Let's see if it valve want my money this time around.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Locking in when I get home. Assuming it costs less then a full G that is...
When they said cheaper than index, I assumed 750 or so. Now I've given up on getting one, as I guess It'll be somewhere between index and 1 500.
Well i wanted to buy it but its porbably gonna be insanely expensive and im saving up for a car so maybe next year...
drmanhattanonmars.png
it's 1995, I can't afford a virtual boy, but the tech is just around the corner
it's 2012, I can't afford the Oculus Rift, but the tech is just around the corner
it's 2026, I can't afford the Frame, but the tech is just around the corner.
I mean the tech is here unless you're looking for full holosuite.
Not OP, but I'm going to have to wait until we get depth of field going in a headset, which is still a ways out. There are some desktop units for commercial sale to optimists, but that's it. With the current VR headsets, having the focal distance never change just doesn't work well for me.
If you want depth of field then that's doable with eye tracking with foveated rendering which in addition tracks your eyes' focal point with active global lens adjustment
Because the only practical alternative is light field displays, which are NOT trivial. We're talking stacks of prism arrays and stacks of transparent displays or multi-laser projection + stacks of waveguides, etc
Yeah, I was referencing light field displays. I think we'll eventually see an attempt at a commercial VR unit with light field displays, but I think it's about a decade away before the first one goes on sale. They also have the added difficultly of needing even more renders from the GPU.
The lense adjustment would still mean that objects at different distances would still all be at the same focal plane, but that the focal plane would change depending on what you're looking at. I bet it's probably good enough for most people, but I've never heard of it before so I'll look into it.
If you want reference for the current state of the art in image quality, the Apple Vision Pro "eye window" display is a light field display.
So to do better you need to outspend Apple, by a lot
No it is not a light field display.
How many places can you find which describes light field displays as something different than the 2D array Apple made with that lenticular design to create unique images for every viewing angle?
If Apple had a better light field display tech available at reasonable cost they would've used it
Wait... What? The focal distance is the difference in image between the two lensesscreens just like irl via the mkI eyeball...
You're thinking of parallax, focal distance is about adjusting the curvature of a lens (or your eye) so that objects at that distance appear sharp
Quest is good and cheap. You can Sideload apps, run Steam VR and never touch a Meta app.
Doing this actually hurts Meta because it's assumed Meta underprices the hardware and makes up the difference in software like other consoles. It's win-win.
But you have to touch and be reliant on a meta os.
Yeah, but depending on where you live you can get some dirt cheap kit on the used market. Depending on who you know you probably could even get a headset gifted. I for sure tried to just give away my Rift S to friends.
Sure, its not the newest shiny thing. But is your PC even powerful enough for these?
I constantly see people in VR communities which are happy because they sniped a headset for 40 - 100 bucks. Which today is like premium controller money or depending on the game not even the price of a premium edition.
Best part is if you invest now for the first time you have tons of games of the last 10 years to play. VR still has a content issue. But not if you get that kind of backlog at once. Well, minus a few great games which were lost in time.
With recent news that Qualcomm are raising their chip prices, I wonder if the Steam Frame prices are affected and by how much.
I’m more excited about what the Frame means for Steam on ARM Linux. In a year or two, third-party ARM handhelds may be amazing — provided the DRAM cartel gets sorted out, one way or another.
(If you haven’t checked out Armada, it gives a glimpse of what the future might hold.)
Definitely looking forward to this. My Index has been great, but I really want wireless.
and here I passed on wireless for my vive cause it would have been another $400+ and installing a card on top of the $699 kit price. Index doesn't have a wireless option?
There's some third party options, but they're not very reliable and usually come with sacrifices.
Damn, Vive and Valve worked together on this, surprised Valve didn't include a paid wireless option like Vive did. I couldn't justify that expense when I first purchased the Vive, and by the time I could I was used to dodging the wire without seeing it
Wireless streaming has always just seemed so obvious to me. I've been advocating for it for years. Of course Valve is the first one to make it.
Oculus definitely beat them to the punch, but I'd definitely say Valve will have the best implementation.
When did they do that?
I mean, I can do the Oculus Air Link from my quest 3, definitely a thing on the quest 2, and after a quick search, was released in April 2021.
I currently mostly use the steam link app on quest. Especially as it has cabled support as well now(in beta).
I've been doing virtual desktop with my quest 1 for steamVR since the pandemic, so around or before 2020
If it's less than the Machine, maybe there's a chance I'll get it but... I'm gonna bet on US$1,500.
The original planned price was below the valve index ($1000), so the real question is by what percentage markup is applied from the chips inside vs. the steam machine.
vr seems to be doomed to forever be a niche, so this may very well be one of the final "mainstream" hardware releases.
It'll come back. People have been enamored with this concept since at least the 1980s.
Facebook killed it I think. They came in swinging the money dick right when the tech started getting interesting and immediately VR became about "being part of a software ecosystem".
I bought a Vive early on, but my reason for never using it was that it was a pain to set up. A lot of fun, though. Hopefully this set is more convenient in general.
It's a niche alright, but judging from VRchat and the modding communities around getting VR working in more and more games, it's a niche people are willing to spend money on.
Some things are also best experienced in VR (such as Half Life Alyx)
half-life 3 confirmed.
Cant wait for this to be scalped
I signed up for a Steam Controller and then got mysteriously removed, despite having a confirmation email, from the wait list. Resigned up. Still no controller.
I look forward to using my Steam Frame in 2030 😅 maybe the bubble has popped by then.
Crossing fingers that it's priced high enough to keep scalpers the fuck away.
At this point there's really no price point too high for scalpers as there'll always be a sap who'll pay more.
Lol