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.
I don’t disagree with that part of the observation :) I also think it’s going to be too expensive for the average gamer :( The HTC Vive cost $800 and was released close to the GTX 1080 which cost $600. If high end VR headsets follow a similar price development as high end GPUs, it would cost just above $1.3k based on the RTX 5080’s release price of $1k. Anything less that this and it has become relatively cheaper, even though it would still be too expensive for most people. On the other hand, I was surprised by how little the Steam Deck cost, I thought it was also going to cost more than it did.
@fhein@lemmy.world @Prunebutt@slrpnk.net The aggressive pricing for Deck was an experiment from Valve. I imagine they must consider it mostly successful since it led to the device creating an entire new gaming market segment. The way they are speaking about the Steam Frame and Machine sounds like they’re not ncessarily really looking to repeat that model here though.