I'd imagine it's less about innovating in the field and more about bringing those innovations to a wider market that isn't gatekept by platforms.
We gotta wait to see how good the tracking is in the wild. And what the battery life is. Hopefully it has good battery life while streaming.
I think this one is to get the ball rolling with the new self-contained paradigm. And then maybe the next iteration expands into AR. With the Steam Machine and its desktop mode, I think applications beyond gaming are going to start becoming a priority to Valve. I see many people buying these and just using them as their primary PC, which was much more rare with the SteamDeck. And then all of that will feed back into the headsets
Valve extensively dabbled with AR games in the pre-Index times and ultimatly those efforts resulted in a spinn-off company that failed. Valve probably made the right call to not persue this further.
The promise of AR seems to be mostly outside of gaming, so why would Valve as a pure gaming company be interested in that?
I think their open approach to software and hardware and the extension slot in the Frame will lead to it being a nice option for AR researchers and tinkerers, but I think it is unrealistic to expect that innovation to come from Valve itself.
We will see what comes of this. I am actually a little excited about the Steam Machine. I think it will make a great Steam console in my front room.
No one who isn't a venture capital weirdo actually gives a shit about "XR" or any kind of augmented reality.
Maybe I'm not phrasing that correctly for people with chronic brain rot to understand. Here:
Zero 👏 percent 👏 of 👏 ordinary 👏 users 👏 care 👏 about 👏 XR/AR.
For anyone doing the math at home, that's even fewer people who than those who are potential VR customers in the first place, which are already objectively far fewer potential customers compared to, just for sake of argument, console sales or ordinary PC gaming.
I don't know what it's going to take for this to finally sink in for Big Tech. Possibly a shovel applied smartly upside the head. Users want to easily play VR games and watch VR porn, and maybe in extended use case scenarios have virtual work environments with multiple floating pseudomonitors or hang a virtual IMAX movie screen in space or whatever. The list ends right there.
No one wants to walk around outside with a bulbous display thingy on their face. No one wants to venture out into the world with their peripheral vision reduced to 110° and tripping over everything. No one has ever developed a compelling use case for ordinary consumers to have "content" (reality check: most of which will ultimately be spyware or ads) floated in front of their eyeballs mixed with the real world. The primary function people actually use the Quest/WMR/Frame passthrough for is brief stints for figuring out where they set down their coffee cup, or finding their keyboard, or avoiding stepping on the cat. That's it. Monochrome passthrough is fine for that. Color would be neat, sure, but monochrome sensors are faster and have better dynamic range and higher sensitivity, which translates to better controller tracking performance, and that's something everyone will bitch about if it's bad.
Hololens was dead on arrival. The Apple Vision was dead on arrival. Android XR and by extension Galaxy XR are dead on arrival. Valve doesn't need to make a bunch of compromises to compete in the "consumer XR market" because there is no consumer XR market. The Frame is a VR gaming headset designed as a VR gaming headset, for VR gamers. Period.
The Frame doesn't have to "disrupt" anything. It has to do everything the Quest 3 does and manage do it roughly as well, while not being sold by Mark Zuckerberg's creepy ass.
Virtual Reality - Quest, PCVR, PSVR2, Pico, Mixed Reality, ect. Open discussion of all VR platforms, games, and apps.