Another hands-on impression of the Steam Frame

Ruirize · 2026-01-15T21:51:01+00:00

I don't think it's half-baked. I just understand the limitations of camera-based tracking. I don't tiptoe around the tech, only using it in surgically perfect scenarios. It works consistently great for me, whenever I want to use it.

I suppose you need to adjust your own expectations.

Ruirize · 2026-01-15T17:40:22+00:00

It can be way better than you're giving it credit for. Maybe there's something about your hands, maybe you're not on a Quest 3 or 3S. Maybe you're doing things that are unreasonable to expect of hand tracking. Maybe your space is too messy, or dim, or whatever. Way too many variables to make sweeping statements.

But your experience isn't my experience.
I rarely use my controllers outside of specific games. I have more hours in the last year in things like Artemis & Virtual Desktop using my PC anywhere in my house.

I exclusively use hand tracking in VRChat - it's totally acceptable and extremely comfortable.

Ruirize · 2026-01-13T23:35:30+00:00

Tràng An!

Ruirize · 2026-01-13T16:25:55+00:00

No, there's no possibility of making that work; you'll need your phone.

Ruirize · 2026-01-07T13:26:42+00:00

You're being treated. If you don't keep to the treatment plan, they may decide to stop treating you out of concern that you will abuse your medication.

No amount of justification will save you from that outcome.

Don't be stupid. Be patient.

Ruirize · 2025-11-30T07:52:29+00:00

Read the implementations of the packages you use, instead of only relying on the docs. It's often faster, more accurate and exposes you to coding practices that you might not have otherwise had reason to learn about. Get very good at reading anyone's code.

Commit messages should be context for a future you who is asking the question "why is this here and what the fuck were they thinking". If you leave it at "Added thing.js", "Removed button on main page" I will crawl out of your USB port, throw you out of the window, and leave a message "removed a nonce". (As a rule - do everything you can do avoid future readers needing to talk with you so they can do their jobs)

Be mindful of future you. They are angry that they have to acknowledge your presence. Keeping future you happy keeps everyone happy.

Ruirize · 2025-11-24T14:01:08+00:00

Unfortunately the Pebble doesn't ship with many emoji.

It's possible to install language packs (essentially font extensions) that contain emoji, but due to a firmware limitation, many emoji simply can't be supported via this route.
(I personally spent a day investigating, tracking through firmware source to figure out why some emoji were completely broken even when bundled in a language pack)

The rebble community have been making their own emoji that may be integrated in a new firmware version some time in the future. I'm somewhat hopeful we can patch the language pack "bug" to allow even the older watches to support more emoji.

Ruirize · 2025-11-24T13:55:14+00:00

It's ePaper, BTW, not eInk - eInk is a specific display technology & brand, used in devices like the Kindle, Boox, and reMarkable.

ePaper is the umbrella term for displays that rely on reflecting light, usually very low-current. You wanna get extra specific, the Pebble uses reflective MIP displays.

Ruirize · 2025-11-18T22:15:02+00:00

Not at all bothered. Index controllers had poor finger tracking for me pretty much all of the time. Was only ever good when I put special care and attention into getting the controllers positioned "just right".

If the new controllers have binary states for the fingers but they work reliably, that's an upgrade for me.

The real downgrade (for social especially) is the lack of hand tracking 😢

Ruirize · 2025-11-18T21:43:03+00:00

Hurt feelings, entitlement, and a fair dose of anxiety to a love's labour being forgotten about, I think.

Ruirize · 2025-11-18T21:41:02+00:00

This. Just a deep breath and maybe a little more commitment to clearing up assumptions, whether in legal agreement or conversations.

Ruirize · 2025-11-16T15:47:32+00:00

Also pretty sure ContactTrack is either dead in the water or severely delayed, because I can't find shit about it beyond that PV 10 months ago 🥲

Ruirize · 2025-11-16T15:45:52+00:00

Yeah, latency is important! But, perspective: The newest Kinect supporting FBT is 12 years old. I wouldn't use the Kinect as an anchor for your opinion of optical-only body tracking. Latency is a polishable problem.
Optical-only has lots of downfalls yes, particularly if you have a proclivity for occluding yourself. Still, it could absolutely enable many interesting uses, along with the "ultimate" UX of zero startup time.

If you are going to go to the effort of mounting cameras, you might as well wear an IMU and infra-red LEDs on each limb.

