> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.

It's an ARM Linux PC that presumably gives you root access, in addition to being a VR headset. And it has an SD card slot for storage expansion. Very cool, should be very hackable. Very unlike every other standalone VR headset.

> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye) 72-144Hz refresh rate

Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. I'd love to see a high-end option with higher resolution displays in the future, good enough for monitor replacement.

> Monochrome passthrough

So AR is not a focus here, which makes sense. However:

> User accessible front expansion port w/ Dual high speed camera interface (8 lanes @ 2.5Gbps MIPI) / PCIe Gen 4 interface (1-lane)

Full color AR could be done as an optional expansion pack. And I can imagine people might come up with other fun things to put in there. Mouth tracking?

One thing I don't see here is optional tracking pucks for tracking objects or full body tracking. That's something the SteamVR Lighthouse tracking ecosystem had, and the Pico standalone headset also has it.

More detail from the LTT video: Apparently it can run Android APKs too? Quest compatibility layer maybe? There's an optional accessory kit that adds a top strap (I'm surprised it isn't standard) and palm straps that enable using the controllers in the style of the Valve Index's "knuckles" controllers.

Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller

No prices listed for any of them yet, as far as I can tell.

The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.

I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.

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.

I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.

Right now getting fast enough and reliable wireless connection means either tweaking to death one's setup or spending car money on the entire setup. In particular normal people usually don't realize how crappy their wi-fi and assume it's all the same, which would end in blaming the poor perf on the headset.

A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".

And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:

- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now

- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution

- pancake lenses

- inside-out tracking

In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.

Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.

[0] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX

[1] https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator

Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.

Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.

I hope this means the GPU and drivers is advanced enough to run fully featured modern video games.

Windows for ARM was kinda sunk by the fact that the GPU wasn't compatible enough due to the crappy drivers and outdated GPU uArch optimized for mobile games.

I'm still kinda on the fence about VR, but I hope ARM + Linux succeeds in a big way and this'll make a truly handheld Steam Deck possible.

I'm super excited for this launch and for all the crazy open source builds, mods, and fun that are going to come from an open VR system (or at least that's my hope).

I assume they will have put a lot of work into an emulation layer (maybe an existing one like FEX) to make it usable similar to what they did with Proton? This could be really good for the Linux ARM ecosystem in general

I love my steam deck, but lately find myself reaching for emulation handhelds like the Retroid Pocket 5 more due to smaller size, especially when I'm leaving the house. There's already projects like GameNative that try to hack steam onto these devices, but if valve offers an official client on Android and other arm devices that would be incredible.

Edit: Some interesting insights in the FEX FAQ about why it's not a great fit for Android right now [0]. Interested to see if this ARM version of steamos is installable on other devices though. RP5 can already run alternatives like Rocknix

[0] https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ

Also, if this is arm and it has steam in it, that means we can finally run steam on arm, which means we can finally install steam "natively" on android Linux, specially now that we have the terminal app on android 16.

Can't wait for graphical acceleration to be fully merged to the terminal app and we have Linux running on android with near native performance and steam.

Yes, I want to see standard batteries being used more. Too bad they didn't go with this on the Steam Controller.

Watching various interviews, clearly it can be on another monitor.

Which, I can't help but wonder. If this ran on the Frame... To aid in streaming from your desktop... In conjunction with Foveated Streaming...

What's even more bonkers to me is the idea that this could really be baked in to the streaming, if you think about it.

Server generates 100 beautiful frames in one second.

The streaming hardware reminds the server that with the current network conditions, that it can only handle X bits per second.

The Frame says, "Hey, here's where the eyes were looking, here's where they are looking, here's where they're projected to look."

The Server knows how many actual frames it can send in a second.

But the Server can run the same Lossless Scaling & Lossless Frame Generation that the client will run.

The Server can then compare the predicted frames against the actual frames, and it can send the delta needed to correct the predictions. Especially in areas close to where the eyes are looking.

The Client consumes the stream, predicts frames, applies the delta, and ends up with better framerate and quality...

Can you do this all low latency, too? I suspect so.

Add it all up, and this is pretty bonkers. I mean, it's kind of obvious that that's how streaming "should work," but I think I hadn't really put it all together yet in my mind. My mental model was too "off the shelf." It didn't include how much effort the client could do... And that the server could then also do, to help the client... It's really a beautiful pairing, when you think about it.

