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Steam Frame starts at $1059

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Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly as a VR enthusiast this is the least interesting feature by far. If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.

But, now you can play through the second half in VR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXho2LdD1qo A flood of VR mods for popular games have been coming out lately.

Sorry I thought you were talking about the half-life ports.

I played the original "Luke Ross" Cyberpunk port but it was pretty horrible due to his mediocre alternate eye rendering and the lack of controller support.

I saw the new mod (dariulone?) but I didn't yet install it because it comes with a huge list of dependencies of other mods to install and I haven't had time for all that. I'm kinda hoping he makes a quick installer that packages everything :)

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#613
post #592
post #495

> Your Steam Frame headset easily pairs with your Steam Controller. Stream from your PC, laptop, Steam Deck or (coming soon!) Steam Machine for an immersive experience with any of your favorite games. How are they even intending for the Steam Frame to be used with the Steam Deck? As far as I know, it’s not meant to be used with a cable, and the wireless adapter it ships with is USB-A.

Not sure what their plans are, but the Deck has a wifi 6E radio, so maybe they can use it to connect to the Frame directly. Given modern wifi chips can usually operate both as an AP and a client at the same time, this might just be a software feature they add to SteamOS. Worst case you can stream without a dedicated wireless link via your normal wifi with potentially reduced quality. If this actually works, this is q…

Notably only the OLED Steam Deck has Wi-Fi 6E. The original Deck only has Wi-Fi 5.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be great if the Meta Quest could be jailbroken to run SteamOS

Quest 1, all firmwares, Quest 2 and 3 on some non latest hardware, can already be rooted, so that's not the bottleneck.

> non latest *firmware

https://github.com/FreeXR/exploits is a good starting point for that. I think replacing the Android userland would be the tricky part here.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#615
With every VR release I check the resolution per eye to see if I can use it as a work desktop replacement. IMO the current Meta Quest 3 is not there, and this roughly matches it. I am not sure what the resolution needs to be to render good text...but I'm hopeful we get maybe 50% more pixels at some point in some version. Unfortunately, i think the screen stack at that level is well outside mobile usecases so there is kind of a chicken and egg. Manufacturers don't want to work on advanced VR display tech without demand, and it can't be used for work purposes until display tech improves.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. I always wondered why nobody copied their gaze + tap interactions. That seems way too basic to grant a patent for...

That’s how it works with the Quest 3 on an updated OS. If you’re using hand tracking then you gaze + tap thumb and finger together to select, or pinch and hold to grab a corner for resizing or a border for dragging.

That’s not how it works, there is no gaze support. I just double checked and couldn’t find it in any Accessibility or Experimental settings. Apologies for the misinfo. (Also no inward-facing cameras ofc)

What I was thinking of was on iPhone. It was Eye Tracking + Dwell for selecting.

Hands act as a pointer on the Quest, with a pinch action to select and drag.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding. The Pimax headsets with foveated eye tracking start at $1599.

You don't need $300 of ram and a $200 CPU to perform eye tracking, otherwise the Steam Frame would be able to do nothing else

If you read the chain of comments again you will notice that eye tracking is only one of several things that it is doing.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity do say this after trying with a recent e.g. Vision Pro or Quest 3 and finding that resolution itself (not inputs, UX, ergonomics, etc) is the limiting factor for work and if so what use case?

I have used most of the major headsets. Vision Pro is close to monitor resolution but not quite there. Quest 3 and Steam Frame are nowhere near that. Vision Pro's ergonomics are bad, as are Quest 3's, but Bigscreen Beyond 2 is much, much better and could be acceptable for laptop replacement I think, especially with the flip-up halo band they are working on. For inputs, passthrough with keyboard and mouse/trackpad wou…

I'm not sure what you mean by monitor resolution but if you mean comparing the screen real estate you have in e.g. 32" flat area in an HMD versus a modern monitor it's both correct and irrelevant. Yes a relatively affordable modern monitor will have way better resolution compared to even the most expensive HMD but ... that's not correct since you can have whatever surface, even multiple layers, you can use as screen real estate. You can also adjust readibility, e.g changing font size, based on distance, have foveated rendering from eye tracking, and lots of other techniques that are impossible with just a normal monitor.

IMHO usable real estate relative to the task (because coding doesn't have the same need as video editing, 3D modeling, etc) is a proper way to compare, not pixel density or anything or the sort that doesn't take what VR can actually offer.

PS: I do spend times in HMDs to work, including Vision Pro, Varjo, Frame, other HMD I can't mention, and in my experience it did already reach point where it is actually "good enough" for most tasks even one where a lot of text (which is typically quite demanding for readibility) is needed, but we don't have the same eyes, workflow, etc. It is though not good enough if you try to reproduce what you already have and compare exactly, but it's also not the point.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#619
post #396

It's SteamOS on ARM64 platform, which means now you can run PC games on phone chips, definitely should be a revolution product.

You could already do that with gamenative. There are many videos. Also you can run steam os on arm portables. https://armadaos.dev/ So all this was possible before the Steam frame was launched

Sure, but I would like to point out that gamenative largely exists thanks to FEX-Emu, which was started at Valve's initiative, and which Valve has stealthily funded since its inception.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do not, in fact sell such a headset, in that it is permanently out of stock. You can risk buying it used for $1800… It was released in 2019 and by comparison, sucks. A new index with new displays of the frame but without the things that make the frame expensive (ram) would be welcome.

It still shows the headset in stock in the US. The bundles, controllers, and lighthouses seem to be out of stock though, which is likely because they're a much more popular product (the controllers/lighthouses break quite often, and they're often used with other headsets as well).

Valve Index Headset Only: "Requires Base Stations and PC." - In stock.

Valve Index Base Station: "Out of Stock"

You cannot buy a functioning Valve Index. And you wouldn't want one, because its 7 years out of date.

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