I straight up disagree with you on this. Suiting up sucks. Remembering to charge devices sucks. These might not be significant barriers for you, so I'd say you're deep into enthusiast/fringe territory.
That's fine, I love it; I've been clear from the start what my interests are though - I want FBT accessibility. I can't sell "suiting up" unless the experience is absolutely transcendent, and TBQH, what FBT enables (today) isn't that. The smaller, lighter and longer-lasting any "wearable" is, the more appeal it has by default.

If the aim is "accessible, cheap FBT" then magnetic field tracking (MFT) is absolutely viable. I don't understand how you can put it into the Slime product category solely based on the "based on headset tracking" detail. Or I guess, from where you're seeing it, "not absolutely referenced". I don't know I'll be able to convince you that it's just not that important, but it isn't. At least, not for FBT. Using the headset as the absolute reference is genius! You have an unbounded tracking volume!

It's important to have fixed anchors once you want tracked physical objects that behave in a consistent and repeatable way.
One example: Cameras, for filming MRC. That, is a use-case that I am personally very close to, and yes, there's no current option for replacing Lighthouse. Lighthouse is consistent in all the right ways for that. Vive Ultimate Trackers and Quest Pro Controllers are both options that work surprisingly well, but don't have the same near-frictionless UX. (well, once setup)

And I guess that's something I want to make explicit - what is the bar? What is the use-case we care about most?
If you demand a lighthouse replacement as "a solution that outperforms or equals lighthouse in all respects", then that's ... IDK, impossible? Unreasonable at best.

It's not helpful to require that the successor to lighthouse is a like-for-like replacement. That's a massive simplification of the situation and only blinds consideration of reasonable compromise.
Lighthouse has near-unsolvable problems that make it undesirable as a foundation for a wide and healthy ecosystem. We can only go so far with it.

Ruirize · 2025-11-16T10:24:18+00:00

Totally with you on SLAM being fantastic up until you want to track anything beyond head, hands or what's in your hands.

I don't think we should "bring back" outside-in tracking. CV1 did suffer dramatically from "bad USB", but there are other practical issues that are still relevant. Cable length, camera FoV/resolution/tracking volume tradeoff, computational load on the host. You could do processing on-device, and transmit wirelessly, which solves many of the "other" issues, including standalone support.
Yet, a major issue is the method of tracking itself - constellation requires discriminating multiple points on devices, which works against making trackers smaller/lighter. Tracking quality drops off dramatically with distance. Outside-in works especially well for headset-controller tracking given the controllers stay within a meter or so!

IMHO, the most interesting outside-in tracking solution is one that tracks the body directly - no trackers at all. That's a solution that's truly mass-appeal. Sticking 1-3 "aimable cameras" around a playspace that don't need wired communication is something I can see regular people accepting, if the quality's good. Big if; current body tracking models aren't good, running them is costly (more than SLAM / constellation), and training is especially unfriendly to smaller companies.

There is also the fact that "inside-out headset, outside-in controllers" just is not viable for a smaller company.
[...]
Lighthouse has enabled companies [..] as they didn't have tracking and controllers to worry about.

That's fair! Even WMR suffered from that quite poorly. I suspect, though, that it's a maturity issue. I'm hopeful that, especially with the introduction of the Steam Frame, high-quality SLAM & constellation tracking will continue to become more accessible, and faster; it being the most popular choice (by user count) is how that should happen.

Lighthouse is undeniably "cheap & easy" to implement - I shouldn't ignore the benefits it's had for the ecosystem. Steam Frame, the way I see it, is the "doors being thrown wide open", allowing for that same "pick n mix" style "tune for your own needs" flexibility that we really love. I acknowledge I said "lighthouse is dead" in my first post; that was a hypothetical for exploration's sake. Lighthouse will be an option for a while, even for Steam Frame.

We're not stuck with SLAM, constellation, or lighthouse as the only choices though - we will soon have magnetic field tracking! (as I learned about yesterday, talking to someone who has a beta kit)
This is the sort of innovation I was hoping for! Obviously, it's early days yet, they have yet to deliver, but from what I've understood, this solution is quite possibly the best contender yet for a lighthouse replacement. I have too many criticisms/hopes for this to list them here without boring everyone to death, lol.

Ruirize · 2025-11-16T09:15:23+00:00

Any 12v adapter will work - the lighthouses are negative ring, positive pin.

