Now that the Steam Frame is finally here, Valve's entire hardware lineup is officially out in the wild. I got a chance to sit down with Valve software developers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Jeff Leinbaugh to talk about the new VR headset, and it sounds like the launch is only the beginning for the Steam Frame. Because while it is more expensive than something like the Meta Quest 3, Valve is hopeful that as an open platform, the Frame is going to be able to evolve over time, and who knows what it's going to be capable of a couple years down the line.
IGN: Why not have the option to have a wired connection from the PC to the Steam Frame?
Jeff Leinbaugh: Yeah, so the goal for the Steam Frame was a wireless experience, really to get over a massive use case friction hump. We've been working on that for a long time. We've been shipping updates and supporting Steam Link for VR for a bunch of other headsets as we've worked on that technology. And then the dongle, the adapter was the next step for that, because as you know, wireless networking setups vary a lot. So the adapter's a way to say, okay, this is the minimum bar, it’s in the box and is something that we can do a lot to ensure works pretty well.
So we see the Steam Frame as a streaming first headset, which for us, we think for the majority of people using it means a wireless streaming VR headset. We do have a [wired] mode that's still restricted behind the developer toggle, but it's something that's being worked on with a USB cable, if you've got a long enough USB cable to the PC, that can be used to stream and it augments the existing wireless adapter or other connections with multilink the same way that all of them work together.
Pierre-Loup Griffais: In general our goal, our aim is for the wireless adapter to be sufficient and that you shouldn't have to change your network configuration.
IGN: If the Steam Frame is designed to be streaming first, why not release a version with less RAM and a weaker chip to keep the price down, especially now that the RAM crisis has grown so bad?
Griffais: I think at this point, things were a little bit too far in development to fully rethink the product.
I would say that despite being streaming first, the ability to run things locally has been pretty well used in our observation and play testing, and I think there's some potential there to improve the experience even further. And so I think we're pretty happy with the trade-offs that we made along the way there to have both of those sides of the experience represented. And we expect that every user is going to approach it in a different way, where streaming might work best for a bunch of them, but standalone play would also work really well for some people.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-frame-the-valve-interview
