(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it&#x27;s limited to HDMI 2.0 it will have to rely on 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to get there. Unfortunately the lack of HDMI 2.1 might be down to politics, the RDNA3 GPU they&#x27;re using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;hdmi-forum-to-amd-no-you-cant-make-an-open-source-hdmi-2-1-driver&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...</a>

Where are you getting this number? I&#x27;m not seeing it on the specs page.

So, in the specs for the mini-pc, it claims the video out can do 4K @ 120Hz (even faster if displayport). I assume the 4K @ 60Hz you saw is from the &quot;4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR&quot; line.I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.

This is not true, from the specs:HDMI 2.0Up to 4K @ 120HzSupports HDR, FreeSync, and CECI have zero doubts the device can do 4k @ 120Hz streaming Hardware wise. In the end it is just a normal Linux desktop.

Considering how much they talk about Foveated rendering, I think it might not be constrained by the traditional limitations of screens - instead of sending a fixed resolution image at whatever frequency, it&#x27;ll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.Or that&#x27;s what I think I may be completely wrong.

Real shame it’s only 60Hz at 4k. There’s a gap for good 120Hz@4k streaming.Hoping the next Apple TV will do it.Edit - updated specs claim it can do this, but it’s limited to HDMI 2.0

Snapdragon doesn&#x27;t really have a good history of supporting proper desktop games. Windows for ARM had kinda bad compatibility. It seems the aim is to have most games just be playable like with the Deck. Fingers crossed but I have some reservations.

What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy&#x2F;build any mini PC? There&#x27;s plenty of options for that

Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.

&gt; Obviously comparing apples to orangesOr is it “comparing apples to steam engines”?

It&#x27;s only a little bigger than Mac Studio.9.5 x 19.7 x 19.7 cm = 3,687 cm³and half the size of my SFFPC @ 8.3L

A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that&#x27;s what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.Mac Mini m4: 127 x 127 x 50 mm = 0.8 LSteam Machine: 156 x 162 x 152 = 3.8 LThat&#x27;s 4.76 times more volume.

The controller looks pretty cool for sure, my biggest fear is the dpad though. I hope they go for a clicky feel like on the latest xbox controllers, and not the mushy feel you&#x27;ve got on the Dualshock 5 or even the 8BitDo Pro 2, which, for me, really is the only think missing from those. 
I&#x27;m more of a &quot;Dpad in the top left&quot; kind of guy, but I want it to be clicky like on the Xbox controllers :( We&#x27;ll see!

I am incredibly excited for the new controller. The og steam controller for me was unmatched as a controller, I could never play any first person game on anything else other than mouse and keyboard, not to mention it allows playing rts or point and clicks from the couch.When they cancelled production I bought 8.

... which likely wouldn&#x27;t have happened if they didn&#x27;t want a computer inside their VR headset. The steam machine is x86 considering it&#x27;s an AMD processor.

&gt; Frame is obviously the main headline hereWhy? VR headsets are a dying fad of the 2020s. Way more excited for SteamOS on ARM.

Frame is obviously the main headline here, but they&#x27;ve also launching a new SteamOS mini-PC and a new controller.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steammachine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steammachine</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steamcontroller" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steamcontroller</a>No prices listed for any of them yet, as far as I can tell.

I&#x27;m unreasonably excited on all things Steam nowadays.  I still like my PS5.  And the PSVR2 is quite amazing for the games it has.  But Steam has been amazing in getting back into games for me in ways that I did not anticipate.

Crashes in the browser as well. Good job Valve.

Same here. Also happens when navigating there from within the all.Open the website in your browser instead.

This is due to a video that has drm encoding and the browser trying to decode it. The drm blob contains the codec keys in our driver and the browser is supposed to negotiate this. It fails. At least on Nvidia for you. It fails for me on safari on iOS.

What the, this link also crashes KDE Plasma, when opening this link with Google Chrome. I had to reboot two times, just clicking this frame link.Both times, first journalctl entry in the crash time is:[drm:__nv_drm_gem_nvkms_map [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Failed to map NvKmsKapiMemory 0x0000000070a84e8bThen KWIN dump etc.Reminding me to buy AMD next.

These links open Steam app on my phone and crash immediately.

Well, that and being squarely focused on gaming.I also trust the Steam ecosystem far more than I probably should...

Vision Pro wants to be an iPad on your face. The hardware&#x27;s just not good enough (in the sense of general manufacturing capabilities, not lack of investment from Apple) to make that an enticing product yet.

I&#x27;d be willing to take the L on the hardware in order to be able to actually run the software I care about. (I own a Vision Pro and barely use it because the pejorative description of &quot;an iPad on your face&quot; is more accurate than I would like to admit.)

Monochrome is rough, but I think pixel count is a few orders of magnitude less important than being able to actually use the damn thing. The Vision Pro has been out for over a year and I haven&#x27;t seen a single notable application that takes advantage of the hardware, and it seems that that&#x27;s largely in part due to it being nigh impossible to develop and run software on it.

