There’s no shortage of speculation when it comes to all things Valve. Tyler McVicker, YouTuber and one of the leading voices dedicated to deciphering Valve’s various internal developments, however now reports that not only is the company’s long-awaited standalone VR headset still coming, but it may arrive alongside its own Half-Life game.
Valve’s much hyped standalone, known only as ‘Deckard’, is “still very much in production,” McVicker maintains, saying that according to his sources that Valve “still intend[s] on shipping this piece of hardware.
Why must the market go standalone? Mobile processing power won’t be even close to good enough for a long time, I would like some more high-end tethered options such as the Bigscreen Beyond
wireless tethering with some stand alone capability is the sweet spot in my opinion, would be nice to be able to use it on the go but with full fidelity tethered to a gaming PC at home.
I don’t know. I really don’t like the idea of carrying around a whole other computer an well as tracking cameras and a battery on your face when using the headset in tethered mode. The opposite of that is exactly what I like about the Beyond: strip away absolutely everything you can in order to optimize for tethered usage.
This is a fair point, there’d likely have to be some comfort sacrificed in terms of heat or weight.
I suppose if push came to shove I’d want minimal computer hardware in the headset that could handle wireless tethering but would be willing to give up standalone usage.
Well there is a reason for this: Tethering is what valve wants to get rid of and it’s obvious to me that it needs to be gone to make VR viable. I’ll explain a bit of why without making a whole post.
My first thing is just that many people have avoided the Quest due to its ecosystem being owned by Meta. And the platform is very closed down. So your current options are either to buy an extremely expensive PC >$500 and a PC headset of at least $500 to $1000 and then run PC VR. This is cost prohibitive and Valve knows it. The Deckard would do the same thing the steam deck did for PC gaming. Make it approachable.
Second point is that VR games vary in experiences. Some are high fidelity. But many of the good ones aren’t. The fidelity is in the interaction and not the graphics. That type of thing is what the Quest excels at and what Deckard will do even better at.
And then I think it confines developers into developing for a set spec of hardware which again solves many of the inherent PC challenges. Verified for Deckard could be a thing.
Lastly it enables wireless streaming which will probably be enabled by WiFi 7 standards. Even with a 6e standard router, the bandwidth is pretty good. And to most people, they won’t need a tether to enjoy it anymore.
I was about to write this exact comment.
Even if I hardly ever play standalone, it’s nice to have the option.
Also the ability to wander around an arbitrarily large play space is nice too.
You can still use it on a PC. Standalone allows you not just to run some low power stuff on its own, but also possibly use the processing power to offload certain task on the more enthusiast side of things of PC VR.
Having a cable running down your back breaks immersion.
And you’d be surprised how much Meta is limiting the XR2 in the quest 3. You can bump the resolution pretty high with quest game optimizer.