Gonna try it out on my m1 mbp because of this comment. Been waiting to play alyx forever but I didn't know a way to get mac to work - theres a solution now.

Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.

HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.

Quest 3 is cheap for the same reason that 80 inch TVs are sold at or below cost. If you value your privacy at zero and want to strap a surveilling, billboard on your face for pennies on the dollar be my guest.

This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.

2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.

[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

For me a lot of the value comes from the freedom you get with frame. Valve says “it’s your PC, install what you want” and it runs an open source OS. It’s the first truly Linux friendly headset (it runs arch btw) and I don’t have to send my data to Meta. Also foveated streaming means, according to reviewers, a pretty decent wireless PCVR experience. I can’t wait to play half life Alyx without a tether. Valve is just doing something very different from meta.

Quest 3 is a mindblowing piece of hardware completely ruined by the runtime and vendor. This is basically it as a Linux machine you actually own. That being said, my Quest has sat on the shelf for years now since purchasing. I just don't really see a market for these things outside of driving/flight simulation enthusiasts. The whole "smartphone strapped to your face" paradigm is a dead end for actual VR.

lmao. n o. thats meta and this steam. iykyk

[delayed]

For DCS only, I wonder how this slots between a Q3 and a bigscreen beyond. The beyond with no controllers is probably about the same price all in as the 1TB, but would be better screens and lighter. If you dont care about the standalone stuff it might be another good option. The frame does bring more versatility, but at the cost of battery/weight. Wireless VR in sims is unbeatable in terms of immersion though.

I bought an HP Reverb G2 for DCS about 5 years ago and it worked great. When Windows started deprecating the Mixed Reality services random things started breaking, though.

I think technically it can, but the cameras are black and white, so it would be very subpar for AR out of the box.

There is some chatter about using the expansion port to add a 3rd party colour camera to get over this, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Edit: I stand corrected, there is such a 3rd party camera linked on the page!

At this price I don't think you can expect the high quality cameras and processing power needed to do AR.

It can do AR, especially with this addon arcturusvision.myshopify.com

AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.

Yeah this could open up a whole new category of lightweight gaming PCs.

The XReal is practically guaranteed to have sold less units than any generation of the Quest hardware.

I played it on my Quest 2 so that's not really the price of admission