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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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'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'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.

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.

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.

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