Hopefully a launch/preorder announcement is coming soon.
Sell me on VR. let’s say this is a mind blowingly perfect launch. Somehow Valve sells the thing for like $600 and meets demand, anything you’d wanna do in VR is possible with this. What would that $600 get me? The only stuff I really see online that’s hype for VR is:
HL: Alyx
Beat Saber
And… 3D/VR porn videos.
Aside from those, what else am i missing out on by not having a VR headset? The tech seems super cool but I don’t hear praises sung for any other VR games than those two (and the half-joking suggestion that it’s just jackoff goggles). People talk about VRChat but I don’t think I’m interested in a positional audio chatroom with random people’s vtuber models and none of the friends i do voice chat with would rather be doing so in a virtual space.
Am i genuinely missing something? People seem really hyped for the Frame, it can’t just be for two games and a chatroom and porn, right? The ARM translation layer is really cool but that’s cool because it’ll benefit phones and tablets and SBCs more than the actual VR headset. I can see why you’d rather have a Frame than its competitors: no Facebook, works on-device or as a PC accessory, price point maybe, etc. But what are people doing with their Quests and Indexes and Vives and PSVRs already?
You’re forgetting Superhot VR and Hotdogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenade (1 and 2).
What is holding VR back “as a platform” in my opinion is one killer game, some MMO virtual world like World of Warcraft that fully optimized for VR seated gaming.
Resolution is still a bit too low to replace monitors, but the frame might be high enough now, but I suspect it takes at least 4k per eye, but it might be 8k minimum. The threshold to really replace screens would be huge. The eye tracking of the frame is also a huge leap forward, not only for performance but more for unique interfaces.
What is also missing is some kind of “VR armchair” with inbuild split keyboard and quick way to switch to a pointing device like mouse or VR controller. There is no good “desktop” or shell interface. You can’t easily pull up some txt or browser window if you want to look up something for the game you’re playing, you’re kind of “trapped” which is a real issue imho. Also something like a multitouch floor mat before the VR armchair to slide your feet and “walk” to move around. And a shelf behind your backrest to pull the headset from and put it back easily without having to mess around much. There is a convenience hurdle to VR headsets.
What is missing is really content / apps and a few hardware advancements and sort of the furniture. AI does have the potential to upscale old movies and tv shows into some kind of 3D parallax format. Like a better quality than we’ve seen so far. Also of course realtime animated photorealistic AI porn that reacts to your voice with cyberdildonics.
The potential is there but requires investment, both for the corporations and the users. But such investments could partially be offset. Imagine your work from home, but instead of sitting before a screen you put on goggles and sit in a virtual office and people can just walk by to organize (or scoot by with the foot mat movement lol). With the right software environment you could fully combine both upsides of office and remote work. And you could do this in a small windowless “pod cubicle too” since you’ll be wearing headset and won’t use papers.
Resident Evil is really cool in VR; have to look down and align iron sights. Racing Sims are also cool in VR.
Elite Dangerous’s VR mode will blow your nuts off provided you have several dozen - several hundred hours in the game AND you have a HOTAS. The original Boneworks was also quite good.
Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades and Space Pirate Trainer are great, along with the Museum of Other Realities. Other than those, VR has been trapped in amber since about 2021.
I have an index and will continue to dust it off occasionally. VR kinda died as valve stopped publishing and Facebook did…well… Everything it did.
Any game that is in first person and sitting somewhere has a big VR community: flight sims, combat flight sims, racing sims etc.
The hype does kind of die out since it’s a bit inconvenient to get it going vs just sitting on your couch. I have not played my quest 2 in a while, but when I was I would add to your list: 11 table tennis (great ping pong. Still prefer the real thing but it scratches the itch if you just want to play and no one to play with)
Demeo (board game. It’s a bit limited in levels but it was great to keep in touch with my brothers who both live in different states.)
Thrill of the Fight (look up boxing videos first to know how to correctly throw a punch, then try to apply that here. Surprisingly good workout shadow boxing a virtual opponent. You are just like “okay maybe I will play one round, not get too into it” and the next thing you know you are pouring sweat trying to win)
Real VR fishing (just nice backgrounds while doing essentially nothing with probably a bit too much action of fishing)
3D or 360 videos (however you can get them to play): it’s kind of cool that I had a (really low quality) video feed at my wedding. Someone set up a small 360 camera and I can drop back in and feel like a mouse at the table at the reception. I also wanted to rewatch Avatar in it too but I never got around to it.
