For sit down, say flight, driving sims and productivity, then things to look at to compare would be things with a cable and no local compute taking weight, heat and component cost. There's the Pimax Dream Air SE and the Big Screen Beyond 2e as two recent updates in the ball park of Steam Frame pricing. Both that have eye tracking for better high resolution performance. The Pimax has a variable quality reputation and the Big Screen Beyond requires a deprecating Lighthouse tracking system, so no easy answers. None will be as smooth an experience of the Frame but are more geared to head mounted display.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

I played a few hours of Alyx and, I'll be honest, it started to kinda freak me out. I noticed myself getting a bit of anxiety when putting the headset on to play, and a relief when I took it off to see the real world was still there! I've never experienced something so immersive, but I haven't picked it back up to finish it yet. Someday.

I also still mini golf regularly. It's such a fun, low effort way to hang out with friends and family that we wouldn't otherwise see all that often.

I had the Quest 2 a while ago and did manage to play some games on it (PCVR through Virtual Desktop, cause they didn't have 1st party support for Intel Arc B580).

In regards to shooting games, while some of them were nice (especially modded H3VR, all of the guns you could build etc.), the shooting and movement always felt off - rounds not always going where you'd think they should regardless of the game, aiming being a bit clunky especially with scopes and so on, same with some RPG combat games. I also tried out Into the Radius VR, CONVRGENCE, SUPERHOT VR and Zero Caliber VR. There was something weird going on, like the world scale feeling off and even when adjusting through the SteamVR options, the experience still being odd, no matter what IPD or height offsets or other settings I'd try. Never really got used to it.

But let me tell you, vehicle games were on another level. It's perhaps the best way to fly in War Thunder because the proper depth perception completely changes the feel of it (if they'd fix the damn camera, I don't want to break my neck trying to look far back), same with VTOL VR and racing games like Dirt Rally and even Euro Truck Simulator 2. You'd think I'd get motion sickness or something but no, it just felt good and more proper than staring at a flat screen, despite the limited resolution and all else. Oh and oddly enough Derail Valley also felt nicer than the FPS games, despite you also moving around a bunch (though it's mostly a train game).

VR is definitely a cool novelty, if sadly underpopulated. There was also some cool productivity software like Immersed but they kinda ruined it by removing support for multiple physical monitors and also the Virtual Desktop program and SteamVR won't let you display like 4x1080p monitors all at the same time, what's even the point of being limited to just one or two in VR? You have 360 degrees around you (well, or however much your neck can comfortably do)!

You may not realise that we are currently in the midst of a VR Mod rennaisance:

https://pcvrcentral.com/

Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS. Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently.

I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home.

There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset only a month ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRGaming/

1. Try Google Earth VR if you haven't. I've poured hours into it and it can be an almost emotional experience.

https://youtu.be/SCrkZOx5Q1M

2. There have been some big advances in converting traditional flat games to VR, especially UEVR (for Unreal games) and various custom mods. It takes a bit more work, but the experience is worth it, even for games you've played 1000 times before.

I remember playing this on my Oculus Rift 1 I think. It was such a better game than the other games I'd played in VR that had you put it on my head in a darkened room and told me it was the newest hardware tech I would have believed you.

Just the metaphors and "magnetics" for fiddling and dealing with your gun were so good. The conveyance system was also just so much more intuitive. I think they even seemed to have done something to deal with the very mild nausea I felt with some title.

Oh, and the game was fun.

You can even run Half-Life Alyx on Steam Frame itself (standalone mode), albeit at around 36FPS according to Tested https://youtu.be/C9JyWAVj94E?t=3330

Tangentially related: If I wanted to play Half-Life: Alyx, and spend as little money as possible whilst still having a good experience, what do I need? (I already own a beefy desktop computer)

I have a recommendation in a similar vein: Gran Turismo 7 in VR on PS5. I have a headseat graveyard and never really used my headsets except for that game. I've heard good things about Half-Life Alyx and now your comment has me absolutely intrigued.