&gt; This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.neither is the Apple Vision Pro

This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.The pass-through video is monochrome and the screens have about 40% of the pixels compared to the Vision Pro.The Samsung Galaxy XR is much closer to being a Vision Pro competitor.The Steam Frame is very focused on playing games locally and streamed from a PC.

I would agree, but I&#x27;m a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I&#x27;m fearful that because of its great computing specs it&#x27;s going to be expensive, but it&#x27;s not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it&#x27;d be a step up but not a huge one. I&#x27;ve seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.

This being a whole system that will allow you to put whatever software you want onto it makes me think that it might actually succeed at being what the Vision Pro wanted to be.

I bought all my sim racing setup for my xbox. It was short-sighted but optimized for a quick decision. Now I feel like I&#x27;m stuck with it and can&#x27;t upgrade the setup forward. Everytime I see these comments, it&#x27;s one more nail in my wallet :)

That mini pc... one more nail in the coffin of the xbox hardware business. Ouch.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fex-emu.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fex-emu.com&#x2F;</a>

x86 to arm compatibility layer they are using to run windows games on the machine&#x2F;frame

What&#x27;s fex? I wasn&#x27;t able to google search it (didn&#x27;t try too hard admittedly)

This explains why alyssa rosenzweig (from asahi linux) was paid for so long by Valve. She worked on FEX.

I doubt fex-emu works on macos.But isnt that what Rosetta2 is for on mac anyway?

It technically works since ARM macs can still run x86 binaries. But it&#x27;s so slow and buggy, and the selection of playable games so slim that there is almost no point.

They&#x27;ll need that either way if they want to get back onto macOS, even if it&#x27;s separate binaries and not a translation layer. At this point I think Steam basically doesn&#x27;t work on Mac? Since the x64 Macs are legacy and the new ones are aarch64

they are porting FEX to Proton, and according to the VRUpload article linked it has &quot;shockingly little performance impact&quot;. This could be fun.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FEX-Emu&#x2F;FEX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FEX-Emu&#x2F;FEX</a>

Steam Frame is running SteamOS on ARM, and is capable of playing games standalone, which implies ARM support in Steam. Through granted, it could be in a limited form.

&quot;below the index&quot;, according to the UploadVR article linked. So below 1000 USD

I believe in Linus very little. I&#x27;ll keep my eyes peeled to see what others say. It&#x27;s certainly possible though, Valve has the chops to pull it off.

Thats not what he said. What he said was even rapidly moving his eyes around he could not spot the lower resolution part.

Also mentions 1-2ms latency on a modern GPU

There is a LTT video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dU3ru09HTng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dU3ru09HTng</a>Linus says he cannot tell it is actually foveated streaming.

When you full screen this, it&#x27;s crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it&#x27;s like an inch or inch and a half on a 32 inch 4k display at a normal seated position.(If I move my head closer it gets larger, further and it gets smaller)

Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere.It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)

That&#x27;s quite harsh, and definitely not accurate.

That&#x27;s crazy. I feel dumb for initial thinking it was somehow doing eye tracking to achieve this, despite having no such hardware installed.I would be curious to see a similar thing that includes flashing. Anecdotally, my peripheral vision seems to be highly sensitive to flashing&#x2F;strobing even if it is evidently poor at seeing fine details. Make me think compression in the time domain (e.g. reducing frame rate) will be less effective. But I wonder if the flashing would &quot;wake up&quot; the peripheral vision to changes it can&#x27;t normally detect.Not sure what the random jab at Linus is about.

There&#x27;s an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;4dsXzM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;4dsXzM</a>Linus the shrill&#x2F;yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.

Foveated streaming should be much easier to implement than foveated rendering. Just encode two streams, a low res one and a high res one, and move the high res one around.

I&#x27;m super curious how they will implement it, if it&#x27;s a general api in steam vr that headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond could use or if it&#x27;s more tailored towards the Frame. I hope it&#x27;s the first as to me it sounds like all you need is eye input and the two streams, the rest could be done by steam-vr.

If you use a Quest Pro and use Steam Link with a WiFi 6E access point, that should accurately represent the experience of using it.It&#x27;s close to imperceptible in normal usage.

The whole &quot;foveated streaming&quot; sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time, that would be incredible. I can&#x27;t even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work.I&#x27;d really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.

Not to mention the insane precision (I believe it’s something like 1 or 2 mm).

These new controllers look just like the Quest 3 controllers. Ergonomically I really like them, and they have capacitive touch for most surfaces as well.

Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing (&quot;on every input surface, and on the grips&quot;) for knuckles-like five finger tracking.Linus says &quot;just like&quot; the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they&#x27;ll feel comparatively. I&#x27;ve personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they&#x27;d have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dU3ru09HTng?t=246" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dU3ru09HTng?t=246</a> - timestampped @ controller section.

It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don&#x27;t make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don&#x27;t know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.The controllers also have gyros, but from what I&#x27;ve read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn&#x27;t reliable for extended periods.

