Yep, something like that. Inside out tracking. Everything lighthouse is expensive, just look at the price of a tracker. I think it's the right choice to not support both, but it still sucks for those deep into this system.

I don't really understand. If I need to do something quickly while I game in vr, I just lift the headset up to my forehead, which only takes a second. I've used the passthrough for finding my controllers and painting my playspace.

Only game I'm interested in where I see value in passthrough would be Thrill of the Fight 2, just because I want to be even more sure I'm not going to punch something hard or valuable before throwing hands, and a better passthrough would definitely be worth it for the comfort if I'm ever going to use it for more than a minute at a time.

3d Gaussian photography looks neat though.

Sucks for the bsb2 people since most of them rely on the Index controllers which are pretty damn good... If you don't take the analog sticks into account.

The lighthouse eco system was pretty nice. I hope we end up having many interoperable controllers with whatever slam tracking method the Frame uses. Time will tell but I don't feel too optimistic.

I'm just hoping steamOS is going to become a standard for standalone headsets instead of them all being android distributions with really bad software support. Kind of like how steam deck competitors used steamOS primarily.

21Wh battery, around one hour lifetime. Yes, it must obviously have a 90W draw!!

Good to have a number on the max draw. Honestly, assuming a slight loss at the buck converter I think at peak consumption a 30W charger might actually struggle. It will be a close call at any rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if you went down to 99℅ after using it for a while. The horror!

It almost feels like the game is native vr. The only awkward thing is that you need to use a controller button for opening doors and such.

Whether you should play depends on your vr legs. Alyx is definitely a more beginner friendly experience, while half life 2 vr is way more fast paced.

Probably about the same danger involved as someone copy pasting random commands from a google search when they understand nothing about the commands they run.

I do dislike advice that boils down to "make ai do it lol", especially if the solution is just a few commands.

Fair point, I'm not really sure on the exact power profiles the Frame supports tbh. I'll take a look a bit later.

I have exceeded 20W during standalone play, and right now my game of choice is the vr mod for half life 2, which works fine in standalone.

Even with a 20W supply and 5W from the onboard battery you will extend the lifetime by a lot.

I got lucky myself. Ordered Monday, though it's still in a warehouse somewhere, packaged but not picked up.

Hey, maybe the worst of software issues will be resolved by the time it's in our hands!

A power bank in your pocket can extend the battery life significantly; it's more comfortable to carry a big battery in your pocket than strapped to your head anyways.

Damn expensive, but if Meta is a deal breaker (it is for me), then there's really not many other wireless headsets it competes with. Maybe the galaxy xr with better displays but way, way more expensive.

At any rate, steamOS is certainly more exciting than yet another android system in my opinion, though that hardly matters for just streaming. It's refreshing that gaming is the focus, I threw up in my mouth a bit when galaxy xr called themselves ai -powered on their site. It's a bit unclear what they actually mean by that, so I'm just going to assume the primary goal is to run some 4b model or whatever locally: the screens are probably good enough to read the text output with relative ease.

Back to the frame and streaming: given that you can't yet stream from the steam machine to the frame, I have doubts you can do it from any Linux desktop yet, though hopefully that's resolved soon.

I hear YouTube channels often upload a day or two before they're meant to release and just keep videos private or unlisted, so the tomorrow (tm) rumor might just turn out to be true!!