Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

GamersNexus released a video comparing the Frame VR vs Meta Quest 3 today, worth a watch for the Frame review alone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g

I do hope Valve's work on ARM64 for this, alongside improvements to performance in Honeykrisp, make for a dramatically better experience with Linux on Apple Silicon Macs.

They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.

If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go.

With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.

I don't game much nowadays; can I just use this to replace my monitor, and work within high fidelity VR?

I think the only way this is really compelling is if it's able to effectively function as a virtual Linux desktop with a reasonably clear floating monitor in front of you.

I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but 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.

Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?

I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.

VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.

It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...

At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high.

Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware

Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one. I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today. They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.

At current hardware prices, this is worth buying to use as a server!

With the software being open source I wonder if the quest 3 will get owned so that eventually we can run steam frame sw on it

Hopefully it's possible to use eye tracking as a pointer in desktop mode. I'd like to connect only a keyboard and use binds to emulate clicks.

I want this for one reason and one reason only: DCS.

Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet?

I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.

Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?

Also exciting, Valve has finally started shipping native ARM/FEX builds of Proton 11: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/vr/valves-latest-proton-11-bet...

Will be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!

I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).

One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.

For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.

That’s a remarkably cheap storage upgrade too. First time I’ve ever thought the upgrade would be worth the money.

Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600.

Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.

Yikes, what a terrible price. 55 minutes playing on-device Half Life Alyx. 1hr 30min streaming from a PC with dongle. 3 hours charge time. It's just pretty lame tbh. Damn :(

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No better than the rest of the VR headsets that came before it and almost no-one wants them. These headsets will end up collecting dust with the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest Pro.

We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.

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