This is my main concern with the new headset.. hopefully they have a way to support lighthouse.. maybe as an &quot;upgrade&quot; to the tracking if you already have a lighthouse setup. I play a game called VTOLVR and it&#x27;s atrocious on the quest with inside-out tracking, because the game VERY often has you looking in a direction where your arm is behind your back or behind your leg (from the VR&#x27;s perspective) and it completely loses tracking.. literally killing you in game sometimes. Think &quot;looking up and behind you for threats&quot; while your hand is in the throttle&#x2F;stick for a combat plane.

I&#x27;m disappointed it seems to have dropped lighthouse tracking with the previous Valve Index. Especially because with the Valve Knuckles controllers are my favorite with how they strap to your hand.

Even modern OLED experience burn-in (despite them announcing every year that &quot;this time we solved the burn-in issue!&quot;): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=whuHuM9h88M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=whuHuM9h88M</a>VR is particularly bad for this because, on OLED, higher brightness = greater burn-in and VR headsets generally significantly over-drive their tiny displays.Naturally the solution to all of this is MicroLED which will have the benefits of OLED without the downsides. But until then, the only device I&#x27;m using OLED for is my phone (and only because I no longer have a choice).

Personally I much prefer
OLED, especially for VR, and haven’t had any burn in issues with OLED in any form for years.

Do your VR games not have static HUDs &#x2F; UIs? It has been a long time since I picked up a VR game since I no longer have the room.

OLED is always burning in as a feature of it. It’s just much less noticeable when it’s:<pre><code> * cooled aggressively 
 * constantly changing colors (more even wear)
</code></pre>
But it is still always losing durability in a steady way.

OLED only burns in if the content is static for hours. If your head is that stable while using VR, I give you $5.

I&#x27;m just not convinced it&#x27;s really much of an issues now-a-days. We have an OLED in our main space and it&#x27;s on nearly all day (I like keeping sound on while I work from home).Zero sense of burn in.

Excited to see that it uses LCDs instead of OLED! One of the things holding me back from head-mounted displays is the short lifespan &#x2F; burn-in issues of OLED. Also loving the replaceable batteries on the controller.

At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house&#x2F;on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!

&gt; You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itselfThe original steam controller’s LT and RT work as mouse buttons in mouse mode, too. Source: have 3 steam controllers

It seems the controller on steamdeck on windows detects as such when steam or whatever companion program is not running. Although in this state. You can only right click or left click by pressing against the pad itself.Although on Linux side. As far as i remembered, it&#x27;s up to how kernel driver developer to map the device input into different class. It would be up to valve to decide what to do in this case.

Funnily enough, the Frame is running KDE Plasma so I bet it works pretty well.

Is the steam controller registering as a joystick and a mouse? It could be amazing to manage my current media center! As I cannot make KDE detect my current controller as a mouse

Wow was absolutely not expecting this.  I need this.

WHAT&#x27;S THE PRICEGABENGABEN DON&#x27;T LEAVE ME HANGING WHAT IS THE PRICEEEEEEEE

And like the Steam Deck it will never be available in my region :) So much for globalization!

I&#x27;m frustrated by the error rate on my Eneloops over the years. I have dozens of them and I swear every other time I recharge them, one more starts blinking and refuses to recharge.Also I would recommend switching to the IKEA rechargeable batteries which are supposedly the same thing except cheaper.

I swapped all my AA and AAA batteries for Enelooops. The cheaper white ones are the best for most applications.

The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can&#x27;t say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made &quot;battery replacements&quot; a cinch.

You&#x27;re right that it&#x27;s &quot;not too-too hard&quot; to get them, but it&#x27;s also &quot;not too-too easy&quot; to actually use them in comparison just plugging a USB-C cable into the device.  The process you will have to go through to recharge this will become incredibly annoying for something that will eat through batteries as quickly as a VR headset.  Think of all the criticisms Apple has received over the years due to the Magic Mouses charging port being on the bottom and that only needs a charge every couple months, this will need to be charged after a few hours of use.

Batteries in machine leads to having to wait 30 minutes for them to charge. Replaceable rechargeable batteries means you can instantly get a full new set. This is ideal

AA means they don’t have to handle battery replacements; and it’s not too-too hard to get rechargeable batteries.I would prefer batteries in machine, too; but this does have some sustainability and repairability (by not needing it) advantages.

Makes me happy. Instant swap when you run out of power.I just buy rechargeable batteries and keep a charger nearby. When batteries die, they come out and straight into the charger. Always ready to go.

I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I&#x27;d expect there will be third party options to replace the cover&#x2F;battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove&#x2F;insert then it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).

Nothing against user-replaceable batteries, just that they use AA batteries. I was expecting something a bit more long lasting and rechargeable via USB.

User replaceable batteries are... fine? Expected; preferred even? 40 hours on a single charge is more than adequate, imo, and if the controllers were too light that might actually bother some players.

I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA&#x2F;AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don&#x27;t have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.

I think it&#x27;s a lot better. Rechargeable batteries built into a device degrade over time. The vast majority of people will discard a device as a result of battery degradation.

Why not replaceable batteries which are not AA? Like any li-on batteries.Also if the stand is also a charger then the hot-swap is mostly a non-issue. Playing with this for more than X hours should not be the default usage.

