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Comment by jasonjmcghee | Hacker News Reader

Wow this looks great. Foveated streaming, great resolution, wireless, 144hz, looks much more comfortable... As much as I want this, I feel like it'll end up being a really cool thing that just sits on the shelf.

Edit: foveated streaming, not rendering

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It looks good until I reached one bit:

> Passthrough - Monochrome passthrough via outward facing cameras

This is an outright bone-headed move that I can't believe Valve is making. Only having monochrome cameras means augmented reality is basically a non-starter.

AR has a lot of potential. I literally bought a Meta Quest 3 just for PianoVision [0] when I already had a Valve Index. I would love to see some sort of AR-based game you could play outdoors. But with only monochrome vision, that's gonna be awful.

[0] https://youtu.be/apwZTV-Rg0s

The videos I've seen about the Frame all call out the front expansion port, which "Valve says ... offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals."[1]

That's plenty to support color passthrough as a physical addon, which in turn makes me think that, like with the OLED Deck, we'll see a Frame with built-in color-passthrough later as a different premium SKU when/if they justify it.

1: https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...

I expect that a premium headset is in the works, but they probably didn't want to complicate what is effectively a console launch with multiple SKUs. They'll probably offer a 'Frame Pro' with wider FOV and better cameras a year or two down the line, possibly at the same time as the Steam Deck refresh we all know is coming.

I'm led to believe there's only so much FOV you can get out of pancake lenses? This is already spoecced to be the best pancake FOV seen to this date.

It's conceivable they could opt for better fidelity over more FOV (this would certainly support the 'play 2d games on your headset' push), but I wouldn't put it past Valve to be experimenting with alternative lens designs.

AR is really cool but it seems like a better fit for premium VR headsets right now. At a given price and assuming other specs are fixed, monochrome cameras offer higher refresh rate. I'm hoping this will help the frame offer better tracking.

Sad fact is that nobody outside tiny niche-cases in engineering really gives a shit about XR. The current round of meta-branded glasses don't have features worth the price.

When it's light & small enough to be a pair of glasses and more than just the expensive but limited gimmick that the form is currently, then it'll be world-changing. It's close, but it's not there yet.

The thing is, Google Glass was announced in 2013, 13 years ago. Yes, hardware and software advancements have been huge in the meantime but the form factor is so restrictive that we're probably still 10 years away from the "iPhone moment" of XR/AR. Especially since hardware is in a weird place where all the cutting edge stuff is more or less made by a single company.

To be fair, I have zero interest in AR so I am glad I will not have to pay for it when buying the headset.

PianoVision sounds like a really bad way to learn the piano. There are already pianos/midi controller that have the abilities to light up the keys you are supposed to play if you really needed that. But that is a gimmick that you might use the first few sessions and then never again. Same with PianoVision.

Generally, is is so much better to start with music notation from day one. I regret starting with all the piano learning apps because they only have been holding me back.

some just want to play Here Comes the Sun and not learn proper technique to go above grade 8 esoteric stuff without feeling pain bc they are playing for hours a day

Has PianoVision been working for you to learn piano?

> AR has a lot of potential

Name one that has to do with with this box competing with xbox and playstation in people's living room.

I recommend preparing a drink or two and loading up VRchat and joining one of the rave club groups. Check out the metaverse zuck wishes he ran.

VRChat is one of the most socially dysfunctional online platforms I've ever used

I haven't ventured in myself but I love reading people's anecdotes if you got any handy.

I could see Steam creating the OASIS

Any idea if Gabe likes Rush?

I tried VRChat once or twice but never seemed to have found any fun places/groups to hang out that weren't obsessing about anime/manga most of the time. Anyone here on HN have better suggestions of worlds/groups or where to even look?

There are groups that are more focused on music (DnB, dubstep, other festival-friendly genres), focused on dancing, focused on drinking games, focused on world-hopping, etc. I'm into the underground rave vibe, so for that there's VRC Party Hub, which is a guy who runs a discord who befriends as many clubs as he can find in that scene, and imports their schedules/announcements channels into a nightly report of all known events.

https://x.com/VRChatPartyHub

My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control.

Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.

You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.

The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.

https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

> Does not support resolutions and colour spaces greater than 4k60 4:2:0 8-bit colour.

This is kind of annoying if you want 4k60 4:4:4 and 10-bit HDR.

If you want that you won't want this steam machine, HDMI 2.0 can do 4K60 HDR at 10-bit, but only with chroma subsampling (4:2:2 or 4:2:0) (not full 4:4:4).

Maybe they've cracked the code with the dongle? Usually, you either have to invest both time and money into setting up the perfect streaming network, deal with annoying cables or resign yourself to inferior on-device game versions. The ergonomics matter more than you'd think.

But if it's a very easy plug-n-play type deal to run SteamVR games (and on Linux!), that's a huge ergonomic improvement. Don't have to think too much about whether everything is running correctly or what-have-you.

If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.

Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.

Bought another AP to use on 6ghz band, still alone there, works perfectly for my oculus. If they can do it with a dongle that would make it much simpler for regular people.

I don't think there is foveated rendering. There is foveated encoding, when game streaming.

Looks like a very competent headset indeed though! Nice combo of fast streaming that can prioritize well with foveated encoding, and hopefully a pretty nice malleable capable standalone headset too.

The eye tracking data is supposedly being made available to other software on PC (and presumably the headset as well), so foveated rendering should be possible but is a software problem.

I did more research. It does indeed support foveated rendering. Developers do need to implement this for their game, but it supports it.

discussed here: https://youtu.be/b7q2CS8HDHU?t=1074

"For foveated rendering, [the developers] have that option, but it's not compulsory"

Yes - thank you, fixed

I lowkey hope it's good enough for coding. Really wanted to try out the xreal glasses, but multiple people said they aren't crisp enough for text.

I can't wait until the tech reaches this stage. Infinite desktop space, surrounded by text and terminals. It will be so hard to unplug.

EMACS. EMACS EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK.

There are already headsets with decent text fidelity, but IMO the problem is now on the host side. I tried to get an XR desktop env running (Stardust https://stardustxr.org/) on Linux but ran into graphical issues. The Windows ecosystem is much better though.

I use Xreal Air Pros for gaming and sometimes working if I'm mobile. Resolution isn't great, but I find them better than looking at a small-ish laptop screen or the Steam Deck screen. You can definitely read text on them, but maybe not small text. It also helps to have prescription inserts.

And now I'm curious if the Steam Frame allows inserts or fits well with glasses on.

resolution is in the 2000x2000 range so don't count on it.

2160 per eye- so a bit more than that in width… I’m thinking if you do 2x pixel density it could look pretty clean. But that’s not a whole lot of real estate… that being said, i remember when 1280x1024 was incredible and that’s the same ballpark as what you’d get.

This is not directly comparable with display resolution since actually you are looking for PPI per degree of vision to judge on clarity.

That's 2160 pixels over ~110 degrees field of view. How many degrees of your view does your monitor cover? The density comes out very different.

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