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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high.

Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware

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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.

Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for).

Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.

VR on linux has really turned a corner in the past 3 years. Last I played in vr with linux it was perfectly acceptable.

Yeah, I used my Index on my Gentoo Linux machine like six months ago and it worked fine. FWIW, I'm using an AMD video card. Perhaps it doesn't work at all on Nvidia hardware, but -absent sabotage from Nvidia- there's no reason why the type of video card should matter at all... the thing's a wide-ass screen with some sensors attached that the graphics card has absolutely nothing to do with.

I love the Steam Deck because it is almost entirely a consumer electronics experience. I mean, maybe for 10% of the games I have to edit an .INI file to have a perfect experience, but for the most part I can pick it up and play and not fight with configuration files and shell scripts the way I do at work and with my hobbies. I've seen Windows-based devices that compete with it at Best Buy and I'm kinda shocked that, for a demo, they drop you on an ordinary Windows desktop with visual scaling appropriate for a 20x bigger screen and it is not obvious how to play a game -- such a fail!

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.

In general the steam deck is what made me comfortable switching to pc for gaming. I'm a couch and controller person and the old steam big picture mode was horrible. Then steam deck came around, and valve knocked the new bpm out of the park.

That made me get into playing games on linux on a desktop pc. Even when I have to run windows, I use the xbox game mode to launch steam bpm without opening windows explorer. It's a surprisingly great experience and the idea is ripped straight out of steam os.

Just echo'ing the other comment.

I'm on arch, and with nearly no tinkering my index just works.

Only low level knowledge I think would be useful is the different VR runtimes. SteamVR vs Monado

Can you elaborate on what your setup is? I have tinkered plenty and there are multiple issues I'm still dealing with on my Arch machine, despite being on a setup that Valve claims is supported (KDE Wayland, Nvidia), namely:

- SteamVR won't see my Index unless I power cycle it

- The in-overlay desktop view does not work at all, either shows all black or doesn't render at all, so I can't control my desktop from VR which is a massive pain

- The SteamVR Home environment (the startup app) crashes immediately even if launched manually

Not the same person, but in case it helps, monitor dbus for denied flatpak permissions and use flatseal to grant them? (Could try allowing everything in flatseal just to rule it out)

I don't use arch btw, but on fedora i have often found setroubleshoot useful for non-flatpak apps

I'm sorry you're missing out on Alyx - it's not the greatest game ever made, but it's up there.

Fortunately I've already played through Alyx a few years back (and it really is an amazing experience). These are issues I'm having since moving my rig away from Windows a few months ago. Even then, games are still playable on this setup, but the points above add a lot of friction that I'd really like to get rid of.

I'm using Arch-packaged Steam, so it's not running in flatpak. I suspect both the headset not detected and desktop view being unavailable issues are Wayland-related, but the Steam Frame itself is running Arch+KDE, and KDE is dropping X11 very soon, so I'm confused that this setup is not functional even in the latest version of SteamVR - it should be what the Frame is running, modulo the CPU architecture.

Even the Frame doesn't support Linux properly. You cannot do streaming from a Linux machine, it must be a Windows machine. (yet).

I'm sick of pretending Valve cares about Linux. Their own games have major issues with Linux.

Every CS2 update breaks something, last time it was the inventory screens which were completely broken for like 2 weeks.

Left 4 Dead 2 has major frame pacing and stutter issues on the Native Build & Proton doesn't let you play multiplayer.

Counter Strike Dev Tools only runs on Windows.

You can't stream from a Linux box to the Frame? Where did you hear that? Given that you can stream between Linux boxes using Steam, I find that surprising.

Linus said it on the leaked TechQuickie video from a 2 days ago.

I think it's a little dishonest to say they don't care. They made proton, they put out patches for their games on Linux fairly frequently.. in comparison to 80% of companies they go above and beyond.

I think this is just a symptom of Valve neglecting their (old and new) games as a whole.

> Left 4 Dead 2 has major frame pacing and stutter issues on the Native Build

Is this a common problem? I've never had it :P

It's a compelling product niche, for sure - but still, awfully niche. I'm sure there's folks out there who will bite on the chance to have a top-line VR headset with Linux, but at the price point... gotta be a fairly small market segment.

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.

VR Chat often has 70k+ concurrent players across the world.

It is a niche, definitely, but one that spends a lot of money and time on their virtual third space.

I was careful in my wording - the benefit is the freedom. Many people will appreciate that, simply by being able to install what you want. That goes well beyond the benefits to Linux users, but as a Linux user I really appreciate it.

I still use a Rift-S, it still lets me run whatever I want.

I'm ready to pay it to not be forced into using Facebook's terrible desktop software that they frequently break the PC Link functionality of. The way it's Windows-only also sucks; it's one of the few things that's prevented me from switching my gaming PC to Linux.

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.

Same here. I would gladly pay extra just to not be tied to Facebook.

The inability of Meta to write a simple working drivers to connect a USB cable from the Quest to my PC is probably the greatest opportunity for Valve here.

For some reason this never works on the Quest Pro I have (which I received for free from Meta). Works every time on the Pico 4 Ultra

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/

Is there an example of foveated rendering implementation?

No Man's Sky is doing it now. It's also useful for foveated streaming which works for all games.

https://www.nomanssky.com/cosmos-update/#:~:text=Added%20sup...

Curious if there's any info about how much Foveated rendering helps performance roughly. Is it like 50% more frames?

It'll be highly dependent on the game. Unlike foveated streaming the implementation of foveated rendering could mean many things. Actually rendering at a lower resolution in areas you aren't actively looking is probably the most complicated approach because it seems like you'd have to render two times (low res + high res) to get the desired effect.