Why? You can use rechargeable AA batteries and if you want you can swap them out and basically never have downtime for charging. Also all embedded batteries degrade over time which is a non issue here

Kind of weird using AA batteries, I&#x27;d imagine something else would be better suited for this?

I have close to 150 hours in Skyrim VR. What makes it unplayable without mods?

Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it&#x27;s unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it&#x27;s incredible,

On my own system I&#x27;ve played a lot of modded Beat Saber. Arizona Sunshine was good but not very long. Other than that mostly just mini game type things like The Lab.One of my friends also has a KAT Walk C2 and I&#x27;ve played Skyrim VR on that. It takes a bit to get used to but it&#x27;s a lot of fun.

There are some games yes but in my opinion right now the best VR experiences are simulators. Assetto Corsa, iRacing, DCS, MSFS etc.I bought a Bigscreen Beyond 2 + 5090 gpu basically just to play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator, a flight sim with full fidelity figher jets that you can even fly in PvP multiplayer) and it&#x27;s the coolest thing VR has to offer for me. All my relatives and friends who tried it were stunned too.

Well done, that must&#x27;ve been really fun to watch from an outsider perspective, unlike almost all other vr games in a social setting!

Beat Saber is the ultimate VR game, IMHO. It&#x27;s what enabled me to create this masterpiece:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;replay.beatleader.com&#x2F;?scoreId=20010657" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;replay.beatleader.com&#x2F;?scoreId=20010657</a>:D

Hitman is amazing insofar as the worlds are so well realised and the gameplay is excellent. But the controls are a bit pants, and I had an issue on Quest three where it was applying a foveated rendering but the mask was off (and the quest 3 doesn&#x27;t have eye tracking). So it was blurry within my field of view, and sharp just next to it.

Various random and unexpected indie games exist. Like the Indie community has fully embraced VR and it is full of unique and experimental and awesome and garbage games.Euro and American Truck Simulator still have VR support and it&#x27;s more fun and satisfying than it should be.Load up Google Earth VR, plop yourself in front of your childhood home and feel more than you expected.If you like modern air combat: VTOL VR and DCS. If you like WW2 fighter combat, IL-2 Sturmovik.Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades for the ultimate American Freedom simulator.Project Wingman for Ace Combat 7 in VR. Star Wars Squadrons is fully playable in VR. War thunder has VRBeamNG has unofficial VRRec Room if you want to get absolutely schooled by 13 year olds at laser tag and paintball and other games.Hyperbolica is an exploring and puzzle game about non-euclidean space, where walking in a straight line doesn&#x27;t work like you expect and apparently it has VRPulsar Lost Colony is a game about being a star trek captain with your friends and also can be played without VR.Phasmaphobia is a game about getting the shit scared out of you and you can do it in VR if you do not fear deathAn upcoming game about &quot;Be an artemis astronaut&quot;. There was also one to explore a Google Earth style of the ISS. Also Kerbal Space Program at one time had a VR mod.

I totally agree with you, I&#x27;m actually doing another Alyx run after only playing it on my Index. It actually please extremely well on the Quest 3 with the Steam Link app. Seamless.This guy on X gave me some suggestions of top tier VR games:Hubris, Into The Radius, Wanderer, Blade &amp; Sorcery, RE4 Remake, Modded Skyrim VR, Modded Minecraft, Vertigo 2, Arken Age, Half Life 1 &amp; 2 VR, UNDERDOGS, Hitman VR, Pixel Ripped Series, Walking Dead, Propagation Paradise Hotel

I&#x27;ll never forget the hilarious moment when given a grenade with a missing pin, I opened various cupboards to find a replacement pin only for more grenades to pile out.&quot;I Expect You To Die&quot; is a very funny game. Great for when you have spectators too, everyone can pitch in with ideas for the person playing to try.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of the &quot;I Expect You To Die&quot; series. They&#x27;re basically a series of small escape rooms. The game&#x27;s designed to be played seated.You play James Bond, except that for various silly reasons you find yourself stationary, and you have psychic powers to reach far away stuff because, again, stationary. &quot;They&#x27;ve trapped Bond in a bathysphere!&quot; &quot;You&#x27;re in a car in a jet ful of poisonous gas that&#x27;s going to explode!&quot; Each level will kill you quickly and hilariously over and over until you figure out a sequence of steps to survive.

I once played a custom Japanese Highway map in Assetto Corsa made for nighttime cruising and was a little high and I forgot what reality was.I used to do a lot of GoKarting at a local course before the Pandemic, and VR racing is the single most immersive video game experience that you can have. The only thing you are missing is the physical exertion and G-Forces. Even the feel of the helmet and reduced field of view is emulated by the headset. Even cheap wheels have force feedback, and you can feel the weight shifting around. You can intuitively glance around for situational awareness. If you have experience, you will naturally fall into the look at where you want to go style of skid recovery, and you will feel the tires about to skid and feel in the wheel when they line back up with your vector of motion. It all transfers so well, even real race car drivers enjoy it.You can feel your body freak out when you hit a wall at 200mph because you misjudged the distance because you&#x27;re not a real racecar driver.Driving an open cockpit car like an old F1 car is insane. You feel like you are just hanging out in the open air. I guess we didn&#x27;t have survival instincts back then.If you have a few thousand extra dollars, you can even fix the lack of physical exertion and G-Forces!Shooting games are super fun too because it feels rewarding to be good at actually aiming, rather than stupid mouse twitches I have never been that good at. Also because Pavlov VR mods let me play Halo 1 Blood Gulch for real and that&#x27;s magic.VR Chat is also a pretty incredible experience. When the pandemic first hit, I actually spent several weekends clubbing in VR Chat clubs.

