Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
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Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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The Index is very old at this point and starting to show its age. It's still functional, but there's much better headsets out these days. The one good thing about it that a lot of modern headsets don't do is lighthouse tracking. Essentially, little IR tracking cameras you place around your play space mounted to walls/tripods that super accurately track you in 3D space. Very precise and tracks from all angles. No batteries but requires a wire to your pc to run which can get in the way.
The Frame is a their more modern headset. Still not bleeding edge specs, but still lighter, smaller, and better functionally in a lot of ways. But it's inside out tracking, meaning the cameras are on the headset itself. Good for tracking your hands/controllers right in front of you, but middling at tracking at waist level, and unable to track behind your head. This is the standard a lot of the industry is moving towards. Functional for 90% of games and all-in-one so no mounting, but definitely a less accurate technology. Wireless by design so no wire to get in the way, but limited play time because of the battery on-device to facilitate this.
If you're trying to decide between the 2, get the Frame. It's more likely to be supported for much longer since it's new and the Index seems to be getting phased out now.
Small correction, but since it's a common misconception: The base stations don't contain cameras. They sweep the room with IR lasers, which get detected by photosensors on the headset and controllers.
Right, and they also don't connect to the PC. They only have power cables.
Not entirely true. They are connected via bluetooth through the headset, but only for purposes of firmware updates and for the PC to tell them when to spin up/down.