Guy modded his steam deck be as small as possible, with the only intended use to be to play with an external controller and AR glasses.
Finished photo: 
So a steam machine.
A very compact, portable steam machine.
With battery too
Just makes me think of Voidstar Labs. It sounds useless as a gimmick, it involves 3D printing, and it could turn an entire gaming device into wearable tech. Amazing.
Someone send this to Zack.
How are these glasses? Any good?
I have a Viture One and an Xreal Air 2. They’re both solid for gaming as a screen directly attached to your face. Neither do floating or body-anchored screens out of the box. The Xreal can do it with a breakout box, and the new generation of the Xreal that’s coming out in March is supposed to do it on its own.
Viture One came with a better carrying case and is easier to hook up in the dark. It’s slightly more comfortable to wear, and it has built-in focusing dials. Picture quality is good for gaming and watching videos, but not good enough for extended text reading - books and websites aren’t recommended.
The Xreal Air 2 has a much better screen, good enough for reading for an hour or so. The edges get some chromatic aberration, but most of the screen is good. It requires prescription inserts if you need glasses - a mixed blessing since it adds a hidden $80 to the price, but means you can wear them as real glasses. The nose bridge has size options, but none are quite as comfortable as the Viture. The Xreal uses standard USB-C cables, which is good for compatibility, but bad for attaching in the dark. As mentioned above, Xreal has a breakout box that gives different options for how the screen is displayed - attached to your head, attached with a delay (better for motion sickness), PiP so you can look at the real world with your media in the corner of your vision, and attached to your body giving the illusion of a TV screen sitting a distance from you.
It depends on what you’re looking to do with the screen, but I’d probably wait until the new generation of Xreals.
I have several pairs of these glasses from Viture. They’re very good. Not sure how the xreals are. But the technology is legit.
I’ve used a Hololens before, and it was pretty cool display-wise, but not even remotely worth the price in practice. What would you recommend to use in conjunction with a Steam Deck dock?
Yes absolutely. Very different than HoloLens. They still need to get the fov up a bit higher I think before they explode. But, I often use them for watching shows or playing in my steam deck in bed so I don’t interrupt my partner trying to sleep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d-U9kpJmts
There’s some shots in this video of his camera looking through the lenses. Not a great representation but good enough I think to get the idea
That actually is something that I’ve been contemplating doing. I never use the built-in display - HMD glasses are just much nicer.
Recommendations?
Previously, I’d have recommended Xreal Air but the company is allergic to open-source and doesn’t have a great track record of supporting their own software. At the moment, Viture seems a better bet, from those that I’m aware of. For screen replacement, the high pixels-per-degree of birdbath optics, like both use, are extremely advantageous and cause much less eye strain. And that’s while being far cheaper than waveguides or pancake optics.
Thanks!
A slight modification as I have new information: If you can justify it, the Xreal One might be worthwhile as they have added an ASIC to do away when the buggy software and dongle nonsense. Still not super open-source friendly (they’re not actively hostile either) but that seems to solve my biggest issue with the experience. They seem to have better quality optics as well.
I may end up getting a pair of those to replace my Nreal Airs that are held together with tape and CA glue (I’m unfortunately hard on my electronics).
No problem! My “dream” HMD would be birdbath optics with ~2k displays for each eye and probably some simple hardware upscaling. The glasses being “dumb” is a real perk. Doubling the pixels/° would make the experience that much better.
Bringus studios needs to see this
I can’t believe he got robbed. That Nvidia pc was so awesome.
Every day we stray further from the light …
I can’t help but figure it’d be cheaper to custom build a device instead of stripping down a Steam Deck. I suppose it was probably gotten used, but still.
If you buy a refurbished one on sale it’s pretty cheap, I double you can make a comparable powerful device that compact for that price.
That’s so sick. How much did this cost all up and would it be more economical to buy the parts from scratch instead of using a steamdeck?
Can the Deck even drive VR graphics? It’s a powerhouse at it’s native 1280x900 resolution but it tends to struggle with the most graphically intensive games, much less VR.
VR has to render the game twice to give you depth perception, which is a big part of the increased resource requirements.
This isn’t trying to do that, it’s only displaying the game once. The effect of the glasses is supposed to be like having a TV a few feet in front of you.
I say “”””yes”””” you might disagree. Here’s my findings https://startrek.website/comment/13646875
The PS4 could drive VR. I suspect this would be similar. A bit fuzzy, crap framerate in places.
You could run the simpler games like Beat Saber well enough.
So isn’t this just basically what the Valve Deckard is going to be?
So… a Steam Link?
No, the Steam Link couldn’t actually play games natively and could only stream them from another system, this would be able to play independently of another PC but still requires an external screen and controller.
I think you are thinking of the steam machines.
Similar form factor, but no network or remote PC required.