Agreed, if you have all the sim racing equipment already adding in VR brings you basically &quot;there&quot;. The sim rig is a rabbit hole of immersive technologies of its own, but even just a basic wheel and pedal plus a headset will get you an incredible experience.I believe sim flight people would have the same opinions on that side of simming too. It&#x27;s a uniquely ideal situation for VR. Seated with full tactile controls.

Driving sims with the right setup are truly breathtaking gaming experiences. For driving, especially, even things like the weight of a headset almost add to the experience since in the real thing you are wearing a helmet. But it is a way to have a legit, e-sports level gaming experience with real-to-life controls with total VR immersion.

On the PlayStation VR 2, there is Resident Evil 4 and 8. I&#x27;d never cared for those games until I tried them in VR. I&#x27;d argue is more like a good game with decent VR support rather than a good &quot;VR&quot; game though. That&#x27;s also the case for things like Hitman, No Man&#x27;s Sky, Metro Awakening and such.And then there are the racing sims. I find these are such an immersive experience it reaches an uncanny-valley type feeling for me, where my body is expecting G-forces that never come, or gets confused with the steering wheel not being the exact same size as my eyes are seeing. It&#x27;s great though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy cars at all.

I&#x27;ve heard that Elite Dangerous is nice in VR.

I wish the answer was Thief: Legacy of Shadow but considering the war crime that was  Eidos Montreal&#x27;s previous outing on the franchise, I doubt it.

The only really incredible VR experience I have had so far was Half-life Alyx. Is there anything that tier or even better these days?

Is this built by HTC, like the Vive is&#x2F;was? Either way, RIP HTC.

Several. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Meganex 8K, and more coming like Crystal Super &#x2F; Dream Air.

I have the Bigscreen Beyond 2 which is OLED + pancake fine. But only if you have the perfect light seal that the BSB face gasket ensures. Your eyes just adjust to it and I never thought about it while using it. The upside of having perfect blacks is sooooo worth it in my opinion. Flight sims in VR at night are an amazing experience

Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.

&gt;2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye)Here&#x27;s hoping it will be like the Deck and we get Frame OLED in a year or so.

Whoo - first party support - including a graphics stack on ARM!I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn&#x27;t compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.I&#x27;m still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this&#x27;ll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.

Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far.

There&#x27;s no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain.&gt; &quot;Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?&quot;Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly.The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro.There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels.

It&#x27;s just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup.  Obviously it&#x27;s enough for 80 char consoles but you&#x27;d need to dip into large fonts for a desktop.

&gt; Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won&#x27;t be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low.Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?

They&#x27;re doing it over 6GHz, if I understand correctly, which with a dedicated router gets you to a reasonable latency with reasonable quality even without foveated rendering (with e.g. a Quest 3).With foveated rendering I expect this to be a breeze.

It was hard for me to believe as well but streaming games wirelessly on a Quest 2 was totally possible and surprisingly latency-free once I upgraded to wifi 6 (few years ago)It works a lot better than you’d expect at face value.

I worked on a foveated video streaming system for 3D video back in 2008, and we used eye tracking and extrapolated a pretty simple motion vector for eyes and ignored saccades entirely. It worked well, you really don&#x27;t notice the lower detail in the periphery and with a slightly over-sized high resolution focal area you can detect a change in gaze direction before the user&#x27;s focus exits the high resolution area.Anyway that was ages ago and we did it with like three people, some duct tape and a GPU, so I expect that it should work really well on modern equipment if they&#x27;ve put the effort into it.

The real trick is not over complicating things. The goal is to have high fidelity rendering where the eye is currently focusing so to solve for saccades you just build a small buffer area around the idealized minimum high res center and the saccades will safely stay inside that area within the ability of the system to react to the larger overall movements.Picture demonstrating the large area that foveated rendering actually covers as high or mid res: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;oculus&#x2F;comments&#x2F;66nfap&#x2F;made_a_pic_that_shows_how_foveated_rendering&#x2F;#lightbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;oculus&#x2F;comments&#x2F;66nfap&#x2F;made_a_pic_t...</a>

At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn&#x27;t seem like it would be a problem. If you can&#x27;t get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they&#x27;ll be on the floor vomiting.

&gt; Saccades are commonly as low as 20-30ms when reading textWhat sort of resolution are one&#x27;s eyes actually resolving during saccades? I seem to recall that there is at the very least a frequency reduction mechanism in play during saccades

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.