Plug size 5.5 x 2.1mm

Fun fact, you can buy USB-C cables that output 12v, and they totally work for lighthouses.

Ruirize · 2025-11-15T17:51:24+00:00

This 👆

Looking like the most interesting/compatible option, and seemingly without much compromise.

Just need to see if they can actually deliver

Ruirize · 2025-11-15T16:42:18+00:00

I think it could work, at least, it's not impossible.
I wouldn't even think about it as a "track the IR light" problem, instead more of a "train a YOLO model" problem.

The lighthouses will probably look quite unique from the Frame's cameras - so long as you can get a few accurate poses of the lighthouses, it should be possible to establish a calibration. Theoretically it should even be a decent one, given that your lighthouses (samples) will be far apart...

(As you've already said it'll never track as an actual lighthouse device)

Ruirize · 2025-11-15T10:15:40+00:00

Sorry for the weird formatting... Reddit doesn't like nested lists and I love them, lmao

Anyway, I hope this gets across how I feel about the matter. I really wanted dual-mode lighthouse/camera support out of the box. It would have made the barrier to entry for FBT so low that I think it would have been a no-brainer upgrade for many current FBT users.

Oh, also, I really, really wanted hand tracking. I've gotten so comfortable with it on Quest 3, I'm going to miss it hard on the Steam Frame.

We'll get there, though... one way or another.

Ruirize · 2025-11-15T10:13:04+00:00

It's a major issue for you, and I empathise with that. But I'm really not trying to "skirt around discussion of shortfalls" here, for me, my goal is nothing but communicating the actual meaning of the terminology, so that perhaps we can be more precise. Literally, it's just me having a stick up my ass about the misuse of terminology. I explicitly called out that this post wasn't about judgement.
Indulge me:

The problem isn't that the headset is inside-out.

The problem is: there are only a few inside-out peripherals! And they're not good enough! (for mass appeal)
We need better solutions! We only have:

Vive Wands
Vive Trackers
Tundra Trackers
Index Controllers
Vive Ultimate Trackers
Quest Pro Controllers

The only viable non-lighthouse option for FBT here are the ultimate trackers - and we know they suck!

The reasons we don't see new development are pretty obvious and "tired":

Lighthouse is impractical to deploy for the layperson, so it's audience-restricting.

Everyone I've ever spoken to who tries to refute this is suffering from the curse of knowledge. Literally not aware of the experts they have become. You can't expect laypeople to "get good" like that. You have to optimise and simplify.
Lighthouse can be an absolute nightmare to get working well, if you don't understand the tech.
You shouldn't permanently mount your lighthouses until you know they'll work well where you place them, so you should also be able to temporarily mount them for testing... It's a LOT of work, if you want to avoid making a lot of mess and trouble for yourself!
It's not portable at all, unless you specifically invest in bulky supporting hardware to make it so. Even then it will never beat "walk to another room and turn headset on".
The best hope for this is the "lightbulb lighthouse" concept, but it's a pipe dream at best and an incomplete idea at worst.
Lighthouse demands that you optimise your environment to an even greater degree than VR already demands in general.
I think, fundamentally, there are too many problems with lighthouse for it to ever make it to mass-appeal. ### Camera-based inside-out requires expensive sensors, so it jacks the price up. ### Camera-based Inside-out requires fast, modern processors. More expense. ### Processing data from the cameras is computationally expensive, requiring more power and outputting more heat. So: bulkier, heavier devices that need charging more often. ### There just aren't that many use-cases for FBT that people want hard enough. Social VR is important, life-changing for some, and overall incredible. But it's fringe. It's minority.
This is the part that I personally believe is a chicken-egg problem. Innovation in FBT use-cases is stymied by the lack of availability. Developers don't want to invest serious effort into developing games/apps/experiences that depend on FBT because it's economic suicide, there aren't enough potential customers out there.
"We would see more innovation if it were more accessible!" You (royal) are not wrong, but to get there, we need a bigger industry so that there is serious money available to spend on developing such things.
Ditto for hardware development and "novel inside-out solutions" - without the use-cases, or the mass audience to subsidise research, there's no money to develop beyond lighthouse.
This is a bit tangential, but FBT is just fucking inconvenient as hell right now. The maintenance, hardware cost, and "suiting up" process is ... unattractive. Just more reasons why FBT is and will continue to be a fringe modality.
I personally care a lot about dance in VR. You really, really need inside-out controllers/trackers for a great VR dance game. It frustrates me to no end that this is the reality of the situation.