Boneworks is pretty sweet too.
Also super hot VR and space pirate trainer. Titans of space was cool to see how vast space really is.
That’s about all I’ve got. Still excited for the steam frame. Been missing trying half half alyx since Facebook trashed oculus.
Most pc games have VR mods? Skyrim VR with real time swings? Superhot? Any racing game, or any tank, aviation Mil sim ?
I can’t speak to most other VR uses, but I have played Walkabout Mini Golf by Mighty Coconut almost weekly for almost 5 years now. The courses are great and they still release new ones almost every month. The game is good alone, but it’s GREAT with 2-7 friends. Honorable mention goes to the “I Expect You to Die” game series - kind of escape-room situations where you are in various life-threatening situations and the scene restarts each time you die (which is frequently).
I want to be interested in it so bad, but the fact it’s also a standalone device, driving the price up massively, means it’s really not what Im looking for in a Sim racing VR headset. I also don’t want the latency of a wireless device.
I’d just love something like my HP reverb G2 that is Linux compatible honestly
The latency issue looks completely solved. It has a custom 6ghz wifi connection and they have an eye tracking foveated compression that is apparently flawless. It reduces the bit rate where you aren’t looking to reduce latency, and from what I heard is completely imperceptible.
It’s cool, but without a way to plug it in, it’s a bit of a PITA… My index controllers had an annoying habit of having one controller die in the middle of a session and need to be charged. One more thing to charge is annoying when we already had corded versions, imo.
It might be pretty impressive wireless, idk I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But nothing is going to beat a wired connection. You also don’t have to worry about battery life with a wired connection. I can do a 4 hour race in VR with a wired headset, maybe can’t do that on a device that has 1-2 hour battery life.
If it charges faster than it draws power while in use, then I can just leave it plugged in, but at that point I’d rather it not have a battery to reduce weight, and not use wireless communication
I think this headset just isn’t for me unfortunately
From what I’ve seen, you can also just plug it into your PC
Edit: well, looks like you can’t. It’s apparently strictly wireless.
The quest 3 is being sold for under €600. Why are we expecting over 1000 for it?
Because Valve manufactures hardware for profit, Meta subsidizes the hell out of it and sells it at a loss to get you into their walled garden.
Right. Good point
In addition to the other answers: I’m a huge VR fan, but gave away my quest 3 and haven’t used VR since.
Fuck corporate surveillance, fuck Zuckerberg, and fuck walled gardens. I will gladly pay 3x the cost for a similar device that isn’t a locked down, walled garden, surveillance nightmare made by a company owned by an unrepentant fascist.
Yeah im reluctantly using mine until this comes out. Dont mind if its more expensive
I was interested in it, but the RAM “crisis” and the scalpers will most likely make it ridiculously expensive and rare. And I’m just tired of these paper launch thing, so probably will pass.
and the scalpers
Can we please stop constantly suggesting there’s mass scale scalping of Valve hardware? The Steam Deck and Steam Machine both had queue requirements to precent an individual from buying a ton of hardware.
You could find a dozen or so people selling their one spot in line to buy a *single * device. That’s not wide-scale scalping.
That may have been true for the steam machine, but the Steam Deck absolutely got scalped heavily at release. I know, because I was one of those scalpers. (I was a poor student that had to make ends meet somehow) If you had hundreds of old steam accounts, for example because you botted CS:GO item drops, then it was very easy money
I see. So you’ve preemptively decided it’s going to be a mess.
I mean, I’m not the pessimistic type but look at every single tech launch from the past 3-4 years and tell me they haven’t been a mess.
Was Nintendo switch 2 launch a mess?
Not OP, but increasingly it looks like it will be, given recent history and current ram pricing (even for mobile devices).
Look, I want it bad. It was actually the one I was most excited about, a little bit more than the controller.
But, yeah. Look at every tech release of the past four years. Look at SSD and RAM prices. Hell even spinning platter drives. Everything has a wait list, or gobbled up by scalpers. And if you do win the wait list lottery, it’s going to cost a goddamn arm and leg. It’s depressing man.
Well… Yeah. It’s a headset that you wear on your head. They’re really uncomfortable. How do you not get a headache from them? How are you supposed to play a game for any meaningful amount of time? I seriously have never see a headset that wasn’t a flop or a regretted purchase for it’s audience. The “metaverse” crashed and burned, if VR was such a promising innovation, wouldn’t it have done well?