Idk. After having THREE Quest 3s brick themselves within the extended warranty period, I really want an alternative. I can do normal cardio but rhythm games like Beat Saber and more are just such a better time of knocking out a decent hour of cardio several times a week for me. Beat Saber is more easily modded on PC and while the number of games I play is really low, this is worth it for me.

The Arizona Sunshine series are also really great VR-native games. Not AAA but far closer to a complete game than most VR games.

Gonna try it out on my m1 mbp because of this comment. Been waiting to play alyx forever but I didn't know a way to get mac to work - theres a solution now.

Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.

HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.

Interesting that Alyx is still listed as "Windows only" even though the reviews say it includes a native Linux port:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

It's pretty good, but it would have been good enough as a non-VR title. The thought of digging out my VR headset to play it makes me shudder. I never even managed to finish it, played through most of it and then couldn't bring myself to get my VR headset out again.

Plays really well but it is very yucky.

“Not a lot of games” will soon be a thing of the past once people find out they can just vibe code all kinds of VR games and experiences.

VR is a solution in search of a problem

I appreciate that the review goes into the privacy issues and legal disclaimers with each. I don't doubt that everyone expects the Meta product to be much worse there, but wow it's a stark contrast.

The comparison difference of terms and conditions was hilarious and spot on. Well done GN!

Would be great if the Meta Quest could be jailbroken to run SteamOS

I think a hackable Linux PC in a VR headset is very exciting. But the major problem is the screen resolution is not good enough to make it a viable desktop replacement. It'll work great for gaming or media consumption, but reading smallish text will be difficult at best.

If they made a more expensive version with a better display it would potentially be interesting as a portable workstation/laptop alternative. But I don't think the SoC they're using supports displays much larger than this, so they'd have to upgrade that too. When you have such a wide FoV the number of pixels you need to cover it all at high resolution becomes very large.

It's still VR. It's still niche.

There are still many issues that VR hasn't solved (and may never solve).

- You still have to wear a device on your head

- You still (can) get motion sickness and/or headaches

- There is still not a lot of great content around VR

- Many people still prefer the flat screen medium and content

The openness/closeness is only one of the many issues this solves, and it doesn't matter when all of the other above issues exist.

I’m excited. In addition to VR games I’m pretty interested to see how viable it is to do things with the Frame that I’d usually do on a Linux laptop.

I hope the openness of the OS leads to lots of cool 3rd party options. I’d love to see a standalone headset the size of the Bigscreen Beyond 2, and I’d also be much more willing to pay $3000 for a premium VR/AR device that runs Linux than an Apple or Meta device.

As a hive mind representative, I will be the first to say: I was already waitlisted before I saw it on HN.

Now the only problem is I'm not sure if I really have another $1059 worth of playing VR golf and rhythm games in me. Cool hardware though & even cooler software.

Is that confirmed? Arm devices tend to be awkward to install your own OS on in general. E.g. look at Android phones.

I mean Valve definitely are very open-source friendly but I wouldn't just assume.

To be clear, you don't have to run things on it, you can stream wirelessly from your PC.

An advantage of a standalone unit is you can take it with you, or for people who don't already have a gaming computer.

You're also asking why not have it plug to a more powerful machine. The answer for that is simple: wires get snagged and pulled on, in practice it's a poor experience (remember, you cannot see the wires when you are wearing the headset).

I like wired for the better graphics and unlimited playtime. In practice even a single cable gets wound up, stuck on things, and generally feels in the way. It's a difficult trade off to accept, even with a long and light weight cable.

The real question is why did they release this as a standalone unit for $1049 and then claim they couldn't sell it for less due to the RAM shortage - when that implies they could have released a dumb unit that depends on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine for far less?