The framebuffer that you are filling out is still at native resolution, but while computing that frame buffer you can do many of the steps at reduced resolution. For example, instead of evaluating the pixel shader code for every pixel, it could evaluate once for a block of four pixels in the reduced resolution region and use the result for all four.

> Actually rendering at a lower resolution in areas you aren't actively looking is probably the most complicated approach because it seems like you'd have to render two times (low res + high res) to get the desired effect

In the newer implementations, you can split the display into tiles, and render each tile at a different resolution, so it's not that bad. A bunch of the intermediate rendering targets are already rendered at reduced resolution, so you won't see a full 4x speed up in the low-res regions, but you should be able to achieve a ~30% overall speed up with modern foveated rendering.

That's really cool to know, thanks for sharing!

Quest Pro has eye tracking, and Red Matter 2 used it.

Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.

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.

> Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.

I'm on your side, but this kind of hyperbole weakens your argument. Tell me about the spyware in pytorch, react, zstd, or llama3.2:1b and how you shouldn't touch this except within a VM.

Took me a very small amount of time to figure out pytorch was a one man effort that actually was discouraged by Facebook initially, and the dev no longer works there

A charitable reading would be that gp is talking about products from Facebook where they have the technological ability to abuse you in whatever way they want, and not open source projects that they happen to have had some involvement in but which are fully auditable and known not to contain spyware.

Not having to faff about with Meta's developer program or whatever to side load my own homebrew stuff, and then get locked out, then have to do whatever hoop jumping six months later, is a huge bonus. I have an OG Quest 1 and the damn thing needs a new copy of meta quest ...whatever, installed every 2 weeks if I want to use it. It's exhausting.

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.

Just don't connect it to the internet.

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.

There's an incredibly simple product case I think HN is missing: I bought a Vive and then an Index. This has higher resolution than the Index, lower mass (even with a battery!), and easier setup that can enable more spontaneous use. In addition, I now get the benefits of "standalone" headsets that I previously did not think were worth hundreds of dollars on their own.

Am I paying $1000 for a minor improvement? Yes. It's a hobby. It costs money sometimes. I don't do this for nearly anything else, like phones that other people seem fine for paying $1000 every other year. I expect this device to last until another 6 years when I can justify spending another $1000 on another iterative improvement. Similarly, I may spend $1000 on a new setup for simracing soon.

Spending $6k on a gaming PC, a VR headset, and wheels and pedals is an experience you otherwise cannot get. I would spend money on VR even if it only worked with one or two driving games and nothing else. For those of us in that niche, VR has been anything but a "Failure", that business people seem convinced it is because it couldn't be the next "Platform" to put an app store on.

But, that's the market for VR. It's a niche toy for people with expendable income. It's not a mass market to rival the smartphone.

I have barely even considered VR until the Steam Frame.

I'm just not interested in closed ecosystems like Oculus.

That said, I have barely looked at VR so much that I'm not sure whether to bother with the Steam Frame.

Is it just for gaming/movies?

Right, in terms of hardware and price, I've always been tempted by the Meta Quest, but the ecosystem and the fact that it's locked down has always been the major blocker for me. It does suck that this more than twice as much (although some of it is obviously the current surge pricing), but for hardware that I own, it's well worth it.

There is much more - people use it to communicate (VRchat), visit 3D scans of real places (3D Gaussian splatting) or see future concepts, like space colonies or massive starship concepts from their won PoV. Really, a lot of stuff is happening & possible with modern VR. :)

Visiting 3D virtual places sounds cool.

What communities do this? Can I do this on my laptop too to trial it?

I am sure more communities do it, but I mostly know it from VRChat. For some examples I have visited:

Scan of a park in Japan with a steam locomotive on static display: https://vrclist.com/world/1191265

Scan of a park in Japan with blooming Sakura trees: https://vrclist.com/world/1216699

In general, you can see other 3D Gaussian splatting worlds using this tag: https://vrclist.com/?type=search&sort=recent&tags=3DGS

The quality can varies a lot, so I suggest checking for number of favorites & visits to see the best scanned worlds or to go by author once you find the good ones. :)

In general, 3D gaussian splatting is not the only way you can use to reproduce a real world location in VR - you can also just do it manually, modeling the structure & possibly using textures from photos. A good example of such manual reconstruction is Gion Street from Fins: https://vrclist.com/world/859459

As for trying it out - all of the VRchat worlds can be explored in flat screen mode on a PC & VRChat can be installed from Steam or from their website. VRChat is also free, so the only thing needed is to register & it is possible to just use a Steam account as well.

Then just get one of the URLs & there is a launch URL. Alternatively you can search the worlds by name from the VRChat UI. :)

Thanks, that's really handy to see.

Looks cool!

No, but take other applications with a grain of salt. Everybody gets excited about the idea of having a dozen large virtual monitors floating around your desk, but even really great resolution has just not been good enough to make those displays look crisp. Also, a lot of folks still get pretty bad headaches when they use VR or AR. So MOSTLY it's for games and movies, but people remain convinced that there's a big killer app here somewhere that we just need to figure out.

It’s hard to find a killer app when the whole ecosystem is locked down by a massive advertising company.

That's not the whole ecosystem though. Past efforts from Valve & partners did not produce any killer app either.

The price is basically the same as the Index was at launch 7 years ago. With the devaluing of the currency, the increase in specs and capabilities, and the current component suppy crisis, it is a deal. Adjusted for inflation the Index would cost $1300 today, which now gets you a Frame with 1TB of internal storage.

I feel much the same. I don't think I'll be moving on from my Quest 3 until the hardware kicks the bucket.

Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.

It's so weird to me that people would even consider buying a device from Facebook of all companies.

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

lol.. offended some zuckers

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