What's really bonkers is that Steam could learn what final images are supposed to look like, for a given game, and train AI specifically for that game. Update the server and the client, and bam, everyone gets better quality. With zero developer interaction.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_Hqngky0s

Here's hoping it will be like the Deck and we get Frame OLED in a year or so.

https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/

will help the hardware last longer. cz non-removable lithium batteries suck.

I read the specs and got excited, until I read about the resolution. 2160x2160 is what I have now with the Pico 4, and while it's ok for entertainment, and acceptable for browsing and reading, it's far too low for professional work.

Linux would have been great, but I can't justify spending money on a headset with exactly the same low resolution as my current one.

Also, I've become used to color passthrough, and going back to monochrome would feel like a big regression.

I'm very curious about the latency if that's the case. This might be the trigger for me to get into VR finally, but I'm worried that if there's noticeable lag in the stream that I'll basically cover myself in vomit from motion sickness lol

Which makes me wonder if they'll make a new Steam Deck that has the IR emitters in it, so the Frame could track the Deck?

I wonder if the two working together could work well?

I also never got used to the feeling of being completely detached from my own world. I know that's the point of VR, for it to be completely immersive but it felt very jarring not knowing what was going on around me.

I would have thought they give you a wired connection for that. you know, like the quest. but with the option to do it wireless.

My question would be: given that the wireless solution in the quest apparently is a peer-to-peer pairing of the headset and the pc through the local networks wireless router, just much of a difference will this dedicated 6GHz dongle make?

Would I be kidding myself if I assumed using this dongle would give me the analog experience of when I am using a dedicated dongle to connect my xboy controller to my pc? I mean, I plug it in, the dongle automagically comes pre-paired with the headset, I start steam on pc, hit play on a VR title and I get to play right away? Because that is my current experience with my controller that is connected via a dedicated wireless dongle. I hated the bluetooth connection. But using this dongle is really making a difference here.

So, I wonder just how "painless" this will all be with the new headset. I held out on buying a quest because the wireless connection through my router would not be possible simply because I cant change my router at the moment and while it is fine for everything i use it for, it would not be enough to stream the quest data. Therefore I would have always wanted a "wired" connection, simply because my router wouldnt be able to do it.

Therefore I was a bit miffed when I learned that this new headset would not come with a wired option. But if this dongle can do everything a wired connection can do without having to go through my router then this would be absolutely game changing for me.

> Large FOV (up to 110 degrees)

Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.

> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.

Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.

Guess I won’t find out what this is about any time soon…

if latency is low enough, then you could get a super high fidelity experience on a thin client VR display with low cost rendering server side.

Nvidia GeForce Now is already very impressive for streaming games at full field of view 4k.

thin client VR gives you longer battery life, lighter devices, lower entry cost. and with a cloud gaming service rendering the game, an even lower barrier to entry

Also, can I hack the OS? Specifically interested in direct VR rendering (other headsets don't allow to bypass compositor).

Always glad to see this.

I guess we get screwed over again :-(

There's a devkit... I'm disappointed, that's the Sony method? I actually tried to do dev for the Meta Quest 2 the other week and was disappointed there because it's my son's, and he can't sign up for a Meta dev account (age), so there's no way for me to do anything with it without factory resetting the thing. This is more disappointing though. Why can't I dev games for the consumer headset?

Can we use one Steam Machine to drive, say, 4 to 16 Steam Frames.

Multiplayer gameplay, like Goldeneye. With the convenience that all of the state is in memory in one process, so there's no networking layer in the gameplay logic itself.

And you can't peak at the other players' screens.

I wonder what their solution to that is. Virtual environments?

Considering the quest 3 came out 2 entire years ago this feels too close in terms of hardware instead of feeling like a next generation headset.

Responses do seem fairly positive though. I wonder if this had been released as the quest 4 though would you all be reacting as positively?

GABEN

GABEN DON'T LEAVE ME HANGING WHAT IS THE PRICEEEEEEEE

Is it not a concern to strap such a powerful defive that receives super strong signals right onto the head for hours??

That said, there is hope, because if there is a wireless version and it takes off, it can't be hard to make a wired version.