Kathy Rayna 🦝🥽

Took a look at the Deckard-Plano (Micro-OLED Frame) stuff… after waking up to pure panic Yeah it’s in there. And they do a lot of wacky things to make it possible… with the current 8 Gen 3 chip They even pair it with the upcoming hotswappable battery headstrap by default In my opinion, that’s probably required due to power consumption.. And while I would love to say “True Deckard soon,” I genuinely think they’re better off waiting a bit more for the Compute module to upgraded to a newer chip, with these Micro-OLED displays that ALSO need new optics You could argue that it’s only for streaming PCVR, but I disagree. Valve built just enough of FrameOS to support the Spatial Computing usecase to where people can do some amazing things with a Linux PC on their Face. And while that’s still hella buggy, and taped together.. that’s just software waiting to be fixed When you switch to Micro-OLED, you get way better visuals. But lose VR gaming focused aspects such as FoV and motion clarity. BUT it still is a greater experience, in my opinion, for many other things Valve positions the current Frame as a way to play the entire 2D game library. Verified titles for those is quickly growing way faster than VR titles But frankly, the current display/optics setup truly doesn’t make that usecase more enjoyable. A slightly lower FoV + Micro-OLED system definitely would But even with the foveal magic they’re introducing here in the code, that doesn’t solve the heat and performance problems even with streaming. The 8 Gen 3 isn’t THAT much better than the chip in the Samsung Galaxy XR. Which uses a lot of these same tricks on an XR2+ Gen 2 That headset throttles a lot even when streaming. It’s a serious problem So when I combine all of these thoughts together in my head. I actually just hope that this is an optics/display prototype being prepped for a bit later down the line. Rather than a Steam Deck/Steam Deck OLED situation The software situation on Steam OS (for Frame) is still a mess. And to have valve engineers and contractors split between supporting two models THIS FAST, after such a rough launch, would be a bit of negligence, imo At the end of the day, I knew valve would adopt Micro-OLED in one of their Headset products at some point. They’ve put serious effort into it over the past deckade and a half they’ve been doing VR. I’ve reported on some truly insane stuff they did in this field. It is inevitable But for this, I pray that inevitability is a bit further out..