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&#x27;s some way to do neural compression of the peripheral vision optimized for a nice balance between peripheral vision and hints in the embedding to allow for nicer upscaling.

They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They&#x27;ve also bet more on standalone apps rather than streaming from a PC. These are reasonable tradeoffs. The next Quest may add eye tracking, who knows. Quest Pro had it but was discontinued for being too expensive.We&#x27;ll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don&#x27;t expect them to match Meta&#x27;s subsidies, so I&#x27;m betting on this being more expensive than Quest. I also think that streaming from a gaming PC will remain more of a niche thing despite Valve&#x27;s focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86&#x2F;Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.

What do you mean?  What part have they not tried?

If you mean foveated streaming - It’s available on the Quest Pro with Steam Link.

Why hasn&#x27;t Meta tried this given the huge amount of R&amp;D they&#x27;ve put into VR and they had literally John Carmack on the team in the past?

2k X 2k doesn&#x27;t sound low res it is like full HD, but with twice vertical. My monitor is 1080p.Never tried VR set, so I don&#x27;t know if that translates similarly.

VR does need a lot of resolution when trying to display text.Can get away with less for games where text is minimized (or very large)

Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won&#x27;t make the resolution fine.To your point, I&#x27;d use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I&#x27;d never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)

The battery isn&#x27;t an issue if you&#x27;re stationary, you can plug it in.The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can&#x27;t do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don&#x27;t precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset&#x27;s displays. It&#x27;s inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.There&#x27;s also the issue that these things have to compete with what&#x27;s available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it&#x27;ll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that&#x27;s a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.

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&#x27;s going to be super comfortable.

&gt; Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won&#x27;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&#x27;t meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.

I think it works really well to pump the same amount of pixels, just focusing them on the more important parts.

It&#x27;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.

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.

They&#x27;re probably thinking of it in comparison to the Apple Pro which attempts to do some facial tracking of the bottom of your face to inform their &#x27;Personas&#x27;, it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can&#x27;t see the bottom half of the face well.

I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s main use case will be VR chat syncing mouths to avatars.

Funny enough the Digital Foundry folks put a Gabe quote about tongue input in their most recent podcast.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c9zfExb5vCU&amp;t=1h32m44s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c9zfExb5vCU&amp;t=1h32m44s</a>

&gt; Mouth tracking?What a vile thought in the context of the steam… catalogue.

Wow, that&#x27;s just 1 frame of latency at 60 fps.Edit: Nevermind, I&#x27;m dumb. 1&#x2F;60th of a second is 16 milliseconds, not 1.6 milliseconds.

That&#x27;s pretty quick. I&#x27;ve heard that in ideal circumstances Wi-Fi 6 can get close to 5ms and Wi-Fi 7 can get down to 2ms.I&#x27;s impressive if they&#x27;re really able to get below 2ms motion-to-photon latency, given that modern consumer headsets with on-device compute are also right at that same 2ms mark.

And foveated streaming has a 1-2ms wireless latency on modern GPUs according to LTT. Insane.

Have a look at this video by Dave2D. In his hands-on, he was very impressed with foveated streaming <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;356rZ8IBCps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;356rZ8IBCps</a>.

You can get a Beyond if that&#x27;s what you want. It&#x27;s an amazing device, and will be far more comfortable and higher resolution than this one. Valve has supported Bigscreen in integrating Lighthouse tracking, and I hope that they continue that support by somehow allowing them to integrate the inside-out tracking they&#x27;ve developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.

I agree. Hopefully Bigscreen continues making hardware. I still have the original bigscreen beyond and im very happy with it besides the glare.

I&#x27;m personally quite hyped to see the first commercially available Linux-based standalone VR headset announced. This thing is quite a bit lighter than any of the existing &quot;cram a computer in&quot; solutions.

They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta&#x27;s offerings, this is indeed an actual computer you can run linux on. Perhaps even do standard computer stuff inside the headset like text editing, Blender modeling, or more.

I was worried about the built in computer as well, but then I found out it&#x27;s only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it&#x27;s still pretty light.

There&#x27;s always going to be a computer in it to drive it. It&#x27;s just a matter of how generalised it is and how much weight&#x2F;power consumption it&#x27;s adding.

It&#x27;s nice to have some local processing for tracking and latency mitigation. Cost from there to full computer on headset is marginal, so you might as well do that.

As a current and frequent user of this form factor (Pico 4, with the top strap, which the Steam Frame will also have as an option, over Virtual Desktop) I can assure you that it&#x27;s quite comfortable over long periods of time (several hours). Of course it will ultimately depend on the specific design decisions made for this headset, but this all looks really good to me.Full color passthrough would have been nice though. Not necessarily for XR, but because it&#x27;s actually quite useful to be able to switch to a view of the world around you with very low friction when using the headset.

It&#x27;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&#x27;t wireless and has a narrower field of view.

I guess there&#x27;s a market for this but I&#x27;m personally disappointed that they&#x27;ve gone with the &quot;cram a computer into the headset&quot; route. I&#x27;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 &quot;all in one&quot; PC&#x2F;headset models is just unnecessary if you already have a gaming PC.

