing games standalone, which implies ARM support in Steam. Through granted, it could be in a limited form.
They'll need that either way if they want to get back onto macOS, even if it's separate binaries and not a translation layer. At this point I think Steam basically doesn't work on Mac? Since the x64 Macs are legacy and the new ones are aarch64
I doubt fex-emu works on macos.
But isnt that what Rosetta2 is for on mac anyway?
Deckard at last! https://isvalvedeckardout.com/
What a weird site. Am i getting it right that this "Deckard" was the code name for the Frame, it's out now, but the makers of the site went through all that trouble make a dotcom and a pedantic design but can't be bothered update it now that it is, indeed, out?
The timeline on the site you're critiquing says the project was confirmed in 2021. So they've been waiting a while.
And it's not out, it was "revealed" today with "early 2026" estimate for availability. No price yet.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
The site has been updated, it says "Announced on Steam — not out yet."
The headset isn't being released until early 2026.
> it's out now
It's not out, just announced.
That mini pc... one more nail in the coffin of the xbox hardware business. Ouch.
I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I'm stuck with it and can't upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it's one more nail in my wallet :)
This looks fantastic. The only negative I see so far it is only monochrome passthrough. The full color passthrough on the Quest 3 is pretty killer, it sucks to go backwards on that.
There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.
I guess we're in a minority but I'm in full agreement. Color passthrough really felt like a game-changer, and I've long wished for a more open, non-Meta alternative. Guess we'll be waiting a bit longer
I have a quest 2 where the passthrough is laughable. Would you really use it for anything other than getting a glimpse of the outside world? I sure don't, but that may be because of the shitty camera's. But I never saw the appeal of passthrough anyways, isn't the point of a VR headset to see a different reality? Like, not the real world?
with the galaxy xr, you don't have to choose. sometimes it's good to have windows in your reality, other times you can go to a fully immersive mode with different environments
> Steam Frame Controllers: Powered by AA batteries (rated 40 hours)
Yes, I want to see standard batteries being used more. Too bad they didn't go with this on the Steam Controller.
Why? It is a bummer to keep them, buy them when suddently they stop working, etc.
While chargeable needs just a usb-c socket.
Devices with internal batteries basically have embedded expiration dates.
Standard AAA or AA can be rechargeable so you don’t need to keep buying more. I’d suggest buying like a 100 pack or something, they’re not expensive.
The ideal would be rechargeable AA battery support with a built-in USB-C that would natively support charging said AA battery.
You can also get a USB charger for them which is very convenient.
I actually prefer rechargeable batteries.
But rechargeable lithium batteries in AA form factor are cheap and cheerful. Even low quality ones will get 20 hours in that situation. So I have no more room to complain.
Valve is weirdly good at making controllers efficient. The original steam controller could get 80 hours out of two AAs if you turn off rumble.
Kind of weird using AA batteries, I'd imagine something else would be better suited for this?
AA means they don’t have to handle battery replacements; and it’s not too-too hard to get rechargeable batteries.
I would prefer batteries in machine, too; but this does have some sustainability and repairability (by not needing it) advantages.
You're right that it's "not too-too hard" to get them, but it's also "not too-too easy" to actually use them in comparison just plugging a USB-C cable into the device. The process you will have to go through to recharge this will become incredibly annoying for something that will eat through batteries as quickly as a VR headset. Think of all the criticisms Apple has received over the years due to the Magic Mouses charging port being on the bottom and that only needs a charge every couple months, this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
> this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.
I think you're mixing up the controller and headset batteries. The controllers use AA batteries and should last for potentially months of use.
The headset itself uses a rechargeable 21.6 Wh Li-ion battery with 45W charging over USB-C.
Thanks for the correction. Still annoying, but obviously less so.
There are 1.5V AA li-ion batteries on the market. I bought a few to power children's toys and they have comparable capacity to alkaline batteries. At high currents they actually perform better.
