I'll share a childhood story as well.

Somewhere between '93 and '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'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/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.

It'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.

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

There'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.

> "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?"

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.

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.

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

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'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'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've put the effort into it.

They'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.

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/66nfap/made_a_pic_t...

At 100fps (mid range of the framerate), you need to deliver a new frame every 10ms anyway, so a 20ms saccade doesn't seem like it would be a problem. If you can't get new frames to users in 30ms, blur will be the least of your problems, when they turn their head, they'll be on the floor vomiting.

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.

They use a 6 Ghz dongle

That's pretty quick. I've heard that in ideal circumstances Wi-Fi 6 can get close to 5ms and Wi-Fi 7 can get down to 2ms.

I's impressive if they'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.

Wow, that's just 1 frame of latency at 60 fps.

Edit: Nevermind, I'm dumb. 1/60th of a second is 16 milliseconds, not 1.6 milliseconds.

Peripheral vision is extremely good at spotting movement at low resolution and moving the eye to look at it.

I don't know if it's faster, but it's a non-trivial part of the experience.

They prioritized cost, so they omitted eye tracking hardware. They'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'll have to wait on pricing for Steam Frame, but I don't expect them to match Meta's subsidies, so I'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's focus on it here, and people will find a lot of use for the x86/Windows emulation feature to play games from their Steam library directly on the headset.

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

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

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)

The battery isn't an issue if you'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't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.

There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.

Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.

To your point, I'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'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)

2k X 2k doesn't sound low res it is like full HD, but with twice vertical. My monitor is 1080p.

Never tried VR set, so I don't know if that translates similarly.

It'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.

I'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 "cram a computer in" solutions.

There's always going to be a computer in it to drive it. It's just a matter of how generalised it is and how much weight/power consumption it's adding.

You can get a Beyond if that's what you want. It'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've developed for this device in the next version of the Beyond.

They crammed a computer into the headset, but UNLIKE Meta'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's only 185g. It is 78g more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but it's still pretty light.

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

I'm guessing it's main use case will be VR chat syncing mouths to avatars.

They'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 'Personas', it notably still fails quite badly on bearded people where it can't see the bottom half of the face well.

Funny enough the Digital Foundry folks put a Gabe quote about tongue input in their most recent podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9zfExb5vCU&t=1h32m44s

Even just have direct access to hardware apis is already a big win. On Oculus quest. The closest you can get is running with webxr. But webxr suffer from all those performance problem of web platforms. (And bug of meta softwares. The recent quest browser have bug that prevent you from disabling spatial audio, rendering it not usable for watch video at all)

It said its running Steam OS, which is just Linux.

I bought an Oculus Go last year for € 30. Its support has been dropped for quite some time, and you can only activate developer mode and sideloading through an old version of the Meta Horizons app [1]. But if you do that, there are 71 GiBs of games to explore on the Internet Archive [2]. Some need patching to remove an online check to a server that no longer exists, but that is easy enough to do with a (regrettably Windows) tool someone published.

The Go is not the best headset of course, but the games are a different style because of the 3DoF tracking without camera's. Somewhat slower paced and sitting down. A style I personally like more.

You can also unlock the device to get root on it [3], which is quite neat, although there doesn't seem to be any homebrew scene at all. Not even the most bare-bones launcher that doesn't require a Meta login.

[1] That doesn't even seem intentional, but it does mean that once the old version of the app can't communicate with Meta servers anymore, any uninitialized Go turns into a brick.

[2] https://archive.org/details/gear-vr-oculus-go

[3] https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/unlocking-oculus-go...

> £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.

I'm sure he put it to good use. Like 500ms worth of upkeep for one of his yachts.

Then this is actually much closer than previous headsets?

There is a lot going on to render the desktop in a tracked 3D space, all that has to happen somewhere. If you're expecting to plug a HDMI cable into a headset and have a good time then I think you're underestimating how much work is being done.

OpenVR and OpenXR are really great software layers that help that all work out.

I am currently writing this from an xreal one pro. I think it fits what you are asking for.

There you go https://www.sightful.com/

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

Snapdragon doesn'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.

(rewriting this comment because the spec sheet has seemingly been updated)

Looks like it can do 4k 120hz, but since it'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're using should support it in hardware, but the HDMI Forum has blocked AMD from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...

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 "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" line.

I reckon it can probably stream at 4K@120 if it can game at half that.

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'll send a tiny but highly detailed image where your eyes are focusing, with the rest being considerably lower resolution.

Or that's what I think I may be completely wrong.

Where are you getting this number? I'm not seeing it on the specs page.

This is not true, from the specs:

HDMI 2.0

Up to 4K @ 120Hz

Supports HDR, FreeSync, and CEC

I have zero doubts the device can do 4k @ 120Hz streaming Hardware wise. In the end it is just a normal Linux desktop.

> Obviously comparing apples to oranges

Or is it “comparing apples to steam engines”?

It's only a little bigger than Mac Studio.