Being able to play without a bunch of setup in your room and without worrying about getting tangled in cables seems great. I have a Valve Index—which is a pretty remarkable device, that I definitely enjoyed—but the hassle of cable management/etc adds some real hassle. And I say this as somebody who actually set up a pulley system to make it work better in my home office :P

There are two use-cases. Already sitting at a PC and you just pop your headset on - your idea makes sense. But traditional VR means standing up in a dedicated space (2m x 2m) and demands uninterrupted time. That's a high friction activity, and adding setting up a PC and Oculus Link and Steam VR before you start playing makes that friction even higher to the point where it's a niche hobby. Most casual players are doing stuff like VRChat and Beat Saber which can run on low powered hardware, so having a basic game-playing ability is a good idea.

It's a lot easier for developers to target a known platform.

It is designed to stream wirelessly from a powerful computer too

I suspect the answer is actually very simple, when you compare this device to one that is made deliberately dumber there are far too few actual differences to make it make sense.

When you’re in VRChat you can be your fursona

> hard sell against a new or used Q3

That depends. Having had a Quest 2 and dealt...nay, put up with with Meta and their god awful ecosystem you couldn't pay me to touch another one of their headsets. I'll take an open linux based one over a Q3 any day. That alone makes the price difference worth it to me. Throw in the foveated streaming and the vastly superior quality and latency of streaming and it makes for a fairly decent offering.

Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes?

Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.

fwiw, I’m already playing windows games on my Retroid (Android ARM Snapdragon) console and it’s already really good at least compatibility wise.

I mean, you can comfortably play GTAV on this thing and it’s powered by a smartphone processor.

Your dreams are going to become true.

Thanks. This was great.

For me a lot of the value comes from the freedom you get with frame. Valve says “it’s your PC, install what you want” and it runs an open source OS. It’s the first truly Linux friendly headset (it runs arch btw) and I don’t have to send my data to Meta. Also foveated streaming means, according to reviewers, a pretty decent wireless PCVR experience. I can’t wait to play half life Alyx without a tether. Valve is just doing something very different from meta.

I'm ready to pay it to not be forced into using Facebook's terrible desktop software that they frequently break the PC Link functionality of. The way it's Windows-only also sucks; it's one of the few things that's prevented me from switching my gaming PC to Linux.

And yes, I've tried third-party solutions like Virtual Desktop under Windows and ALVR under Linux. Even with some of the best WiFi 6E hardware available standing within 10ft of the router with the PC being wired into the network with ethernet, nothing has beat a tethered USB connection using the native Link functionality on my Quest 2.

Any SteamVR based solution fixes most of these issues and the Frame sounds like it might make wireless actually viable. Even if it doesn't, tethered with Valve software instead of with Facebook software is still a meaningful improvement.

2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.

[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

I have barely even considered VR until the Steam Frame.

I'm just not interested in closed ecosystems like Oculus.

That said, I have barely looked at VR so much that I'm not sure whether to bother with the Steam Frame.

Is it just for gaming/movies?

Not having to faff about with Meta's developer program or whatever to side load my own homebrew stuff, and then get locked out, then have to do whatever hoop jumping six months later, is a huge bonus. I have an OG Quest 1 and the damn thing needs a new copy of meta quest ...whatever, installed every 2 weeks if I want to use it. It's exhausting.

The price is basically the same as the Index was at launch 7 years ago. With the devaluing of the currency, the increase in specs and capabilities, and the current component suppy crisis, it is a deal. Adjusted for inflation the Index would cost $1300 today, which now gets you a Frame with 1TB of internal storage.

Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.

Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.

Quest 3 is cheap for the same reason that 80 inch TVs are sold at or below cost. If you value your privacy at zero and want to strap a surveilling, billboard on your face for pennies on the dollar be my guest.

This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.

I feel much the same. I don't think I'll be moving on from my Quest 3 until the hardware kicks the bucket.

Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.

There's an incredibly simple product case I think HN is missing: I bought a Vive and then an Index. This has higher resolution than the Index, lower mass (even with a battery!), and easier setup that can enable more spontaneous use. In addition, I now get the benefits of "standalone" headsets that I previously did not think were worth hundreds of dollars on their own.

