Steam Frame

This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.

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.

I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.

Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.

I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception

I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.

They've cut some fairly shallow corners, like mono vs color cameras so I imagine getting it within a decent price range has been of high importance. I really doubt it'll be any thing close to $1k.

I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.

Only question is if 2160px is enough.

Not to mention this comes from a company that I respect and that has a proven record of trying to respect its users, unlike literally every other company making VR headsets. The fact that they are trying to making this an open device, and that the controllers have user-replaceable batteries is almost unheard of in any consumer device these days.

Word is they're aiming for less than the full Index kit (which was $1000), so good news there. I suspect it'll be fairly high up in that range though given the hardware.

See "cheaper than index": https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...

I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.

I bought the original Steam Index and pretty much never used it again cause its such a mess to have around. That plus the motion sickness. For applications where you're moving around in game though Id really want to try it again.

from your keyboard to GabeN's ears. I've spent a lot of dollars supporting my local startup; it was mostly wasted.

> The fact that this can run standalone

Just make sure to wait for reviews on this front - it almost certainly can't run AAA games at the native resolution + fps. Likely it'll only be able to run lower req games on device.

Thanks for the article link. Nice quote from the article:

> Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don't have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.

I was disappointed seeing no hand grip straps. I've never used a Valve Index but they seemed very useful. Very glad that they will still be available.