9.5 x 19.7 x 19.7 cm = 3,687 cm³

and half the size of my SFFPC @ 8.3L

Thanks for the article link. Nice quote from the article:

> Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don'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've never used a Valve Index but they seemed very useful. Very glad that they will still be available.

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've kept their hands much cleaner than any other game developer.

It'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's a bit of a downgrade, I want to buy what Valve is selling.

I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" 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't open sourced the firmware for it.

Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.

I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception

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't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.

Only question is if 2160px is enough.

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.

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

I wonder if this will be a VR trojan horse.

The Steam Deck was wildly popular for a non-Nintendo device. It's got Linux up to 3% of total Steam playtime. If this has a similar draw (play every game on Steam without having to buy a TV), maybe the install base of VR will grow to a point where it's more feasible to make games that support it.

It also makes SteamVR relevant again in a world where Oculus has been eating a lot of the mindshare by releasing affordable headsets and buying the most successful game studios.

I get that there needed to be tradeoffs, I just disagree with this particular one. I could suggest many other ways to save ten bucks in hardware costs. Any other cost saving measure would still allow to play the same games, just with worse performance. But this choice cuts the stock device off from an entire class of apps - in my opinion the best of them all.

I don't think the greyscale camera is mainly a cost concern. I imagine the greyscale camera has better low light and noise performance, which is quite important for tracking.

The big difference seems to be that this headset doesn't have AR cameras at all, but reuse the mapping camera for some light passthrough duty.

As I understand it it's two separate radio and stack to have continuous link to both.

When you full screen this, it's crazy how tiny the area that spins is. For me it'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's quite harsh, and definitely not accurate.

I believe in Linus very little. I'll keep my eyes peeled to see what others say. It'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

I'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 "an iPad on your face" 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't seen a single notable application that takes advantage of the hardware, and it seems that that's largely in part due to it being nigh impossible to develop and run software on it.

> This isn’t likely to be a compelling spatial computer.

neither is the Apple Vision Pro

It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.

Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?

100%, a non-spyware Quest 3 is what I wanted. The Q3 is a fantastic headset, easily the best amalgamation of features at the right level of performance. Very pragmatic.

But Meta basically having access to my room in 3D, full audio, is not ideal. The very last company I want to invite into my home.

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

I doubt fex-emu works on macos.

But isnt that what Rosetta2 is for on mac anyway?

Devices with internal batteries basically have embedded expiration dates.

Standard AAA or AA can be rechargeable so you don’t need to keep buying more. I’d suggest buying like a 100 pack or something, they’re not expensive.

Allow me to recommend low self-discharge NiMH batteries (Eneloop brand is excellent) and a good charger made for that chemistry.

The timeline on the site you're critiquing says the project was confirmed in 2021. So they've been waiting a while.

And it's not out, it was "revealed" today with "early 2026" estimate for availability. No price yet.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware

The site has been updated, it says "Announced on Steam — not out yet."

The headset isn't being released until early 2026.

> it's out now

It's not out, just announced.

You're right that it's "not too-too hard" to get them, but it's also "not too-too easy" 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

The (now original) Steam controller used AA batteries as well. I can't say it was my favorite feature but I did appreciate that it made "battery replacements" a cinch.

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

I'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.

Agreed, if you have all the sim racing equipment already adding in VR brings you basically "there". 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's a uniquely ideal situation for VR. Seated with full tactile controls.

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'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'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'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.

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'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'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 VR

BeamNG has unofficial VR

Rec 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't work like you expect and apparently it has VR

Pulsar 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 death

An upcoming game about "Be an artemis astronaut". 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 have both a quest 2 and quest 3 and you are right, the quest 2 is laughable. The quest 3 is WAY better, and is way closer to making it feel like you are just looking through glass (not quite, but on the way).

Eh, I don't use it for augmented reality a TON, but there are some fun apps that my kids and I like to use that use the passthrough for augmented reality... one is a virtual aquarium thing where you can draw 'windows' on your wall that become a window to the ocean, with things swimming around. It is pretty cool.

I mostly use it, though, for short term moving around things, like to pick up something in the real world or to figure out where I am. I guess that can work in monotone, but it really feels cool in full color.

with the galaxy xr, you don't have to choose. sometimes it's good to have windows in your reality, other times you can go to a fully immersive mode with different environments

One of the reasons I put off getting corrective lenses for a long time and kept trying to use contacts despite how horrible they make my eyeballs feel, is that I have an extremely wide peripheral vision. I can see my fingers wiggle behind the plane defined by my shoulders, I will react to motion out there.

Having my FoV dumbed down to 90º sounds like hell, especially in a game where we are looking for opponents.

Playing Doom on a widescreen monitor with the FoV modifications made it a lot less annoying. I want that even more today.

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

Several. Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Meganex 8K, and more coming like Crystal Super / Dream Air.

It’s good that we have decent NiMH batteries that I don’t think leak like alkaline ones do (I’ve never seen one!).

Lower voltages, but flatter discharge curve so pretty much everything works with them.

Let me guess: were they alkaline batteries, left in the device while not in use for several weeks or months?

If we're going that route, it should really be Lisp :)

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.

Crashes in the browser as well. Good job Valve.