Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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Why is everyone so concerned with passthrough these days? MR apps are the worst XR apps of them all
For now. Software is constantly changing. Plus, even my very old gearvr had color pasthrough.
And, when you consider that valve is partially putting out this device to stoke vr/ar/mr enthusiasm, I would have liked to try a headset with great pasthrough. I tried the apple headset right as it came out in a store, and the headset was awesome, but lived in a closed wall garden. The passthrough on it was awesome. That xr keeps taking steps backwards is tragic every single time.
I guess now I know what it must've been like in the 80s when vr was this cool tehcno fantasy that went nowhere until basically palmer lucky spits on floor.
Edit: i forgot to really answer. Because passthrough is part of vr. Also because it's cool. Also because it's still novel to me and I want to play with it. Also because maybe I would have made something with it. Also because backwards progress is sad and annoying and feels bad.
IYKYK...
All jokes aside, one reason is MR to watch a movie while being able to see outside. Another is when you kneed to step out of the room for just a moment or talk to someone that just came in or maybe even just grab the controllers while seeing what you're doing.
Do you really think cameras with color are that much of an ask in 2026 on a device that costs over $1k?
The addon costs $150, if they increased the price by $150 and had color passthrough included in the box, you would be happy, but everyone who would be forced to buy cameras for a use case they are not interested in wouldn't be.
Imo all of your use cases for color passthrough are weak. You want distractions from a movie? You need to step outside, take the headset off lol.
If they launched at $1200 way more people would be complaining about the price
They're already using a literal phone soc that HAS CAMERAS. Having two color cameras on board probably would have cost much much less than an external, $150, third party module, like maybe a tenth of that at scale so like maybe $15 more. OoooOOOOOooooo scary
They likely made compromises like this all over the device to keep the price as low as possible, this (and the ergo pack) is just one that they errored on and probably should have just included.
Why would internal cameras be significantly cheaper than the external cameras to produce? Isn't it the same hardware with the same pcie interface?
Like the other guy said, using color cameras would not have costed much more. This is an expensive device with some budget entry-level features. There's no excuse.
If you think they were targeting an "expensive device" when they were designing this, you're completely misunderstanding the product and the current market conditions.
You read the marketing material, nice.
An expensive vr device would be the apple vision pro. This is not that, you seem to think valve knew that ram and storage would triple in price over the last 2 years and designed the frame with that in mind.
That's a dumb device, not just a stupidly expensive one. There's a reason why it was discontinued.
I just assumed they were more performant for their actual task of tracking. Everything else is secondary.
This is just an assumption, but, if true, give me the improved tracking over color passthrough any day.
Not that color passthrough wouldn't be nice. But I don't think it's a cost saving technique
Well, I happen tl have dabbled a bit in image processing and applying a mask to make the image grayscale has a negligible (if not inexistent) impact in performance. I do admit that I'm unaware if there's another characteristic this cameras have that make them better for tracking. If they do, it's pretty weird that Valve hasn't mentioned it.
Applying a mask? I'm pretty sure the cameras themselves are black and white only, no color, specifically to increase tracking performance.
Something about b and w cameras being more sensitive to light?
You wouldn't get the same benefit from applying a mask I don't think.
But again, IDK for sure.
If I really need color, I'll get the aftermarket adapter, probably do a better job than any built in cameras anyway 🤷♂️
I'm saying that if a grayscale image was required, you can use a color camera to show that to the user and apply a mask to use a grayscale image for tracking processes.
Maybe, not sure. But then again, why wouldn't valve say so if that was the case?
This one's kinda dumb, sorry. Valve makes the device and they make the camera accessory as well. If the cameras were built-in and used a ribbon cable instead of usb-c, the quality would quite literally be exactly the same.