Am I paying $1000 for a minor improvement? Yes. It's a hobby. It costs money sometimes. I don't do this for nearly anything else, like phones that other people seem fine for paying $1000 every other year. I expect this device to last until another 6 years when I can justify spending another $1000 on another iterative improvement. Similarly, I may spend $1000 on a new setup for simracing soon.

Spending $6k on a gaming PC, a VR headset, and wheels and pedals is an experience you otherwise cannot get. I would spend money on VR even if it only worked with one or two driving games and nothing else. For those of us in that niche, VR has been anything but a "Failure", that business people seem convinced it is because it couldn't be the next "Platform" to put an app store on.

But, that's the market for VR. It's a niche toy for people with expendable income. It's not a mass market to rival the smartphone.

Quest 3 is a mindblowing piece of hardware completely ruined by the runtime and vendor. This is basically it as a Linux machine you actually own. That being said, my Quest has sat on the shelf for years now since purchasing. I just don't really see a market for these things outside of driving/flight simulation enthusiasts. The whole "smartphone strapped to your face" paradigm is a dead end for actual VR.

lmao. n o. thats meta and this steam. iykyk

I'm thinking of selling my Index and my Vision Pro for one. The screens/tech in the Vision Pro is remarkable, but sadly the iron grip of the App Store Guidelines means none of it is really accessible for any interesting applications. The AVP App Store is a pathetic ghost town. I'd much rather have a less technically capable headset but have it be completely open.

Given the entire hardware world is experiencing multiple important shortages that are unlikely to improve before a while, I wouldn’t bet on it

The scalpers will probably be all over this too.

> It's still out of stock in France today.

You might look at why it's out of stock. Here in the US, it looks like they're out of stock of the base stations, the right controller (but not the left!) and replacement face gaskets. [0]

> They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.

shrug I've little doubt that there were a great many periods between the Index release and now that you could have gotten a full set of equipment. I'm very suspicious of the claim that you never found a time when you could purchase one from the Steam Store.

The Index had the misfortune of being released during the start of The Global Plague when everyone with a sizable chunk of disposable cash found themselves with a great need for new toys to play while stuck at home... and global manufacturing got turbofucked by said plague, which didn't make it especially easy to ramp up production.

The Steam Frame has the misfortune of being released in the beginning of The Great Abandonment of The Consumer PC Market, which has just screwed the availability of parts and their price.

I'd say that neither of those things are Valve's fault, but what can I really know? They're a secretive private company, so maybe they engineered both catastrophes. ;)

[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059530/Valve_Index_Heads...>

Agreed... I already played Alyx years ago and there's no other game of similar quality... love the hardware, but it's hard for me to imagine dropping a grand on this

Just ask someone you trust to make the reservation from their account.

Unfortunately, your behavior is identical to what a reseller would do.

This does make me excited for the possibility, several years down the line of a Valve ARM Linux laptop with decent battery life. I wonder if anyone will rip out the compute unit out of the headset and try to use it as mini PC, just because you can, it seems like fun.

Heh, I use one of my Steam Decks as a small home server.

You could do it, but the resolution isn't high enough for it to be a good experience. (2160x2160 per eye sounds like a lot, but with a 110 degree fov it's only ~19 pixels per degree. Which is like sitting very close to a 27" 720p monitor.)

you can even replace the whole computer if you tinker enough, since it runs Linux. whether or not that is a good idea in principle with _any_ vr headset is debatable.

AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.

Not quite: foveated streaming only affects the bitrate of the stream. For improving rendering performance, there is a similar technique called foveated rendering. It's still somewhat unclear how well that works while streaming, though. In theory, it should work, but no reviewers seem to have covered it for some reason.

I do wonder if they use local upscaling after foveated rendering/streaming. The screenshot I've seen look a bit aliased in the periphery, which I hope isn't too distracting.

DLSS adds lag, as does wireless, that 144hz may not help as much in those cases. For me it's the lag that gives me headaches.

Something to keep in mind that a lot of simmers (DCS specifically) don't get when they want to jump into VR:

Once you hit the advanced 3rd Gen or any 4th Gen fighter or attack aircraft (essentially anything where you go "heads down" for any significant portion of the aircrafts mission profile) VR becomes more of a liability than an asset.