Cost is about 10x that of their non-rechargeable brethren, but obviously there's return on that investment.
I wasn't denying their existence. I was comparing the process of opening your device, taking out the batteries, finding their proprietary charger or hooking each individual battery up to a USB cable depending on the specific variety of battery, and them putting them back into your device is more annoying than just plugging the device into one of the half dozen USB-C chargers we all have scattered around our homes.
I doubt this would be a dealbreaker for most people, but it's a choice that will provide a consistent small annoyance for users.
True, but you can just swap in a spare set of charged batteries and you are back online instantly.
The controller is the only part that uses AA. The computer/headset portion uses USB-C recharging.
I would hazard a guess that the battery in the controller will have a life measured in weeks if not months.
AA’s are only used for the controllers and they’ve got a claimed 40 hours of battery life on those AAs.
Batteries in machine leads to having to wait 30 minutes for them to charge. Replaceable rechargeable batteries means you can instantly get a full new set. This is ideal
The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can't say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made "battery replacements" a cinch.
User replaceable batteries are... fine? Expected; preferred even? 40 hours on a single charge is more than adequate, imo, and if the controllers were too light that might actually bother some players.
I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA/AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don't have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.
I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I'd expect there will be third party options to replace the cover/battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.
Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove/insert then it wouldn't surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).
I swapped all my AA and AAA batteries for Enelooops. The cheaper white ones are the best for most applications.
I'm frustrated by the error rate on my Eneloops over the years. I have dozens of them and I swear every other time I recharge them, one more starts blinking and refuses to recharge.
Also I would recommend switching to the IKEA rechargeable batteries which are supposedly the same thing except cheaper.
Makes me happy. Instant swap when you run out of power.
I just buy rechargeable batteries and keep a charger nearby. When batteries die, they come out and straight into the charger. Always ready to go.
I'm unreasonably excited on all things Steam nowadays. I still like my PS5. And the PSVR2 is quite amazing for the games it has. But Steam has been amazing in getting back into games for me in ways that I did not anticipate.
That's gonna be one expensive BeatSaber machine, but after having owned an Index (and really feeling how nice that headset was when I got my current Quest 2), there's no way I'm not gonna get one.
kudos to them for using AA batteries for the controller.
will help the hardware last longer. cz non-removable lithium batteries suck.
>2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye)
Here's hoping it will be like the Deck and we get Frame OLED in a year or so.
Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.
I have the Bigscreen Beyond 2 which is OLED + pancake fine. But only if you have the perfect light seal that the BSB face gasket ensures. Your eyes just adjust to it and I never thought about it while using it. The upside of having perfect blacks is sooooo worth it in my opinion. Flight sims in VR at night are an amazing experience
That is micro OLED and is more expensive than regular OLED.
Several. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Meganex 8K, and more coming like Crystal Super / Dream Air.
Finally, a modern VR headset that doesn't hate you.
It's interesting to see them putting more attention on playing traditional games with this. I have long thought that the most broadly viable use for VR headsets in gaming is giving users a big screen to play their regular games. There just doesn't actually appear to be much market for true VR games considering all the complicating factors like motion sickness or requiring a big play area. It reminds me of the Nintendo Wii. Taking turns playing Beat Saber with a few of your friends is fun just like Wii Sports was, but in the end people are going to spend a lot more time sitting on their couch to play something more traditional like Mario Kart.
The only really incredible VR experience I have had so far was Half-life Alyx. Is there anything that tier or even better these days?
On the PlayStation VR 2, there is Resident Evil 4 and 8. I'd never cared for those games until I tried them in VR. I'd argue is more like a good game with decent VR support rather than a good "VR" game though. That's also the case for things like Hitman, No Man's Sky, Metro Awakening and such.
And then there are the racing sims. I find these are such an immersive experience it reaches an uncanny-valley type feeling for me, where my body is expecting G-forces that never come, or gets confused with the steering wheel not being the exact same size as my eyes are seeing. It's great though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy cars at all.
