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)
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.