For those aircraft being a pilot is secondary to being a systems operator.

Think of an F-14; you have the front seat who would want to be in VR because they fly the aircraft, but the RIO would NOT want to be because they have very little need to be, especially since it makes interfacing with their mission systems so much harder. AH-64's are the same split.

Now if you are the sole person in the aircraft and need to do both missions being able to operate the systems fluently and smoothly via dedicated interfaces FAR exceeds any benefit from being in VR.

I've done it all, and I far prefer flying in VR. But for accomplishing complex mission profiles multiscreen with each being an MFD and a rich control set far beat that immersion.

Perhaps the best mix is using a curved UW and trackir plus dedicated MFD screens. Once you get that setup its amazing for that advanced capability set.

All of this assumes you want to use the full capability set of an airframe, or use an attack profile at all. If all you want is to use them for A2A, then VR is wonderful as long as you have a full HOTAS set, understand the preset modes on everything, and memorize the controls and alternate control schemes properly for BVR to close in conversion, countermeasures, etc.

For DCS only, I wonder how this slots between a Q3 and a bigscreen beyond. The beyond with no controllers is probably about the same price all in as the 1TB, but would be better screens and lighter. If you dont care about the standalone stuff it might be another good option. The frame does bring more versatility, but at the cost of battery/weight. Wireless VR in sims is unbeatable in terms of immersion though.

If you enjoy DCS give VTOLVR a shot as well. Fantastic fun.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/667970/VTOL_VR/

I bought an HP Reverb G2 for DCS about 5 years ago and it worked great. When Windows started deprecating the Mixed Reality services random things started breaking, though.

I used a Rift for DCS and it was amazing graphically. Hard to go back to playing on a screen and using a HOTAS hat to capture your view (or head tracker).

But you better have your HOTAS controls memorized because it's a pain not having visibility of them.

There's an accessory that adds high-res color passthrough: https://arcturus.vision/

> If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.

It costs less than a third of the Vision Pro, and less than the Meta Quest Pro. It's relatively affordable, for a RAM crisis.

They use a generic phone chip so have to do camera processing using CPU and not dedicated accelerators.

This. This is what I am looking for. I remember using iz3d years ago, with their anaglyph renderer. Playing Half Life 2, Halo and others in stereoscopic 3D was a great experience. Dead Space was particularly nice, as the game uses no HUD.

I guess most of it could run as a Vulkan layer?

It includes GST right? US prices are before sales tax.

That is nothing, less than 10%.

Ther are countries that get it at 100% or even 200% more.

It’s hard to meaningfully compare prices across countries due to differences in tax regimes.

You can pick up a Valve Index if you want to do this, which is a fantastic device, but I think the reality is that the market for the wired to a desktop head set just isn't there to support the product.

Apparently the beta just added support for this.

The streaming is good enough now, especially with foveated rendering, that there's no reason for them to eat the extra support cost and user experience drag of focusing on a tether.

> Great news: SteamOS running on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, ARM64

Bad news: It's trapped in a VR headset and not a pocket-size steam deck

AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.

Yeah this could open up a whole new category of lightweight gaming PCs.

I imagine thats why they've gone so far with the dual stream setup that can use the 6ghz dongle + your wifi for ultra low latency to a dedicated machine.

I think technically it can, but the cameras are black and white, so it would be very subpar for AR out of the box.

There is some chatter about using the expansion port to add a 3rd party colour camera to get over this, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Edit: I stand corrected, there is such a 3rd party camera linked on the page!

I use VR a lot and have not needed AR except for getting a drink from the fridge. What am I missing?

At this price I don't think you can expect the high quality cameras and processing power needed to do AR.

It can do AR, especially with this addon arcturusvision.myshopify.com

> I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.

Unfortunately none of the current generation VR/AR/XR glasses come close to replacing a monitor full-time. They may be okay for using in a pinch (like if you're travelling and need a bigger/secondary/private display), but they suck for long term use.