Driving sims with the right setup are truly breathtaking gaming experiences. For driving, especially, even things like the weight of a headset almost add to the experience since in the real thing you are wearing a helmet. But it is a way to have a legit, e-sports level gaming experience with real-to-life controls with total VR immersion.
There are some games yes but in my opinion right now the best VR experiences are simulators. Assetto Corsa, iRacing, DCS, MSFS etc.
I bought a Bigscreen Beyond 2 + 5090 gpu basically just to play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator, a flight sim with full fidelity figher jets that you can even fly in PvP multiplayer) and it's the coolest thing VR has to offer for me. All my relatives and friends who tried it were stunned too.
Beat Saber is the ultimate VR game, IMHO. It's what enabled me to create this masterpiece:
https://replay.beatleader.com/?scoreId=20010657
:D
I'm a huge fan of the "I Expect You To Die" series. They're basically a series of small escape rooms. The game's designed to be played seated.
You play James Bond, except that for various silly reasons you find yourself stationary, and you have psychic powers to reach far away stuff because, again, stationary. "They've trapped Bond in a bathysphere!" "You're in a car in a jet ful of poisonous gas that's going to explode!" Each level will kill you quickly and hilariously over and over until you figure out a sequence of steps to survive.
On my own system I've played a lot of modded Beat Saber. Arizona Sunshine was good but not very long. Other than that mostly just mini game type things like The Lab.
One of my friends also has a KAT Walk C2 and I've played Skyrim VR on that. It takes a bit to get used to but it's a lot of fun.
Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it's unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it's incredible,
I totally agree with you, I'm actually doing another Alyx run after only playing it on my Index. It actually please extremely well on the Quest 3 with the Steam Link app. Seamless.
This guy on X gave me some suggestions of top tier VR games:
Hubris, Into The Radius, Wanderer, Blade & Sorcery, RE4 Remake, Modded Skyrim VR, Modded Minecraft, Vertigo 2, Arken Age, Half Life 1 & 2 VR, UNDERDOGS, Hitman VR, Pixel Ripped Series, Walking Dead, Propagation Paradise Hotel
Trying to decide if Steam Frame is going to be better than Apple Vision Pro + ALVR + lighthouses... AVP has higher resolution and OLED displays with higher PPD but obviously weighs a lot more.
There was a lot of discussion about some work they've done to minimize compression artifacts... that's the biggest drawback for me in terms of ALVR + AVP... I suppose time will tell.
They mention tracking the new Steam Controller, too.
Which makes me wonder if they'll make a new Steam Deck that has the IR emitters in it, so the Frame could track the Deck?
I wonder if the two working together could work well?
Wonder if/when prescription lenses will be available for it. I had to get some for my index since my glasses were too big to fit inside the headset.
There will be.
If it all launches with Half-Life 3 that works seamlessly across all 3 Steam platforms then we're living in the best timeline...
> then we're living in the best timeline...
Needs to run GNU Hurd for that.
Valve just defeated Meta and Xbox in one go. nice.
From the spec sheet:
> Large FOV (up to 110 degrees)
Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.
> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.
Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.
Anybody know the limiting factor to providing lower IPDs on VR headsets? My wife had always struggled with this with an IPD in the 50s when we were exploring early gen VR headsets. The Frame bottoms out at 60.
Annoying not to include price or release date.
Considering the quest 3 came out 2 entire years ago this feels too close in terms of hardware instead of feeling like a next generation headset.
Responses do seem fairly positive though. I wonder if this had been released as the quest 4 though would you all be reacting as positively?
WHAT'S THE PRICE
GABEN
GABEN DON'T LEAVE ME HANGING WHAT IS THE PRICEEEEEEEE
Interesting they went with the 8 Gen 3 instead of something like the X Elite. From what I’ve seen, the 8 Gen 3 actually outperforms the Elite in emulation and running PC games. I wonder if that factored into the decision.
