Comment by vunderba

3 months ago

I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.

I realize this might not be the case for everyone, but for me, $600 premium is easily worth it to "jailbreak" the meta game store. Steam was here for ~25 years and I expect it to be around in another 25 years. My Quest 1, an absolute Dinosaur of the VR world now, 2019, barely works at this point, is out of support and Meta still haven't open sourced the firmware for it.

  • Seconding this, I love my Quest 1 but at this point it's looking more and more like it'll turn into a brick at some point. The Frame looks like the next best non-meta alternative, and a damn good one at that.

Meta Quest 2 owner here, with all the damage to UX after Oculus was acquired by Meta, I'll lean towards something from steam, even with a 2-3x price tag.

I don't think I'm the norm, but probably neither an exception

I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device.

Only question is if 2160px is enough.

  • If the lenses are good, it's enough. Just have to up the font size a bit and give up some information density compared to, say, a 16-17 inch laptop.

    The Quest 3 is already close to good enough to spend decent chunks of time in reading text. Just have breaks every 30m to avoid mild strain.

    To me, the sweaty face issue is the main annoyance with working in these types of headsets.

  • I'm also very interested in this use case, however I suspect 2160 square is going to be great for gaming but insufficient for serious work. It's very comparable to the Quest 3 (lenses too), which is kind of on the level of a giant 1080p monitor.

    • I somewhat agree except that you can still make the screen however big you want, and the pixel density is the same across the new area.

      Clarity has been totally fine for work reading text on, if I were inclined to code in VR that would totally work for me.

> at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest

Having the headset also be a PC (and not essentially a phone OS) is worth a premium of >$250 at least. You can build desktop apps/games on this thing, it can (hopefully) do just about anything a normal PC can.

The Quest is impressive in many ways, but it's a much narrower-use device. I don't think Valve's pricing needs to be in that same bracket to still sell.