I got my Frame today and found an unlabeled button at the side. Took me a bit to find out what it does. It’s actually a mouse button! When you click it once the cursor appears and from then on works like a mouse. Only trouble is that the cursor is right in the middle of the screen and you control it by moving your head.
Guess it’s good in a pinch, when you don’t have the controllers. Could be more useful if it used the eye tracking. Maybe with a later update.
I played around a bit, installing basically every VR game I have to see if it runs. Unfortunately none of them (or SteamVR itself) support lying on your back while playing. I’m disabled and basically can’t leave my bed. I was hoping for some setting to reset the pitch when you reset the forward view.
While it does position 2d windows wherever you look, that isn’t the case for the VR space itself. The floor is always downwards and not in the direction my chin is pointing. I think OVR Advanced Settings can give me that option. I just have to wait for them to add Steam Frame support, which is supposed to come with the next major version.
Still I was pleasantly surprised to see that many VR games just worked out of the box. At least the initial screens worked in Droid Works, 7th Guest, Spellbound Spire and I Am Cat.
What outright refused to run was Batman, The Lab and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
I also dabbled with the Linux port of MotherVR, the VR mod for Alien Isolation. For a moment it actually worked. Only trouble was that a second window with the game scene was showing over the VR view. But just positioning it outside of view kind of fixed that. In my quest to fix it probably I must have broken something because now I can’t get the game to work at all.
And on the topic of Quest, I grabbed Minecraft VR from SideQuest. I could not find a GUI option to add non-Steam games. But on the command line it ships with the script steamos-add-to-steam. You just have to modify it to also accept files with the type application/vnd.android.package-archive. After it was added I selected Lepton as the compatibility layer and to my surprise it started. Only running Minecraft itself did not work, as it complained about some missing libraries. Seems like a solvable problem.
All in all I’ve still got a lot to tinker with. Maybe I can whip up a quick SteamVR plugin to solve my laying down problem. We’ll see.
The button on the side is called the Aux button, it’s mentioned in multiple reviews and I think? also on the product page.
Nice to hear that so many games just work!
Guess I totally missed that.
I missed it too, and forgot about it actually. So when I saw your post I was like oh yeah, cool, someone figured it out lol
The aux button is necessary if your controllers aren’t working, or you need to manually pair them to the device without any other method to go through the menus.
The HTV vive has this too.
It’s very useful for cleanly exiting SteamVR if your controller batteries run out, if you don’t want to just take the headset off and use your normal peripherals instead (maybe there on the other side of a wall? Shrug.)
You probably never had any vr issues before, because this is an extremely important button for when something is wrong
cyclops optic blast mouse. yes please.
That button, with the same functionality, was already a thing on both the Index and the Vive. Mildly useful to control the SteamVR panel when playing something with M/KB or a regular controller.
I like the pointer button. Helps when I’m seated at my PC and don’t want to fiddle with the controllers.
My first thought went to games like flight sims or sim racing where you use some other peripheral instead of VR controllers, but still want to be able to navigate the VR menus in a pinch.
Have you had the chance to use it with Plex or Jellyfin? I’ve been really interested in the Frame primarily for watching movies.
Yeah, I watched The Road To El Dorado yesterday on a giant cinema screen. The surroundings actually gently change color depending on what’s showing on your flat screen. I just wish you could choose a black void as surroundings. But the default starry sky is dark enough.
I used the normal Jellyfin Desktop app installed as a flatpak through Discover.
You don’t even have to use the desktop mode. All newly installed apps are added to a menu on your dashboard, plus some of the already installed ones are there. No idea how they chose what to put on there and I fear it will become cluttered with time. But for now it is nice. Given time we’ll probably be able to change it.
That is sick. Also, great movie.
Jellyfin should work for sure, although probably not with 3D support if you want/need that. It’s just a Linux PC after all.
I remember Kodi having some 3D support in the past but at the moment I don’t have any 3D content to test it out. And I recon the app would have to be adjusted for VR.
Maybe VLC will get support as well.
VLC is pre-installed on the frame.
https://github.com/banasraf/steam-frame-theater-3d
OpenVR or whatever the Frame is using handles SBS video natively. Thes “steam frame theater 3D/2D” script is just a toggle switch that Steam didn’t expose (yet).
I can run an HSBS video, in VLC, with no other code downloaded or things to install, no dev mode or root required. Click the toggle for “Theater 3D” and i have a fully 3D movie on a 200+ inch screen about a foot from my face, it is so good. Done watching - close VLC, click the toggle for “Theater 2D” and it’s back to normal.
Not OP, but I wasn’t able to get Plex running natively. It’s not listed in the software center to install (a lot of apps seem to be missing) and trying to play video through the web browser would cause it to freeze, requiring a force-quit (both Chromium and Firefox). I may be able to install it through Command Line if I enable Developer Tools, but an easier solution might be adding it as a non-Steam app on my Desktop PC to stream to the Frame.
I think many apps are missing due to missing ARM support. So no Heroic or other GOG client either.
Holy shit, someone made a No One Lives Forever VR mod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrHUTnWPAw8
And he’s working on a Steam Frame version. I really really have to get VR working in bed!
Gonna grab a comment from Hotrian on reddit as a possible solution to paste here. Hopefully it helps! It’s 9 years old, though hopefully it is either still viable or some else will provide a more updated method.
comment
case you don’t read the other comment I made,
The correct solution is probably to just use OpenVR-InputEmulator to just rotate the HMD orientation. Then OP can lay down but face “forwards”, and the tracking system is still properly calibrated. I use this all the time when I’m developing and need to move my controller somewhere I physically cannot. This doesn’t solve the inner ear issue but with a bit of tweaking OP should be able to reposition and reorient his devices so they treat “left” as “down”, or whichever direction he needs them to. The Device Offsets page allows you to redefine device orientation.
Trying to trick the lighthouses (or rather the LH System) on the physical level is a bad idea as there is some pretty complex math going on. Instead I would recommend just redefining how SteamVR interprets the device orientations.
I haven’t tried redefining the down direction, but I offset my devices and rotate around all the time, and I think you should definitely be able to do it with OpenVR-InputEmulator.
Thanks, I saw that. The trouble is that this driver is over 9 years old and we have moved on from OpenVR to OpenXR. On top of that it is a Windows driver.
The Quest has this too, but it sounds like it works a load better from your description than the Quests. There are a few times when having that pointer work well would have been super nice. Like when just watching videos in VR and you want to pause or change videos really quick without having to use the controller or enable the wonky hand camera controls.
All these posts make me so sad I didn’t make the cut. 😢
Don’t fret too much, I made the cut but still haven’t received the order email. At this point I think the difference between reservation and waitlist is pretty arbitrary.
I just got an email that I’m now in the queue!
@bjoern_tantau what’s the feature?
Read the post
The aux button everyone apparently already knew about after all.