I&#x27;ll share a childhood story as well.Somewhere between &#x27;93 and &#x27;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 headset and a single puck hold in hand. Rotate the puck and you move. Push the button and you shoot. Look around with your head. Most memorable part - you could duck to avoid shots!
Game itself, as I remember it, was full wireframe, akin to Q3DM17 (the longest yard) minus jump pads, but the layout was kind of similar. Player was holding a dart gun - you had a single shot and you had to wait until the projectile decayed or connected with other player.I&#x27;m not entirely sure if the game was multiplayer or not.I often come back to that memory because shortly after within that time frame my father took me to a computer fair where I had the opportunity to play doom&#x2F;hexen with VFX1 (or whatever it was called) and it was supposed to revolutionize the world the way AI is suppose to do it now.Then there was a P5 glove with jaw dropping demo videos of endless possibilities of 3D modelling with your hands, navigating a mech like you were actually inside, etc.It never came.

I remember there was a flight simulator project that had something like that, or even it was that.it was called ESPRIT, which I believe was eye slaved programmed retinal insertion technique.

That’s reality cool. My first job out of college was implementing an image generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer on the USS Nimitz, also using SGI hardware. I would have loved to have seen the final product in person but sadly never had the chance.

&gt; Foveated streaming! That&#x27;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&#x2F;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 resolution. The other projector was on a turret that pan&#x2F;tilted with the pilot&#x27;s helmet, and projected a high resolution image but only in a perhaps 1.5m circle directly in from of where the helmet was aimed.It was super fun being the project manager&#x27;s kid, and getting to &quot;play with it&quot; on weekends sometimes. You could see what was happening while wearing the helmet and sitting in the seat if you tried - mostly ny intentionally pointing your eyes in a different direction to your head - but when you were &quot;flying around&quot; it was totally believable, and it _looked_ like everything was high resolution. It was also fun watching other people fly it, and being able to see where they were looking, and where they weren&#x27;t looking and the enemy was speaking up on them.

I use a 1920x1080 headset as a monitor replacement. It&#x27;s absolutely fine. 2160x2160 will be more than workable as long as the tracking is on point.

Peripheral vision is extremely good at spotting movement at low resolution and moving the eye to look at it.I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s faster, but it&#x27;s a non-trivial part of the experience.

I once lived in a place that had a bathroom with mirrors that faced each other. I think I convinced myself that not only is my attention to detail more concentrated at the center, but that my response time was also fastest there (can anyone confirm that?).So this gets me thinking. What would it feel like to correct for that effect? Could you use the same technique to essentially play the further parts early, so it all comes in at once?Kinda a hair brained idea, I know, but we have the technology, and I&#x27;m curious.

Eye tracking hardware and software specifically focus on low latency, e.g. FPGA close to the sensor. The resulting packets they send is also ridiculously small (e.g 2 numbers as x,y positions of the pupils) so ... I can see that happening.Sure eyes move very VERY fast but if you do relatively small compute on dedicated hardware it can also go quite fast while remaining affordable.

It just needs to be less impossible than not doing it. I.e. sending a full frame of information must be an even more impossible problem.

The data you&#x27;re sending out is just the position and motion vectors of the pupils. And you probably only need about 16 bits for each of these numbers for 2 eyes. So the equivalent of two floating point numbers along a particular channel or 32 bits at minimum. Any lag can be compensated for by simply interpolating the motion vectors.It actually makes a lot of sense!

How the hell would foveated streaming even work, it seems physically impossible. Tracking where your eye is looking then sending that information to a server, it processing it and then streaming that back seems impossible.

Yet this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting VR releases

&gt; Foveated streaming! That&#x27;s a great idea.It would be interesting to see⁰ how that behaves when presented with weird eyes like mine or worse. Mine often don&#x27;t always point the same way and which one I&#x27;m actually looking through can be somewhat arbitrary from one moment to the next…Though the flapping between eyes is usually in the presence of changes, however minor, in required focal distance, so maybe it wouldn&#x27;t happen as much inside a VR headset.----[0] Sorry not sorry.

&gt;  Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.
 That might be the reason I&#x27;m going to buy it. I want to support this and Steam has done a lot to get gaming on linux going.

I&#x27;m entirely unfamiliar with the vr rendering space, so all I have to go on is what (I think) your comment implies.Is the current state of VR rendering really just rendering and transporting two videostreams independent of eachother? Surely there has to be at least some academic prior-art on the subject, no?

