Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.

In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.

The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.

But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.

Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.

What pass-through apps are you using for all this? I tried pass-through pingpong but it didn't fit in my room so it clipped through the wall uncomfortably. There is AR golf?

> You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both.

You clear the area within the boundaries, leave a little buffer space to the walls, and respect the boundary warnings in game. No problems. You do need a few square meters without any furniture to do this.

Boxing and ping pong feel just as great in VR as they do in AR. It's more a matter of the level of immersion: AR works well for table tennis, but fantasy games are severely limited in what they can do. The most impressive experiences are always in VR - "flying in space" doesn't work while looking at your living room walls.

> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.

That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.

> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.

There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.

There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.

Apparently Valve was able to use a true cell phone chip and get more raw performance out of it by using lower res monochrome cameras, whereas qualcomm's AR-capable chips use up a lot of the wafer for processing color AR video and DSP. Given it's built to a budget, and I don't ever use AR, monochrome AR seems like an acceptable tradeoff.

I have little to no interest in AR and i'm glad they didnt waste more money or resources on it. I don't use it on my Q3 and I wouldnt use it on this.