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:

    • Tahl_eN@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • Gwaer@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I have several pairs of these glasses from Viture. They’re very good. Not sure how the xreals are. But the technology is legit.

      • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        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?

        • Gwaer@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          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

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    23 hours ago

    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?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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    1 day ago

    If you hate your Steam Deck. :D Jokes aside, I am always flabbergasted by the ingenuity and knowledge of extreme modders like him. He has a use case and first it sounded stupid, but after reading a little bit it makes sense for him. I guess there is no solution like this one can buy, right? Or is it too expensive? It just hurts me personally seeing the Deck crippled like that (just jokingly talking here, man I am funny as hell today). But there was some really cheap refurbished old Decks sold on the Steam site.

    Interesting project, but not my taste to be honest.

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • FubarberryOPM
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • FubarberryOPM
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • TVA@thebrainbin.org
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • Jake Farm
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      1 day ago

      I think you are thinking of the steam machines.

    • FubarberryOPM
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      1 day ago

      Similar form factor, but no network or remote PC required.