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#headset#games#more#quest#price#don#linux#meta#experience#steam
Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.
And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.
(edit: shameless plug for my recent, longer writeup on this: bhmt.dev/blog/frame)
I could see how a kid might want that on Quest when they don’t have their own TV. And it might be nice on a plane.
But $1000 is a lot for that. I know people say that watching video in the Vision Pro is really nice, I wasn’t that thrilled when I tried it, but it felt to me more like a “you can do this because you have the hardware“ not a“ this is why you buy it” feature.
If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.
I can already run 100% of my Steam games on a flat screen in front of my real eyes
It's particularly fun to watch 3d movies with the headset but with several decent TVs in the house I'd watch movies most of the time with one of them.
Without a tether to the PC (I have battery in my pocket) it’s pretty okay!
Worry not! That's how long the battery lasts!
Edit: I missed the point here, see reply.
I even downloaded some 3d movies to try watching in VR, pacific rim and avatar movies (there's not that many 3d movies) but I didnt get far into them, the 3d was more of a distraction than anything. Flat screen is just superior imo.
Hopefully Valve make a sequel to Alyx to help sell the new headset.
Just the metaphors and "magnetics" for fiddling and dealing with your gun were so good. The conveyance system was also just so much more intuitive. I think they even seemed to have done something to deal with the very mild nausea I felt with some title.
Oh, and the game was fun.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/
Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.
If the price of leading edge VR price drops two orders of magnitude every 35 years or so, it's probably only going to be another 10-15 years for $200 headsets.
So it's not here yet, but will be soon.
I love the idea of the Apple Vision Pro 2, but its wildly expensive and it sounds too heavy to wear for very long throughout the day unless you're reclined. I'd just use it for virtual screens for development and in my workshop ideally - but that requires me moving around, and the weight makes that a no-go.
I'm into these things, but they still just aren't there yet- and the ecosystem is still lacking geniune investment beyond HL:A and some cool tech demos.
In particular, I don't know if the Steam Frame will have the power for this, but something like a native ARM build of Dolphin (so no FEX) that exposes the 3D nature of polygonal games is very interesting to me. If you can cross your eyes to get stereo you can see what that would look like for something like Super Mario 3D Galaxy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgdqCL2toE (I find a conventional, unfolding phone to be a pretty good size for that. On a big monitor getting it small enough to cross eyes can be a challenge.) In general any emulation target that has 3D polygons is really interesting to me. I'm also pretty interested in what full 3D does to Skies of Arcadia (could be a complete disappointment, could be absolutely amazing) and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, where I feel like the game that was a bit crowded and struggling with being 2D in SD might just come alive. (Assuming they didn't play too many games with the distance that doesn't work if we see it in true 3D.)
I gather the modding community is already gearing up for modding more games to be true 3D in the VR space. That is, not necessarily VR (though there's a mod community for that as well), but having a visible screen floating in 3D VR space where the screen itself is fully 3D. There is also a wide variety of games from the past couple of decades that I suspect might be very difficult to "convert to VR" but might be relatively easy to trick into rendering full 3D instead of down to 2D.
Nothing really stops any of this from happening now, but I've tried to set it up before and I was unsuccessful with my current stack. Being able to give out instructions that say "Install the Dolphin3D Build from the Flatpak Store and load up your ROMs" rather than the current set of ad hoc complex instructions that I couldn't even get through successfully could be a game changer.
I will giggle like a schoolgirl if the reason why Steam Frames sell like hot cakes in six to twelve months is that they become recognized as the premier way to emulate 3D systems from the Playstation forward. Overclocking, texture packs, modding, all that's great, but how about all those things and true 3D for a lot of games?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g
They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.
With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.
Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.
Is the Glasshole thing more geared towards recording people in public? This headset has 1. bad cameras but 2. a much better privacy posture than meta.
Even despite pinning the display in a corner, I noticed I was very distracted when crossing streets. Made me stop wearing them like that, instead prefering to carry them in my backpack and use them on train rides or flights.
At least with my phone I can just slip it back in my pocket when I need to pay attention to my surroundings.
To be clear, wearing a full VR headset has an "I am an idiot" vibe.
Although, I do agree, I would find it odd to go down to the park and see someone wandering around with a VR headset tuning out the world and waving controllers around. I'm more addressing the "cowork in public spaces" part of that. I think their statement about "while traveling" is more like while seated on a several hour plane trip or relaxing at a hotel or things along those lines. Not like wearing the device while ordering a latte or something along those lines.
Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware
And yes, I've tried third-party solutions like Virtual Desktop under Windows and ALVR under Linux. Even with some of the best WiFi 6E hardware available standing within 10ft of the router with the PC being wired into the network with ethernet, nothing has beat a tethered USB connection using the native Link functionality on my Quest 2.
Any SteamVR based solution fixes most of these issues and the Frame sounds like it might make wireless actually viable. Even if it doesn't, tethered with Valve software instead of with Facebook software is still a meaningful improvement.
Still, I'm happy they're doing this, it seems like a cool product and I bet it would be almost as much fun as a platform to hack around on as it will be for gaming.
It is a niche, definitely, but one that spends a lot of money and time on their virtual third space.
Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.
Overall I like the experience of installing and running games on the MQ3, I can very much see a Steam-based device that is just as nice or nicer.
[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/
https://www.nomanssky.com/cosmos-update/#:~:text=Added%20sup...
Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.
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.
Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.
AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.
One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.
For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.
The fact I can throw it into my bag and travel with it is a bonus.
Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet?
I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.
But you better have your HOTAS controls memorized because it's a pain not having visibility of them.
Can't be used more than 30min without major discomfort for most people. Any talks about it replacing monitors are lies.
I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.
Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?
I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.
VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.
It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...
But in seriousness, I've gone down this rabbithole ever year or two for about as long as I've had the darn thing (including one especially masochistic attempt at making it work on ppc64le), and any time I have gotten an open stack to drive it, the result has always been unusable with regard to input jitter and "general feel". Which is to say, yes, people have already figured out how to drive it on Linux.
It's just that the experience sucks.
Very impressive work by all the folks who hacked on it. But it seems like actually getting all the smoothing/filtering and interpolating sensor data is, for whatever reason, an unreasonably hard problem. Dunno if the LLMs could help at all, short of ... stealing the secret sauce from the proprietary runtime??
Will be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!
https://interfacinglinux.com/community/sbcsoftware/native-st...
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!
The official product page above has a link to one you can already preorder: https://arcturus.vision/
> Four high-resolution, monochrome cameras provide controller and headset tracking
(Emphasis mine)
So it's not really suitable for real AR out of the box. Thanks for the heads up!
Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.
Yikes, what a terrible price. 55 minutes playing on-device Half Life Alyx. 1hr 30min streaming from a PC with dongle. 3 hours charge time. It's just pretty lame tbh. Damn :(
I don't want to buy that high end cell phone. First because I already have one (it would be very nice if I could have my phone handle compute from the back of my head or my pocket), second because I mostly want the headset to use with my desktop computer. $250 or $500 for a dumb headset with these features would be great.
Also charging 2-3x slower than you use the battery is very lame.
We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.
Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.
Maybe that's the reason why the Meta Quest Pro is in "so much demand" that Meta is no longer selling them anymore. Apple is not even bothering to restock Vision Pro either.
So much demand /s
I am saying VR had a great run. We are not in the Covid era anymore which the Quest greatly benefited from this. VR has a very limited future and it shows.