i was gonna get a quest 3 for christmas but then the steam frame got announced and i was like HELL NAH and thew my quest 3 ideas out of the window. if everything falls into place il have my steam frame just intime for my birthday :D
gone will the days where i will be kicked from vrc lobbies for being a “Questie”. gone will be the days of my game crashing mid snuggle session, gone the days of having a lowkey mid game selection (apart from like metro awakening as if i was gonna get the quest 3 i would have 100% gotten that game)
cant wait to get ittttt (also i cant wait to play half life alyx on it)
ELI haven’t been following VR at all (because i haven’t). Why is Quest trash, specifically? It sounds like Frame is little more than a VR display for the Steam Box/gaming PC. Am I grossly misunderstanding the situation?
The frame is a gaming computer in its own right but can also be used as a display. There’s nothing wrong with the Quest from a technological standpoint. It’s just that you’re forced into the closed Meta ecosystem in order to use it. Many people don’t want to be there these days. Steam hardware tends to be open and moddable. Let’s hope they keep that up with the upcoming products.
The only thing I open in the Quest Home is Virtual Desktop, which then opens any PC game through Open XR or Steam VR fine. That said, I’ll probably get a frame as soon as they’re available in Aus. as well as the new controller.
Can you install software directly to the device without a Facebook account? Can you update the device firmware without a Facebook account? If you buy a new one right now, can you play games on it without a Facebook account? Can it serve as a display for your PC without a Facebook account? Can you modify or alter the games and software installed on the system with third-party tools? If you get account/IP banned from Facebook for not providing/verifying your real identity when making the account, does your headset become a paperweight?
That’s what the “meta ecosystem” means. If you can’t operate the device without signing into a Meta account in good standing, the ecosystem is locked down. A corporation can break your toy whenever they want to. The Quest’s price to specs ratio is fantastic specifically because Facebook knows they basically have to undercut their competitors to that level to sell people Facebook accounts and make those people use their own software store, even if one or two Enlightened Individuals can manage to only make a Facebook account and use their store to download the PC connect stuff.
I personally consider the Quest at $500 to be an $800 headset that pays me $300 to make a Facebook account and that deal isn’t good enough for me.
What on Earth are you talking about?
I’ve completely deleted my Facebook account and can still use it just fine. They removed that requirement fairly quickly after introducing it after the massive backlash. I have an oculus account, and I don’t give them any money in it. I bought Virtual Desktop on the Sidequest store and haven’t spent a cent since. The only vr games I play are in Steam, and they’re pretty much all racing simulators.
“I have an oculus account”
Same thing. Facebook = meta = oculus. The ability to even have something called an oculus account is purely grandfathered in, lucky you for getting one in the good ol days and only giving facebook money once to use your headset as a pc display, but nobody else can do that ever again. It’s a “meta account” now.
“We don’t require a facebook account, we require a meta account”
“We don’t eat dairy, we eat cheese”
All that makes sense. I didn’t realize the Frame could run games on its own. Any idea how powerful it will be? Equivalent to a steamdeck? Is the Quest similarly capable?
It’s hard to benchmark because it’s running on a weird system architecture that no one’s ever really seen before.
On paper it should be at least as good as the quest, possibly a little bit more powerful. But there’s an awful lot of optimisation opportunities possible on ARM, but we don’t know if they will be initially realised. Of course you can also run it in display mode in which case it’s as powerful as the PC it’s paired with. At which point only really care about is the screen, comparable to the quest, the lenses which aren’t good as the quests, and the tracking which is probably quite a lot better than the quest. Also when it is paired to a computer it’s done so via 6G wireless rather than a cable, so that’s quite a lot more convenient.
The steam frame also has an expansion port, which is a new concept for VR headsets so we’ll see what ends up happening with that.
Unknown.
It’ll be running some kind of ARM soc. Hades has been demoed running flawlessly on it. No VR titles yet, but there is no reason they couldn’t work, too.
Meta does all kinds of creepy shit, like using the cameras to compile a list of items in your home. I’d rather not do VR at all than use Meta, no matter how good it is.
The main (and big) reason to not touch Quest is Facebook. It’s Facebook hardware running Facebook software and everything you do is tied to a Facebook account. VR is a novelty, I don’t think it’s a novelty worth using Facebook or buying a $900+ piece of hardware for (and most non Quests have their own restrictions).
Plus as far as I know, Quest doesn’t work very well as a PCVR headset. So instead of my $2000 gaming PC, I’d be playing these ultra high resolution high refresh rate games on what’s functionally a phone. Frame is designed as PCVR-first.
The top end Quest 3 has an msrp of $500. They can often be found with a discount or used for less. I paid $300 for mine. That’s a pretty difficult price point to beat.
It actually works very well as a PCVR headset. What you need to understand is that it does not work as a dedicated display like traditional headsets do. You have to run a program on your PC that streams the display data to the headset over either a USB or wifi connection. An app on the headset receives and decodes the stream. There are some tradeoffs involved in doing it that way but it works surprisingly well for many use cases. I use mine over wifi with the third party streaming app Virtual Desktop. It’s shockingly smooth and the display quality is very good.
The next thing you should understand is that the Steam Frame is designed to work in exactly the same way for PCVR. That said, I am hopeful it will be more optimized and a smoother ux than a quest due to Valve’s priority on PC gaming. The fact that they include a dedicated 6ghz wifi dongle should give it a significant advantage in both stability and bandwidth. But I expect it will cost more. Probably a lot more. For my part I will have to decide if the benefits outweigh the price difference.
Yes, but that’s Facebook. What i said was “either deal with Facebook or pay $900+”. Neither option is worth it to me for the novelty that VR provides. A Quest 3 at $500 or $300 with a completely open source operating system would already be on my shelf, but it’s Facebookware.
VR also isn’t worth “tradeoffs” like installing a proprietary streaming tool to kludge the Facebook thing into pretending to be a “standard VR” display. What Valve’s offering is something I can completely trust to:
A: not require any hoops to jump through to use with VR-capable software on my computer
B: work with any of that VR-capable PC software instead of requiring one locked down storefront (and the storefront it’ll be most compatible with is Steam)
C: work with any Android APK software on device, for the lower intensity VR toys like Beat Saber
D: be compatible with a variety of controllers and peripherals
E: not be connected to Facebook in any way
F: maintain an open source OS so that a community can fully maintain the software even if the original manufacturer abandons support for the device
For those promises, I’d buy in at up to ~$700. No other headset on the market currently fulfills this list for less than $1000.
I fucking hate mine but I can’t stop playing beat saber. I only play the pc version with wivrn over wifi. It keeps forcing me into the little virtual scene thing when I would only ever want passthrough, some updates make tracking worse and beatsaber unplayable, controllers are super slippy and easy to drom/throw, management phone app spams you with ads/‘reccomendations’, never remembers my window setup and always forces me on to the store or socials by default and I have no friends that would use any fb/meta gaming socials, default face gasket is awful and I tried an alt strap and lost the original when the most comfortable setup I’ve since tried on someone else’s headset was alt gasket and default strap. Probably other stuff I’ve forgotten.