Steam Frame

Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one.

In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, and I don’t think it ever will be, no matter how good the graphics get. That’s assuming they even solve the motion sickness problem, which doesn’t seem solvable to me at this point.

The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings. You can’t meaningfully move around or swing your arms fast in any realistic home environment when you’re in full VR. You’re constantly at risk of punching something or breaking something, or both. So the controls have to become really stiff and avoid requiring wide movement, at which point you might as well just push buttons on a gamepad.

But AR is a completely different thing. No motion sickness, no risk in any movement, you can move around without silly threadmills, and no exclusion from the world. It’s truly amazing. The AR boxing, pickleball, ping pong and golf are so much closer to real thing then to a videogame adaptation, even the shitty Quest graphics don't ruin the magic. Those AR experiences don't work on videogame rules and really deserve their own name and category - they're as different from gaming as books are from movies. If VR headsets don’t die out, AR is going to be the thing that brings them to the mainstream. I just wish it had more attention, more apps, and more non-Meta mainstream platforms. Not this time, sadly.

Valve is focused on making a device that works well with their existing game catalog. It's a Steam device first, and it needs to be inexpensive to compete with Quest (which is subsidized by Meta), so they need to prioritize which features get included. I wouldn't be surprised to see a first party AR camera attachment a while after launch. The expansion port seems specifically designed for this, with the inclusion of MIPI CSI lanes for two cameras.

I wonder if this will be a VR trojan horse.

The Steam Deck was wildly popular for a non-Nintendo device. It's got Linux up to 3% of total Steam playtime. If this has a similar draw (play every game on Steam without having to buy a TV), maybe the install base of VR will grow to a point where it's more feasible to make games that support it.

It also makes SteamVR relevant again in a world where Oculus has been eating a lot of the mindshare by releasing affordable headsets and buying the most successful game studios.