110 deg fov is a bit on the low side but I guess it'll have to do. I hate how 90% of VR headsets are designed to feel like you have binoculars strapped to your face, absolutely zero peripheral vision.
It's not that they're "designed to feel like", it's that the technology for better than 110 degrees just isn't there yet.
There are tons of pro level headsets that go up to 170, the tech definitely exists, it's just not as cheap cause you need larger displays if you want to maintain dpi.
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.
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck. I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one. In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, an…
What pass-through apps are you using for all this? I tried pass-through pingpong but it didn't fit in my room so it clipped through the wall uncomfortably. There is AR golf?
I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.
I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling? It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services
3588 can do VR, just not Unity/Unreal VR. That is a problem with bloated engines not the 3588. All mainstream headsets get open-source drivers eventually: https://github.com/collabora/libsurvive
yeah but is foveated streaming and whatnot going to be opensource, or are we going to have to wait a decade for some grad student to reimplement a half broken version?
I guess there's a market for this but I'm personally disappointed that they've gone with the "cram a computer into the headset" route. I'd much rather have a simpler, more compact dumb device like the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which in exchange should prove much lighter and more comfortable to wear for long time periods. The bulk and added component cost of the "all in one" PC/headset models is just unnecessary if you alre…
It's super light compared to Quest 3, half the weight on your face, the rest is on the back which balances the headset. Big Screen Beyond isn't wireless and has a narrower field of view.
> has a narrower field of view.
On the beyond 2, only by 2 degrees horizontally. I don't think that would even be noticeable.
I'm guessing you have a very positive experience with gaming PCs; I wish I could say the same. My Windows PC: - Randomly BSODs because of (I think) a buggy Focusrite audio interface driver (that I can't fix and Focusrite refuses to) - Regularly 'forgets' I have an RX 5600 XT GPU and defaults to the integrated graphics, forcing me to go into the 1995 'Device Manager' to reset it - Occasionally just... stops playing au…
Definitely an outlier. Windows has generally been very very solid since about Windows 7. Certainly since Windows 10. Linux is still quite far behind in terms of desktop stability in my experience. But I guess if Valve fully controls the hardware they can avoid janky driver issues (it sounds like suspend will work reliably!), so this might actually make a good desktop Linux option.
You are also definitely an outlier. In my experience, Linux has been 5x as stable as Windows (and more performant, too). SteamOS is just Arch Linux with the KDE desktop, the actual desktop stability wont be different from the same setup on a normal PC.
I would guess that the “foveated” region that they stream is larger than the human fovea, large enough to contain the saccades movement (with some good-enough probability).
Saccades afaik can jump to an arbitrary part of the eye which adds to the latency of finding the iris; basically the the software ends up having to look through the entire image to reacquire the iris whereas normally it’s doing it incrementally relative to the previous position. Are you really sure overrendering the fovea region would really work?
Not sure, probably depends on the content too. When you read text, the eye definitely isn’t jumping “arbitrarily”, it’s clustered around what you’re focusing on. Might be different for a FPS game where you’re looking out for ambushes.
I’m not sure what you mean by “look through the entire image to reacquire the iris”? You’re talking about the image from the eye tracking camera?
Genuine question, if you already own an Index, why would you also get this? Wireless functionality, or something else?
I only own Index controllers, not the headset. I have a mixed tracking Pico 4 setup and wireless functionality is definitely one of the pluses; the higher resolution panels also make a significant difference (the Frame and the Pico 4 seem to have the same resolution). This is basically an open Steam-backed Pico 4 that's superior to my hardware and definitely superior to the Index. Here's a comparison: https://vr-comp…