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Steam Frame

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Re: Steam Frame

#171

Post by potatolicious »

giobox wrote: post #158
potatolicious wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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 mon…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#172

Post by monocasa »

cube2222 wrote: post #136
monocasa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#173

Post by rft »

craftkiller wrote: post #52
AndroTux wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OLED only burns in if the content is static for hours. If your head is that stable while using VR, I give you $5.

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#174

Post by skywal_l »

> 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.

Re: Steam Frame

#176

Post by rebeccaskinner »

monocasa wrote: post #99
modeless wrote: post #60

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 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 op…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#177

Post by ziml77 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #96
pixelpoet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#178

Post by Dilettante_ »

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#179

Post by robotnikman »

modeless wrote: post #119
cedws wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Steam Frame

#180

Post by brian-armstrong »

cyberax wrote: post #124
esseph wrote: 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.

The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.

Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.
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