Biggest issues:

- Screen resolution is still pretty low. At 2160x2160, it feels like you're just sitting really close to a 27" 720p monitor. You will see the pixels. It may not matter much for movies and some games, but you will notice it for productivity. If you have a decent monitor already, it's a very noticeable downgrade, even when compared to using any modern laptop display.

- They're just not comfortable for long term wear. I can work 8+ hours in front of a regular screen with almost no issues, but that's just impossible with current generation VR/AR/XR glasses.

- The big screen promise is a lie for productivity. You'd need to constantly move your head around to be able to see the whole screen; you can't see it all in one go, without dealing with blurry/distorted edges. If you do want to see the entire screen in one go then not only does the image become smaller (breaking the big screen promise), the clarity of text drops sharply.

So if you're considering getting any of the current generation glasses for long-term productivity: just don't.

I’m somewhat surprised nobody has pointed one of those hacking models at a Rift CV1 and said “make it work without all the Facebook junk, preferably in Linux.”

Ars Technica's article put it at 1.5hrs in performance mode and over 2 in a power saving mode, but noted that the lower saving mode wasn't enjoyable. Of course it's I am sure that is going to be highly subjective to what you are doing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/09/steam-frame-the-ars-t...

Valve confirmed a separate strap with hot-swappable batteries 'coming soon'

Same

Headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond 2 are basically the weight and size of goggles. Wearing headphones isn't actively comfortable either but very few people would say that that is prohibitively uncomfortable relative to their desire to listen to music. It's not unreasonable to think that the privacy and convenience of a VR workspace could eventually reach that level of convenience for a significant number of people.

The real issue for replacing monitors seems to be screen fidelity.

in my experience this is only an issue when headsets are unbalanced between the front and back, since this results in the weight going on your nose/face rather than straight through your head to your neck. the frame's battery is on the back specifically for this reason in addition to the whole thing being relatively light anyway

You're fooling yourself if the quest provides any advertising data value, let alone 600$ The device is simply just being sold for as a loss and is not a data harvesting operation.

Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.

I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?

There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.

For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)

vrchat is just weird enough (and for, maybe, weird people) plus the new user experience/children yelling slurs situation makes it hard to even bring up to general audiences

I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though

> Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets

Far into the future, perhaps. These glasses may be fine for short stints, but not for serious 8+hrs of productivity. I have a Viture Beast and I regret buying it. Even for short gaming stints, I still prefer my laptop or smartphone display as these glasses are such a downgrade.

The current XReal models are very underwhelming. Very narrow FOV more or less equivalent to using a 27" monitor, lots of fuss with the cable, switching sound to headphones because the built in speakers are garbage. Issues with HDR support.

The XReal is practically guaranteed to have sold less units than any generation of the Quest hardware.

Is it really that bad? The hardware processing and storage is effectively a S24 which retails for $800. Add the additional displays, cameras and controllers, an extra $250 doesn’t seem that out there.

I played it on my Quest 2 so that's not really the price of admission

Slim, lightweight form factors similar to that of the Bigscreen Beyond are not going to be practical in a self-contained headset for quite some time to come, at least if the goal is to play anything more demanding than Terraria on it and its price range is anywhere remotely within reach of the general consumer.

The only reason why Facebook has been able to swing such low prices is with steep subsidization, and the Quest hardware itself isn't much less bulky.

Weighs less than Quest 3 on the first review I saw? They also said weight was better distributed, not as heavy in the front area as others.

Watching the gamers nexus review, that seems not true? Outside of expensive.

Nitpicking a bit - once again another FOV of ~110. Sigh.

Maybe I’m just being picky, but I feel like I’m playing a submarine periscope simulator when I use these things. It’s been over a decade since the early VR headsets like the Rift, and it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been.

The only headset that didn’t give me this tunnel effect was the Pimax 8K, but it had its own problems.

Did you try it?

It's not heavy, it's very light. I bet it's not hot either.

The focus on mobile game graphic quality of the Quest was the real step back