Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore...

Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is.

Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.

I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.

I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.

CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.

I did catch that the streaming stick for the Valve Frame in the announcement video was plugged into a computer that looked an awful lot like a Mac.

Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.

The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.

Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.

That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical

It can, but it'll be a small subset of stuff. You'll probably be able to just hit install + play on most things, but it'll have a "Steam Frame Verified" program like the Steam Deck's.

Yes, in the same way that a Quest 3 can run BeatSaber and other similar calibre games.

For more demanding games it's designed to stream from a PC.

Sad fact is that nobody outside tiny niche-cases in engineering really gives a shit about XR. The current round of meta-branded glasses don't have features worth the price.

When it's light & small enough to be a pair of glasses and more than just the expensive but limited gimmick that the form is currently, then it'll be world-changing. It's close, but it's not there yet.

The videos I've seen about the Frame all call out the front expansion port, which "Valve says ... offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals."[1]

That's plenty to support color passthrough as a physical addon, which in turn makes me think that, like with the OLED Deck, we'll see a Frame with built-in color-passthrough later as a different premium SKU when/if they justify it.

1: https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...

AR is really cool but it seems like a better fit for premium VR headsets right now. At a given price and assuming other specs are fixed, monochrome cameras offer higher refresh rate. I'm hoping this will help the frame offer better tracking.

Has PianoVision been working for you to learn piano?

> AR has a lot of potential

Name one that has to do with with this box competing with xbox and playstation in people's living room.

VRChat is one of the most socially dysfunctional online platforms I've ever used

I tried VRChat once or twice but never seemed to have found any fun places/groups to hang out that weren't obsessing about anime/manga most of the time. Anyone here on HN have better suggestions of worlds/groups or where to even look?

I could see Steam creating the OASIS

The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.

If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.

Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.

There are already headsets with decent text fidelity, but IMO the problem is now on the host side. I tried to get an XR desktop env running (Stardust https://stardustxr.org/) on Linux but ran into graphical issues. The Windows ecosystem is much better though.

I can't wait until the tech reaches this stage. Infinite desktop space, surrounded by text and terminals. It will be so hard to unplug.

resolution is in the 2000x2000 range so don't count on it.

The eye tracking data is supposedly being made available to other software on PC (and presumably the headset as well), so foveated rendering should be possible but is a software problem.

Yes - thank you, fixed

Proton was a community led effort years back. The guy who started that is now an employee at Valve (IIRC) working on Proton, but also getting paid :)

Arch has been working with Valve on various build system improvements for some time [0], which as I understand it are targeted at making it more feasible for them to eventually support more architectures [1]. This doesn't release for several months; I wonder if there'll be an official Arch Linux ARM by then?

[0]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696041

You mean valve's?

isn't Steam Deck arm based?