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Steam Frame

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Re: Steam Frame

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 weight on your face is half that of Quest 3, they put the rest of the weight on the back which perfectly balances it on your head. It's going to be super comfortable.

Yeah, already many people use something like the Bobovr alternative headstrap for the Quest3 that has an additional battery pack in the back, which helps balancing the device in the front.

Re: Steam Frame

#572
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Back when I was in Uni, so late 80s or early 90s, my dad was Project Manager on an Air Force project for a new F-111 flight simulator, when Australia upgraded the avionics on their F-111 fighter/bombers. The sim cockpit had a spherical dome screen and a pair of Silicon Graphics Reality Engines. One of them projected an image across the entire screen at a relatively low resol…

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…

>It never came.

Everything you described and more is available from modern home Vr devices you can purchase right now.

Mecha, planes, skyrim, cinema screens. In VR, with custom controllers or a regular controller if you want that. Go try it! It’s out and it’s cheap and it’s awesome. Set IPD FIRST.

Re: Steam Frame

#574
post #480

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Can it run the terminal and vscode comfortably is what I’m very interested about. Not having high hopes due to it being only 2160px, but… a man can dream

We just need a terminal with stereo rendered distance field font.

plug me into the matrix already so I can do without any screen at all

Re: Steam Frame

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SteamOS at its base is just Arch with Steam and some additional software installed.

that doesn't in any way mean you can install an alternate OS. But i get your point that at least you can run Arch stuff. Isnt Arch ARM support unofficial? (its been ages since i tried) You dont hear of people running it on RPis for example

If it's anything like the Deck, then the version of SteamOS on it won't be locked down in any way whatsoever. You can install Windows or any other distro you want on the Deck with 0 issues (other than regular ones you'd experience anyways on any regular computer, nothing to do with Valve locking anything down).

Re: Steam Frame

#576

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.

> first standalone headset with an open ecosystem What about the Lynx XR1? Running Android sure but officially rooted (details https://lynx.miraheze.org/wiki/Rooting_Process ) and with Linux proper (details https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lynx_R1_(lynx-r1) ) even though experimental.

Yes we released our headset with root access and an open bootloader. We are going to announce our next headset in a couple of months :-)

Re: Steam Frame

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first standalone headset with an open ecosystem What about the Lynx XR1? Running Android sure but officially rooted (details https://lynx.miraheze.org/wiki/Rooting_Process ) and with Linux proper (details https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lynx_R1_(lynx-r1) ) even though experimental.

Yes we released our headset with root access and an open bootloader. We are going to announce our next headset in a couple of months :-)

Sorry Stan, forgot about the Lynx, huge fan of your work!

Re: Steam Frame

#578
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the same amount of pixels though, just with reduced bitrate for unfocused regions so you save time in encoding, transmitting, and decoding, essentially reducing latency. For foveated rendering, the amount of rendered pixels are actually reduced.

At least when we implemented this in the first version of Oculus Link, the way it worked is that it was distorted (AADT [1]) to a deformed texture before compression and then rectilinear regenerated after compression as a cheap and simple way to emulate fixed foveated rendering. So it’s not that there’s some kind of adaptive bitrate which applies less bits outside the fovea region but achieves a similar result by giving it fewer pixels in the resulting image being compressed; doing adaptive bitrate would work too (and maybe even better) but encoders (especially HW accelerated ones) don’t support that.

Foveated streaming is presumably the next iteration of this where the eye tracking gives you better information about where to apply this distortion, although I’m genuinely curious how they manage to make this work well - eye tracking is generally high latency but the eye moves very very quickly (maybe HW and SW has improved but they allude to this problem so I’m curious if their argument about using this at a low frequency really improves meaningfully vs more static techniques)

[1] https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/how-does-oculus-lin...

Re: Steam Frame

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's SteamOS and SteamVR - you can run arbitrary aarch64 Linux binaries that talk to SteamVR and they should just work

from a cursory look . it seems SteamVR is intended to be used with their DRM platform and isn't open source. Maybe its a bit less limiting vs Meta's offering? i wouldnt characterize this as an "open ecosystem" though

The key takeaway is that you will rebuild the drivers less often:

1) The stack is mature now, we know what features can exist.

2) For me it's about having the same stack as on a 3588 SBC, so I don't need to download many GB of Android software just to build/run the game.

The distance to getting a open-source driver stack will probably be shorter because of these 2 things, meaning OpenVR/SteamVR being closed is less of a long term issue.

Re: Steam Frame

#580

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…

Yeah. I’d love to understand how they tackle saccades. To be fair they do mention they’re on 6ghz - not sure if they support 2.4 although I doubt the frequency of the data radio matters here.
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