2mo ago

Valve's Next Headset Reportedly Enters Mass Production

www.uploadvr.com Valve's Next Headset Reportedly Enters Mass Production

Valve's next headset has entered mass production and will ship this year, a Chinese analyst group claims, with an estimated run of 500,000 units in the first year.

The group, which calls itself XR Research Institute, claims that the launch is set for this year, and estimates a production run of 400,000 to 600,000 units per year.

For comparison, that's roughly the production scale of Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, 2.5 million people have unlocked the achievement for completing the Quest 3 and Quest 3S introductory mixed reality experience after two years, and Quest 2 sold north of 20 million units. As another point of comparison, estimates peg Steam Deck at around 5 million units after almost four years.

18 comments

I heard vr support is seriously bad on Linux, here's hoping Valve can make some headway here.
- I mean, it is patchy but there. NVidia is a problem, like always. My friend struggles with the Index because of the shitty NVidia DRM drivers causing reprojection issues.
  I’m on a Quest 3, and getting things to work wirelessly with WiVRn was basically plug and play, in the figurative sense. Install WiVRn server and client app, add launch arguments to whatever you’re trying to run in VR and you’re set. It’s more reliable than Virtual Desktop with SteamVR on Windows, in my experience.
  That said though, getting FBT working was a little fiddly, requiring patched versions of xrizer and WiVRn, then making sure both of those can write to the proper devices. Once that was done though, it just worked.
- It is mostly working fine these days. I don't think that will be a show stopper for a new standalone HMD from Valve.
- Valve has mostly neglected SteamVR on Linux. There's Monado and associated projects that are much better performance wise but are still ironing out integration of equivalent features. it's a playable experience, and in some cases can drastically improve FPS but it's not a drop in upgrade. If Valve wants to improve SteamVR they would do well to adopt a similar approach to what they've done with Proton and put resources towards the open source project and use it as a base for a SteamVR 3.0.
- I never got my OG Vive to work smoothly in Linux so it's the last thing I've kept a Windows dual boot for. Would be nice if I could get rid of it when I upgrade headset, which I've also been reluctant to do due to uncertain Linux support.
- My Index worked great on AMD hardware, linux software, to play HL Alyx.
  At the time, I was using PopOS!, and the straight .deb version of Steam/Proton, mesa drivers for AMD.
  Only thing that stuck out was initially that it wasn't properly registering the front pass thru camera properly as its own video source, but that got fixed... well, literally years ago now.
- I have an NVidia card and use my Index on Bazzite without problems 🤷🏻
- It's a mess in Windows, I'm not even touching it on bazzite.
  
  Steamvr works ok on Bazzite and Pop_OS with AMD hardware and Valve Index.
- Yeah, I was about to say that I'd buy the shit out of that headset, but after valve fixes VR on linux.
  I had it not to great, but it usable after I switched to linux couple years ago on gtx1070, but since switching to AMD card I didn't manage to get it working. No Wayland support also sucks, I don't want to swap to X every time I want to run VR :(
  
  Seems like your info is a bit out of date. VR works on wayland, and while steamvr is still pretty much crap, monado/wivrn work very well. You can check out https://lvra.gitlab.io/ for more info
- They have done great stuff with Wine/Proton but valve can't even get Steam itself working that well on Linux. I have almost constant UI rendering issues.
  
  @vala @cronenthal it's sad that valve replaced ui with glitchy web bullshit. I stopped updating steam in 2022 and almost stop using it (2022's version works, but cannot unpack new depot chunks after zstd chunks was introduced).
  Also, it's now irrelevant for gaming service, because another browser eats resources and it cannot be disabled now. There was some alternative solutions, like openstramclient, but it is not in useful state for some reason. They made fully working client in qt and deprecated it, announcing c# rewrite. old qt version works with 2022s steam, but i do not know if it works with modern versions

Source: that Bradley guy
Worth: less than noting
- Technically, this is the source:
  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ufib2bT-IM1WodZWKcmHzg
  Bradley did say that he knows the person but he isn't the source himself: https://xcancel.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1976068955510132975#m
  He also posted about some data mined strings referring to Deckard dv1 and dv2 which is presumably verifiable by someone: https://xcancel.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1976141425801822419#m
  You're right to be sceptical since all of this is a mix of rumours, data mining and speculation. I think it's fair to say, in this case, Bradley is more the data mining and speculation bit, rather than the rumour bit.

18 comments