

A self-contained unit that matched the Quest and wins on not price but privacy was the only reasonable direction for Valve here.
I do agree that the niche they’ve chosen to fill is valuable, having a good self-contained unit free of Meta’s spyware was the entire selling point for me.
I know a lot of people who were looking into PCVR but didn’t buy an Index because they didn’t want to spend $1000 on a VR headset. PCVR is a niche of a niche audience, so I’m not surprised that they didn’t release a product that was just Index v2.
Maybe, in the future they could offer a low-end SKU that was PC-only, without onboard gaming hardware.




It was finicky to get setup and their company was overwhelmed with support requests for months. One of the guys in my makerspace had one and we managed to get it working (it helped that they were EEs). Outside of some rare dropped frames it was pretty smooth without any noticeable latency increase.
The Frame just uses standard Wifi7 which can push around 17-20Gbps, more than enough for low latency compressed video. It would take minimal hardware to connect to Wifi, and run the video through some hardware decoder.
I understand why they’re competing with the Quest, I’m buying one because it’s a good standalone that isn’t made by a data vacuum company (not yet, at least). The privacy aspect and Linux solidarity are what got me (I’m also selling my Index, so it’s a ‘cheap’ upgrade)