A resolution of 2160@110° is kind of low normally, effectively being around 20 pixels per degree. I wonder if they could pull off something like what the engineers behind the Simula VR headset did, where they shift the outer resolution to the centre of the lens, up to 35.5 PPD, higher than the Apple Vision Pro. Last I checked, it was difficult to find off-the-shelf VR displays suitable for pancake lenses with a resolution above 2160, so this might be the best option.
https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
I'm disappointed it seems to have dropped lighthouse tracking with the previous Valve Index. Especially because with the Valve Knuckles controllers are my favorite with how they strap to your hand.
Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.
Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.
[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=246 - timestampped @ controller section.
This is my main concern with the new headset.. hopefully they have a way to support lighthouse.. maybe as an "upgrade" to the tracking if you already have a lighthouse setup. I play a game called VTOLVR and it's atrocious on the quest with inside-out tracking, because the game VERY often has you looking in a direction where your arm is behind your back or behind your leg (from the VR's perspective) and it completely loses tracking.. literally killing you in game sometimes. Think "looking up and behind you for threats" while your hand is in the throttle/stick for a combat plane.
It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don't make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don't know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.
The controllers also have gyros, but from what I've read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn't reliable for extended periods.
Not to mention the insane precision (I believe it’s something like 1 or 2 mm).
Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan / burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.
OLED only burns in if the content is static for hours. If your head is that stable while using VR, I give you $5.
OLED is always burning in as a feature of it. It’s just much less noticeable when it’s:
But it is still always losing durability in a steady way.I used colorcontrol to enter the service menu of my LG C2 and disable all anti-burn-in features. No auto dimming, no auto picture level, no anti-logo, etc. The only one I kept is pixel shift because it's only noticeable if you're looking at the edge of the screen when it moves, it's a tiny movement. I skip the "pixel cleaning" prompt every time it wants me to wait. When I'm gaming in HDR, I use filters to increase the exposure to get the maximum brightness range of the panel. Been using it like that for ~8hrs/day for over 2 years now. Zero detectable hint of burn-in.
If you want a different anecdote, I have a LG C1 that got burn in after a year of use, playing FFXIV. I can see a blue outline of where my minimap and hotbars are. HUD burn-in. The only thing I disabled was the dimming feature, because it's outright annoying to use, where every time i'd scroll it'd make the text on a page illegiblly dark. (Dark mode pages, white text becomes dark gray while scrolling then back to white when stopped... sometimes not!). I moved that TV to the living room and got a non oled samsung instead which is what I use now.
Do your VR games not have static HUDs / UIs? It has been a long time since I picked up a VR game since I no longer have the room.
I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.
And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.
Not really, most HUDs are fixed to thigns like your hands, guns, etc. or don't exist at all.
Static objects in your view are VERY nauseating (at least in my experience).
Personally I much prefer OLED, especially for VR, and haven’t had any burn in issues with OLED in any form for years.
Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whuHuM9h88M
VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.
Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I'm using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).
> Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that "this time we solved the burn-in issue!"):
Yes, but it's not degrading as fast as OLED haters makes you think. I spent days playing the same games (so HUD is in the static place) on multiple OLED screens I owned for years. No noticeable burn-in and still looks better than my only IPS screen.
I'm just not convinced it's really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it's on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).
Zero sense of burn in.
Is the steam controller registering as a joystick and a mouse? It could be amazing to manage my current media center! As I cannot make KDE detect my current controller as a mouse
It seems the controller on steamdeck on windows detects as such when steam or whatever companion program is not running. Although in this state. You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself.
Although on Linux side. As far as i remembered, it's up to how kernel driver developer to map the device input into different class. It would be up to valve to decide what to do in this case.
This explains why alyssa rosenzweig (from asahi linux) was paid for so long by Valve. She worked on FEX.