VR is just the new version of the same thing that was happening with every iteration of “3D” whatever over the past 80 years or so. It’s always the next best thing and right around the corner, but in this instance the premise is just flawed. A lot of people are still “social” when they game, talking to family, texting people, pausing to watch a video or go get something to eat.
Edit: And just looking up the ram: 16 gigs?? Aside from that, it’s intended for streaming games from a main pc, do most people even have internet that’s fast enough to handle that? Iirc in the US at least the government and companies have been dodging defining what “high speed” is because most of the country doesn’t have access to it. And the resolution specs seem great, but what FPS would it be at? I gotta hazard a guess that it’d be at 30 or so for most modern games.
Obviously, my experience is anecdotal, but I got both Valve-developed headsets at launch, the HTC Vive and the Valve Index, the latter of which I think is still very close to the sweet spot for VR tech 7 years on. I’ve purposely avoided all the Meta headsets.
The stock Vive only using straps for support was indeed a little uncomfortable to wear, but the experience was still compelling enough to use it for hours. I did eventually do the welding mask mod for it that greatly improved the comfort and added over-ear speakers like the Index later got.
Fast forward to the Index, and I still use it off and on. It was comfortable enough out of the box to never modify, and I’ve even fallen asleep a few times in the thing. The Frame further shrinking the front and moving weight to the back for balance can only be better.
I think VR overall is only a failure for those who bought into the hype that it’s an evolution that would eventually replace flat gaming (see the Ready Player One vision). That’s never going to happen because the abstraction that allows you to press a button, move a mouse, tilt a stick, etc. to simulate an action taking much more energy to perform in the real world is a huge convenience we’re never going to give up en masse. It’s perfectly fine for VR to remain a niche, adjacent medium.
Internet has nothing to do with this. You could be in a submarine at the bottom of the Mariana’s trench with a Frame, a good enough computer and a random (decent…) WiFi router plugged into power only, and it’ll work. Your local network is not part of the internet.
Performance was fine even on the Oculus Go. Streaming performance is about the computer and quality of your wireless access point, but supposing both are fine, it’ll also be fine. Been doing it since the Oculus Go.
I believe it has a USB dongle that creates a custom network between the headset and your computer and nothing else, so it isn’t dependant on your other networking hardware or speeds.
Most of my friends who have VR headsets have gotten enough satisfaction from it. The Steam Frame fixes the things about those older headsets such I will be getting one eventually.
Frankly, to be asking your question about internet speeds makes it obvious that you’ve done barely a cursory reading on what the Steam Frame is. Until you’ve fixed that I cannot take what you say seriously.
$1500 USD at least. Likely more.
They were targeting sub-$1000 before things got crazy. If it was going to be exactly $1000 and it sees the 40% jump the Steam Machine did, that would be $1400. I think storage and RAM are a lower percentage of the Frame’s cost which would theoretically push it down further, but then again, that may be countered by the market continuing to get worse. Still, I’ll be very surprised if they price it a ton higher than $1500.
$999
(Obviously not, I just want to put that out into the universe. 😭)
Something something let’s manifest our own reality! Seriously tho, please be this much
Come on, kids. Let’s all grab hands and say together: “I believe in affordable prices!”
$2000 :(
I’ll have to pass on it. Wish meta weren’t the main ones making VR headsets. I’ve wanted to play Half Life Alyx but entry cost has been meta or pay more, and I’ve opted for passing on VR.
Tomorrow.
Soon
$2,300 - $2,500
What a mess this whole thing has been. Shame.
A mess in what way?
How the prices have skyrocketed, the delays, the fact that when all this was announced it seemed like it would all new a slam dunk. Like after the OG steam controller failed they learned and the steam deck was amazing and they were taking what they learned and making three great pieces of hardware. Like nothing could stop the new releases from being awesome.
Then, AI wrecked havoc.
In the absolute lack of communication from valve way. Peek over on reddit and you’ll see
Edit: specifically the steam frame subreddit
I peeked. It didn’t seem that bad, just memes and shitposts.
I also don’t mind releases taking the “when it’s ready” approach. It’s kind of refreshing actually.
I think the point is that the people over there are doing things like scouring shipping logs and fcc reports because Valve has said it was ready and would be released then has been ghosting for months
Yeah, but that’s not abnormal stuff. Every anticipated hardware device has people digging into documents, patents, etc. for clues ahead of release, tracking milestones, etc.
Then again, I was an active participant in similar efforts for both the original Steam Deck and Valve Index releases, and I follow a few other tech spaces that see this continually even right now, so maybe my standards for “normal” are way off.
