It felt like the headset hardware had reached a sweet spot for the moment, but with this announcement the software situation is now also going to be reaching a similar place. Now we have a continuity of freedom with a PC OS on the headset away from home as well as the full mobility of a untethered headset display with the full power of a stationary PC at home. Can't wait to see what dev's do with this.
Steam Frame
551–560 of 717 posts
Re: Steam Frame
#552Foveated 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…
> Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading text
What sort of resolution are one's eyes actually resolving during saccades? I seem to recall that there is at the very least a frequency reduction mechanism in play during saccades
Re: Steam Frame
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Drivers are not an issue for quite some time (but its always good to have latest nvidia ones for example for optimizations focused on given game).
But its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet. I have roughly 20 of them installed currently (why the heck?) and earlier versions would happily get installed over already-installed version of same for example as part of game installation process, not a stellar workmanship on MS side. Whats wrong with having latest being backward compatible with all of previous ones, like ie Java achieved 25 years ago?
Talking about fully updated windows 10 and say official steam distros of the games.
Re: Steam Frame
#554Cool to see Valve committing to the ecosystem like this
Re: Steam Frame
#555Foveated 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…
Yet this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting VR releases
Re: Steam Frame
#556This 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.
Valve giving users root access out of the box is huge. It puts the headset in the same category as a real PC
Re: Steam Frame
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
It said its running Steam OS, which is just Linux.
Android is also just Linux. But i cant install Debian on my phone
Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.
Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.
If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).
And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.
Re: Steam Frame
#558The IPD range is a bit on the lower side, which is unfortunate knowing it can make a VR headset unusable and that it is just a matter of design and not technology
Re: Steam Frame
#559I've actually just recently started using my Quest 3 again through virtual desktop. I found the sharpening feature to actually make text look good enough that I'm able to work in it for hours uninterrupted, mostly writing papers and coding. I'm super excited for this launch and for all the crazy open source builds, mods, and fun that are going to come from an open VR system (or at least that's my hope).
I am unable to parse announcements such as for this Valve product. Could I use this as a thing through which to spawn multiple monitors and code / read papers?
Re: Steam Frame
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll share a childhood story as well. Somewhere between '93 and '95 my father took me abroad to Germany and we visited a gaming venue. It was packed with typical arcade machines, games where you sit in a cart holding a pistol and you shoot things on the screen while cart was moving all over the place simulating bumpy ride, etc. But the highlight was a full 3D experience shooter. You got yourself into a tiny ring, 3D…
That sounds like you're describing dactyl nightmare. [1] I played a version where you were attacking pterodactyls instead of other players, but it was more or less identical. That experience is what led me to believe that VR would eventually take over. I still, more or less, believe it even though it's yet to happen. I think the big barrier remains price and experiences that are focusing more on visual fidelity over…
Nah, people spend 700 on consoles, the biggest barriers is comfort.
As long as the headsets are heavy, I won't get one, no matter how great the graphics are or how good the game is