The Apple Vision Pro is an expensive flop. I haven’t heard anyone mention the Meta Quest in months, despite it getting a new model just last year. I can’t even remember the name of Samsung’s incoming Android-based headset. While virtual reality gamers remain passionate, the excitement around the format seems to be slowly dying… again.
And then along came Zeus Valve. Easily the least mainstream of its three — THREE! — hardware announcements yesterday, the Steam Frame is everything I was hoping for. It’s a standalone, self-powered headset with its own software and apps, a la the Quest. With an internal battery, it’s ready to go on the road or just roam around your home without being tethered.
But it can also connect to a gaming PC or a Steam Deck or a Steam Machine (what’s the difference?) to access more powerful virtual reality games and non-VR media. And Valve is setting this up as a central feature, with a low-latency wireless dongle included in the box.
It’s packing the latest VR tech such as eye tracking, pancake lenses, and expansion options for MicroSD and USB-C. It’ll be running on a powerful Snapdragon ARM64 processor, and the software is at least some flavor of SteamOS, giving it immediate access to a huge amount of both VR and standard games.
Well they’re saying you’ll be able to install Android APK files on the Frame, which pretty much confirms this is exactly what they’re going for. Meta headsets run Android and the games are APKs.
How does this work, can Arch run APK files?
I mean Waydroid is a thing you can install Android apps with. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid
But that’s basically a full VM that can do some tricks to make it look like a window. I imagine Valve must have some other translation layer.
No waydroid is exactly what they are using.
Really? That’s kinda neat. Probably pretty customized image to handle the VR stuff.
Is this not similar to BlueStacks on Windows?
Yes basically. It’s just more open source.
Well, there’s more technical differences too. Waydroid should be lighter because it’s not a full VM like BlueStacks. It uses your already running Kernel. (Because Android is also Linux based)
Sure, you could try it right now with Waydroid.
Will have to see more details. They may mean ability to run common Android applications on a virtual 2d surface. Apk is too vague, since my phone certainly is apk based but cannot run any quest applications.
Running something like waydroid is one thing, implementing all the quest apis may be a whole other thing.
Actually there’s already a project that gets (some) Quest exclusives working on other Android based VR sets like those made by Pico, so it’s further along than I thought.
https://github.com/ovrport/app
Oh yes, I know, but we cannot expect everyone to side-load APKs. My point was that nowadays Meta’s catalog way surpass Steam VR’s and that Valve should entice developers that published on Meta’s marketplace to publish on Steam.
No I’m saying that I’m pretty sure side-loading is just a side effect of them making it compatible exactly so that it’s very easy for devs to port Quest games.
Oh sure! But wouldn’t that mean that some VR games sold on Steam would only run on the Frame? That seems so not like Valve.
Would it? Maybe just because of the walled garden approach if other hardware developers, and that would be their own fault and not Valve’s. If they had some sort of proprietary format that only worked on Valve hardware, maybe. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s being discussed.