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…
Steam Frame starts at $1059
191–200 of 472 posts
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#192I'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…
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#193Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.
Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS. Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently.
I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home.
There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset only a month ago.
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#194No better than the rest of the VR headsets that came before it and almost no-one wants them. These headsets will end up collecting dust with the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest Pro. We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones. Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.
Far into the future, perhaps. These glasses may be fine for short stints, but not for serious 8+hrs of productivity. I have a Viture Beast and I regret buying it. Even for short gaming stints, I still prefer my laptop or smartphone display as these glasses are such a downgrade.
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#195I still remember Michael Abrash's talk from 2016 where he talks about Foveated Rendering + Eye tracking as one of the key pillars of next-gen headsets https://youtu.be/o7OpS7pZ5ok?t=5438. Interestingly, his prediction was that it would be widespread as of about 5 years ago. Is next-gen finally here after 10 years?
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
This machine runs Linux, it comes with KDE. This is the open Apple Vision Pro alternative that you can use as a real computer. It comes with a black and white passthrough camera but you can add on a 5K color one. There's ongoing work for a full Plasma XR mode, so you aren't restricted to a "virtual desktop" experience: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8671
So it may be a good wirk machine to use during long flights, with a compact wireless keyboard. Unless you fly first class, using a laptop on a plane is painful.
So far all reviews I've seen been centered around gaming and not work.
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#197I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies). One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player…
Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.
I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?
There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#198Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one. I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today. They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.
The scalpers will probably be all over this too.
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#199Foveated Streaming seems to be buried on the page, this feels like a true game changer, especially for PCVR. Coupled with eye tracking it unlocks about 2-3x more compute for rendering. Now sparkle DLSS-like upscaling and you can render 144hz native resolution PCVR games without buying a 5090. Truly exciting stuff. I still remember Michael Abrash's talk from 2016 where he talks about Foveated Rendering + Eye tracking…
Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.
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.
A flood of VR mods for popular games have been coming out lately.