What's fex? I wasn't able to google search it (didn't try too hard admittedly)
https://fex-emu.com/
x86 to arm compatibility layer they are using to run windows games on the machine/frame
Steam Machine is x86_64
Wow was absolutely not expecting this. I need this.
Will the eye tracking data be directly available to developers?
Also, can I hack the OS? Specifically interested in direct VR rendering (other headsets don't allow to bypass compositor).
Pretty sure the OS is just the same old Steam-flavored Linux distro "SteamOS" with ARM support and some new graphics pipeline stuff for the VR portion, though we don't know until it's actually out.
Though Valve has put a focus on developer ease and very low software lockdown in the recent years with their hardware, so I'd say the chances on direct rendering are quite good!
Wondering what window/desktop manager will valve ship with the new steam frame. Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently? Will that be a mod of kde or something?
> Is there even a desktop/window manager work with 3d space currently?
The best known is perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass but there's many others, at varying stages of development. It will be interesting to see if custom OS/UX development is made available for this device. We'd also need quite a bit of custom development to make the OS comprehensively usable with gamepad-like controllers alone (no mouse or keyboard required). The existing work on "10-ft." media center interfaces can provide a useful starting point for this but it's far from covering all possible uses.
And like the Steam Deck it will never be available in my region :) So much for globalization!
These links open Steam app on my phone and crash immediately.
What the, this link also crashes KDE Plasma, when opening this link with Google Chrome. I had to reboot two times, just clicking this frame link.
Both times, first journalctl entry in the crash time is:
[drm:__nv_drm_gem_nvkms_map [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Failed to map NvKmsKapiMemory 0x0000000070a84e8b
Then KWIN dump etc.
Reminding me to buy AMD next.
This is due to a video that has drm encoding and the browser trying to decode it. The drm blob contains the codec keys in our driver and the browser is supposed to negotiate this. It fails. At least on Nvidia for you. It fails for me on safari on iOS.
Same here. Also happens when navigating there from within the all.
Open the website in your browser instead.
Crashes in the browser as well. Good job Valve.
It looks stunning, great design there
There's a devkit... I'm disappointed, that's the Sony method? I actually tried to do dev for the Meta Quest 2 the other week and was disappointed there because it's my son's, and he can't sign up for a Meta dev account (age), so there's no way for me to do anything with it without factory resetting the thing. This is more disappointing though. Why can't I dev games for the consumer headset?
Have you tried adding a second user on the headset with your own account?
Steam is becoming what Google or Apple was in the past but much better, I like it.
Good engineering discussion from gamers nexus https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ
The death of VR has been greatly exaggerated. The only thing that died is the hype, and the hype will not be missed. It's just nice to have so much less bullshit.
Meta and Apple smothered VR almost to death. Valve is coming to set VR free.
This looks really cool, but USB-A on the wireless adapter? Really?
Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.
It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.
USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.
It is my second laptop I got from my employer (replacement every few years) and it also has just usb c ports. I hate plugging in usb-a adapter. I would at least expect adapter included for usb c.
I'st much less likely to break a usba dongle compare to usb c though.(the area is much mcuh bjgger) And I don't think the dongle really need the 40gb potential of a usbc port.
I mean.. my X670E motherboard (a high end, modern mobo!) has only ONE usb-c port.. it has, in comparison, 3 usb-a 10gbps ports and another 4x usb-a 5gbps ports. Given the headset's main use case to be plugged in is for PC-VR game streaming, it makes sense that they'd go with USB-A. Maybe in a few years they can switch but right now most desktop mobos barely even have usb-c.
So it connects to your PC via Wifi? I could use this anywhere in my house as far away from my computer as I want?
I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)
The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.
[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=445 - timestamped at wireless segment
It's both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
> But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?
That's my experience streaming games to steam deck. I have central 2.4/5/6Ghz AP and 6Ghz-only APs in other rooms. Any sort of wireless streaming at my place is snappy.
Is this built by HTC, like the Vive is/was? Either way, RIP HTC.
any idea on price?