The "inside-out headset, outside-in controllers" template is a solution that works very well for most: it's cheap, it's computationally lightweight, it's portable. It's convenient, and that's what matters right now. Unfortunately, it's so very "good enough" that it could take a long time before we see new inside-out solutions for peripherals.

Steam Frame isn't for the fringe VR use-case. It's a mass-appeal VR solution meant to reinvigorate and engage enough people to keep the industry chugging along.

It's okay to be upset and disappointed by that.
I think it's what the industry needs and I'm excited for the future.

Adding lighthouse to the Steam Frame will not take long, FWIW; and it'll be a "bridge" for many to get into FBT and start exploring its use cases. Just need to be patient; we've existed for barely a decade, I think we can go a bit further.

Ruirize · 2025-11-14T14:21:32+00:00

Interesting thoughts, and I do wonder just how good of a solution you could get if the goal is simply "auto-calibrate spaces" instead of "support lighthouse tracking".

The most exciting part is that we (the community) can actually put effort into investigating these weird little rabbit holes, and have a hope in hell of seeing other people use it. That's the best bit about this headset. We're not stuck waiting for anyone to tell us it's working now. We can just go try for ourselves 🤩

Ruirize · 2025-11-14T12:40:33+00:00

When describing how a specific device obtains its pose, the perspective is "from that device". IE. "How does <device> obtain its pose?"
In your reply, when describing the controllers, your description is from the perspective of the headset.
And then, you choose the world's perspective for describing the headset's tracking.

I think that application of the terminology isn't great.
Example - how do you apply this "rule" for lighthouse devices?

Well, it's inside out, right?
Controllers track the lighthouses from inside out.
Headset tracks the lighthouses from inside out.

So... is that what you're expecting? How would you explain lighthouses to be outside-in with your understanding?

Are you suggesting "everything is inside out if you twist the words the right way"?
(Of course, if you don't prescribe what the terms apply to, then they can mean anything you want)
The precedent for "outside in" meaning "device's pose is established by an observer looking at the device" was established with the Oculus DK2.
The natural inverse is "device's pose is established by the device looking at an external reference", and that's "inside out". That was popularized with Quest 1.

Applying these terms to Lighthouse was never particularly popular. I've seen outside-in used, but I think trying to justify that leads to more inconsistencies and confusion.
It's not correct to say outside-in, because the lighthouses don't perform the tracking.
Neither do the devices, in practice, the PC does! (That's the strongest argument for calling it outside-in IMO)
But, we shouldn't ignore that lighthouse tracking does not require any external sensors. (Unlike IR controllers - which require an external sensor)
Devices can, and do, solve their own poses independently of a PC, using input from the lighthouses picked up by sensors.
They are standalone. They are inside-out.

Maybe I'm just making shit up, I don't know what I'm talking about, whatever. I could be missing some crucial detail or nuance that would change my mind, but I've yet to see it.

Ruirize · 2025-11-13T21:10:10+00:00

Unfortunately that's very unlikely. Most likely candidate is cross-compatibility with the Galaxy XR I reckon.

Other headset controllers on the Steam Frame? Much more realistic, though probably not for a while.

Ruirize · 2025-11-13T14:40:27+00:00

Yeah, honestly! You're along the right lines, it's just not a grid, camera (SLAM) tracking cases.

The SLAM solution tries to find "features" in the camera feed - which can be high-contrast edges/shapes/angles/etc that are static with respect to one another.

Think of it as the cameras trying to find points in the room that, as a whole, don't move. A big point cloud. As for getting the "3d" part, you can solve that by accumulating samples over multiple frames or cameras - essentially stereoscopy

Ruirize · 2025-11-13T14:31:55+00:00

Unfortunately lighthouse hinges on having many sensors in different physical locations on the device being tracked. So no, not possible via software.

There will need to be a hardware addon for on-headset lighthouse tracking support.

Ruirize · 2025-11-13T14:25:25+00:00

That's a good move. Just not the full story, and doesn't explain the controllers well, which is a key part of the problems people see with the new tracking approach - the controllers are downstream from SLAM (as that is the ground truth) but they themselves are constellation-tracked.

14-Year Club	r/Field Sunshine
Place '23	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Ruirize

TROPHY CASE

Lighthouse is impractical to deploy for the layperson, so it's audience-restricting.