Just a heads-up…
6 Likes
I haven’t yet looked at the video but my first thought is wondering how it performs vs OpenXR.
I saw the post this morning and had a read of the main features - didn’t see what the fuss was about, but I guess more stuff will be added and improved as it matures.
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It’s more about consolidating their Big Picture mode UI throughout all the platforms. They had the ‘TV Big Picture’ and the VR layout was all different. Then the Steam Deck came along and they then needed a 3rd layout of UI for a more console like layout. The Steam Deck caused ‘Big Picture’ to get rewritten and tidied up, and the last piece in the puzzle is that now the VR UI uses this new common layout. It basically means that things like ‘Home’, ‘Library’ and Settings are all looking common.
I’ll give the OpenXR stack another go, as it was never as good as the WMR one on WMR (not surprisingly) but then it does have nice new ‘compositor’ features of being able to dock desktops as floating windows etc (could be handy in MSFS etc). I’ll report back to see how bad the performance is (or not).
Btw, it would be sort of Valve-like to announce a new headset about an hour before the Meta Connect conference Meta Quest 3 presentation. Youtubers have been spelunking this 2.0 release and finding lots of references to new devices apparently.
5 Likes
Gave it a go and it has some nice ideas but for the WMR stack it’s pretty fragile still. It would make sense that they would concentrate on the Index and even the Oculus stack. You can set the OpenXR support to ‘SteamVR’ and you do get pretty much the same performance as the WMR OpenXR stack, but you lose a few options around Motion Reprojection and it still crashes a fair bit.
The UI is much nicer and the floating/docking windows is good, but I don’t tend to use the controllers much (mouse in VR usually) and SteamVR doesn’t really support the mouse in a 3D space so well. I watched a youtube video in a flight and it worked ok, but selecting the ‘floating window’ to be usable with a mouse ended up being some sort of IQ test I wasn’t up for. I’d like to see it on an Index or something with SteamVR native support, as it probably works all ok.
It’s interesting as tried some OpenVR titles (VTOL, Kayak etc) and they work fine but don’t allow for the new features of desktop window floating etc, so maybe that’s only OpenXR titles? Dunno.
3 Likes
I meant as far as features are concerned. Seemed to be focussing most on things I don’t use.