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Steam Frame

store.steampowered.com

131–140 of 717 posts

Re: Steam Frame

#131

Kind of weird using AA batteries, I'd imagine something else would be better suited for this?

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#132

Kind of weird using AA batteries, I'd imagine something else would be better suited for this?

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).

Re: Steam Frame

#133

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'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.

Re: Steam Frame

#134

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?

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?

Re: Steam Frame

#135

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?

> it's out now

It's not out, just announced.

Re: Steam Frame

#136
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#137
post #118
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#138

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…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#139

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 bro…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#140
post #37

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.

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