411–420 of 501 posts
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If it can do innside out tracking its way more data efficent to have compute onboard. And if you already have a decent amount of compute you can scale it up just a little more to have. a fully standalone unit.
compute is fine. its necessary battery is not. compute is almost weightless, battery crushes heads.
I've never been interested in VR headsets and am not very educated about it. Can someone explain why you'd want to actually run things on it instead of having a much lighter screens-and-headphones-only unit that plugs it into a more powerful machine that renders things for it? What's the benefit of having to strap all this extra hot hardware and batteries to your face. Is it just about it being wireless? Surely there…
There are two use-cases. Already sitting at a PC and you just pop your headset on - your idea makes sense. But traditional VR means standing up in a dedicated space (2m x 2m) and demands uninterrupted time. That's a high friction activity, and adding setting up a PC and Oculus Link and Steam VR before you start playing makes that friction even higher to the point where it's a niche hobby. Most casual players are doin…
All the really impressive Worlds and avatars are still PC only.
Ideally, there would be some more seamless performance scaling than the current "do 2 versions, one of them ugly but fast, if even possible". :P
Maybe Steam Frame will help this get going by being in a better place to run more advanced stuff, being more powerful than Qeust 3, which was basically the "mobile" VRChat benchmark so far.
If only it were OLED
The usual "images burn in" OLED concern isn't even at all applicable on a VR headset, where the entire image naturally changes every frame.
The contrast, low-latency and power efficiency of OLED seem a no-brainer.
It's SteamOS on ARM64 platform, which means now you can run PC games on phone chips, definitely should be a revolution product.
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I’m shocked that this is performant enough to work in practice. Isn’t the timing window for VR responsiveness extremely tight?
It works, but there is usually a noticeable difference (at least with Quest).
Have done quite a lot of quite active stuff (exploration, driving, flying, fighting games) and it really is seamless and I don't notice any lag as long as the game itself manages good FPS.
If you really concentrate on the graphics, you can see some compression artifacts in places, but it is unnoticeable when you are actually doing VR stuff, not just looking for it. :)
For the Frame, this should all be much better - easier setup, much better available bandwidth (dongle has Wifi 7), efficient foveated streaming, etc. :) I would exect better image quality (more bandwidth, more efficient streaming), better FPS (more efficient rendering) and better image quality (can reduce compression).
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Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes? Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.
I don't really get the ick about wearing these kinds of things in public, but, having tried to wear XR glasses in public has shown me that the bigger issue is that these things are at a whole other level of distracting compared even to phones. It'd probably be worse with a full face headset, since at least with glasses you have your full field of view. Even despite pinning the display in a corner, I noticed I was ver…
I've never been interested in VR headsets and am not very educated about it. Can someone explain why you'd want to actually run things on it instead of having a much lighter screens-and-headphones-only unit that plugs it into a more powerful machine that renders things for it? What's the benefit of having to strap all this extra hot hardware and batteries to your face. Is it just about it being wireless? Surely there…
Of course, that multiplies with bandwidth requirements, which are also quite extreme at 4k 120fps.
At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high. Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware
I have barely even considered VR until the Steam Frame. I'm just not interested in closed ecosystems like Oculus. That said, I have barely looked at VR so much that I'm not sure whether to bother with the Steam Frame. Is it just for gaming/movies?
Hacker News should be all over this device. They won't lock it down like the Meta stuff. Go ahead and install BeOS on it.
I think a hackable Linux PC in a VR headset is very exciting. But the major problem is the screen resolution is not good enough to make it a viable desktop replacement. It'll work great for gaming or media consumption, but reading smallish text will be difficult at best. If they made a more expensive version with a better display it would potentially be interesting as a portable workstation/laptop alternative. But I…
xerox intentionally replicated what the typical office desk 'experience' looked like to create the 'the desktop'; this approach either isn't possible or just hasn't been explored by someone with a headset on
maybe we just need to think of work differently to be productive in an enviornment where we sacrificed horizontal and vertical fidelity for a third dimension?
3d desktops? workframes?
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Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for). Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.
Just echo'ing the other comment. I'm on arch, and with nearly no tinkering my index just works. Only low level knowledge I think would be useful is the different VR runtimes. SteamVR vs Monado
- SteamVR won't see my Index unless I power cycle it
- The in-overlay desktop view does not work at all, either shows all black or doesn't render at all, so I can't control my desktop from VR which is a massive pain
- The SteamVR Home environment (the startup app) crashes immediately even if launched manually