&gt; 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rateI question that we could not create a special purpose video codec that handles this without trickery. The &quot;per eye&quot; part sounds spooky at first, but how much information is typically different between these frames? The mutual information is probably 90%+ in most VR games.If we were to enhance something like x264 to encode the 2nd display as a residual of the 1st display, this could become much more feasible from a channel capacity standpoint. Video codecs already employ a lot of tricks to make adjacent frames that are nearly identical occupy negligible space.This seems very similar (identical?) to the problem of efficiently encoding a 3d movie:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2D_plus_Delta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2D_plus_Delta</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiview_Video_Coding" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiview_Video_Coding</a>

Quest 3 is $499 and Quest 3S is $299 in the US

&gt; But the price is hopefully low.The main value of Meta VR and AR products is the massive price subsidy which is needed because the brand has been destroyed for all generations older than Alpha.The current price estimate for the Steam Frame is $1200 vs Quest 3 at $600 which is still a very reasonable price given the technology, tariffs, and lack of ad invading privacy

Foveated streaming! That&#x27;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.&gt; Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It&#x27;s your PC.It&#x27;s an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.&gt; 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rateRoughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won&#x27;t be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I&#x27;d love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.&gt; Monochrome passthroughSo AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:&gt; User accessible front expansion port w&#x2F; Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) &#x2F; PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?One thing I don&#x27;t see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That&#x27;s something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There&#x27;s an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I&#x27;m surprised it isn&#x27;t standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index&#x27;s &quot;knuckles&quot; controllers.

Meta and Apple smothered VR almost to death. Valve is coming to set VR free.

They have been trying to make VR thing since the 90s. It has never reached mass appeal and never will.I can&#x27;t wear one of those headset (I get severe motion sickness).

The death of VR has been greatly exaggerated. The only thing that died is the hype, and the hype will not be missed. It&#x27;s just nice to have so much less bullshit.

Wondering what window&#x2F;desktop manager will valve ship with the new steam frame. Is there even a desktop&#x2F;window manager work with 3d space currently? Will that be a mod of kde or something?

Pretty sure the OS is just the same old Steam-flavored Linux distro &quot;SteamOS&quot; with ARM support and some new graphics pipeline stuff for the VR portion, though we don&#x27;t know until it&#x27;s actually out.Though Valve has put a focus on developer ease and very low software lockdown in the recent years with their hardware, so I&#x27;d say the chances on direct rendering are quite good!

Will the eye tracking data be directly available to developers?Also, can I hack the OS? Specifically interested in direct VR rendering (other headsets don&#x27;t allow to bypass compositor).

I thought 6Ghz is not allowed world wide? For example Germany?Are you sure it&#x27;s not just wifi6?

I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that&#x27;s probably going to be more&#x2F;less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It&#x27;s somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4&#x2F;5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do &#x27;mobile&#x27; vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn&#x27;t need a connection to your PC at all.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dU3ru09HTng?t=445" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dU3ru09HTng?t=445</a> - timestamped at wireless segment

&gt; But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?That&#x27;s my experience streaming games to steam deck. I have central 2.4&#x2F;5&#x2F;6Ghz AP and 6Ghz-only APs in other rooms. Any sort of wireless streaming at my place is snappy.

It&#x27;s both standalone and streaming. It comes with a 6GHz Wifi dongle; 6GHz has low penetration so using it in different rooms is iffy. But if you have a good 6GHz mesh setup it might work?

So it connects to your PC via Wifi? I could use this anywhere in my house as far away from my computer as I want?

Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I&#x27;ll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m the norm, but probably neither an exception

I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to &quot;jailbreak&quot; the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven&#x27;t open sourced the firmware for it.

I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can&#x27;t meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.Only question is if 2160px is enough.

&gt; at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta QuestHaving the headset also be a PC (and not essentially a phone OS) is worth a premium of &gt;$250 at least. You can build desktop apps&#x2F;games on this thing, it can (hopefully) do just about anything a normal PC can.The Quest is impressive in many ways, but it&#x27;s a much narrower-use device. I don&#x27;t think Valve&#x27;s pricing needs to be in that same bracket to still sell.

I can&#x27;t imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they&#x27;ve got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.

I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.Still hoping that you’re right, though.

They&#x27;ve cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it&#x27;ll be any thing close to $1k.

Valve kinda shows how a well-managed private business ought to run: respect your customers, find a cash cow and use it for slowly expand into related markets to your niche, develop good products over a long period (SteamOS took many years to become something actually useful) without focusing on the mentality of hyper-growth, keep the stereotypical contemporary MBA thinking away, have a small but competent team.There are, of course, the issues with lootboxes but even there they&#x27;ve kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.It&#x27;s a very well oiled machine, I had another VR headset ordered for sim racing, immediately canceled it when saw the Frame announcement because even if specs-wise it&#x27;s a bit of a downgrade, I want to buy what Valve is selling.

Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.

Thanks for the article link. Nice quote from the article:&gt; Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don&#x27;t have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.I was disappointed seeing no hand grip straps. I&#x27;ve never used a Valve Index but they seemed very useful. Very glad that they will still be available.

Word is they&#x27;re aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it&#x27;ll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.See &quot;cheaper than index&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uploadvr.com&#x2F;valve-steam-frame-official-announcement-features-details&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uploadvr.com&#x2F;valve-steam-frame-official-announce...</a>

from your keyboard to GabeN&#x27;s ears. I&#x27;ve spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.

I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you&#x27;re moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.

This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I&#x27;ve used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends&#x27; place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.The fact that this can run standalone, doesn&#x27;t have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I&#x27;m hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.