The Valve Index is nearly 5 years old now. And while I love my Index, the state of the art has moved forward a lot and I am excited by the next generation Index, if it ever comes.

I don't think VR/AR is the absolute future of all computing, but it provides an exciting direction.

Some rumors that Valve is working on a standalone headset, that would almost certainly be more open, if the Steam Deck is any indication.

That would be great. I will not buy a VR headset that requires an "account" in order to use. It's my own personal line in the sand that I am drawing. I would not accept any other peripheral like a monitor or a mouse that required an account to use, and so it doesn't make sense to accept a headset either.

If it's like the Steam Deck you can probably do that but it'll be a pain in the ass.

Are you able to setup Valve Index with SteamVR without first logging into Steam?

Is the quest better yes for most people you basically won’t be able to afford it and the best selling point of the quest is the software library and games with the special controllers. This is what most people do with headsets right now regardless .

Will the quest ever really break into the productivity space with apples headset? Probably as a Chromebook like device and Apple controlling the high margin ground which I think is most likely .

The main problem with headsets is that the pass through isn’t as seamless as Apple’s and it can always get cheaper and faster .

I think it could easily surpass AVP as a productivity device if they added built in support for running a Linux distro on top of the Android kernel and there was a way to have free floating X11/Wayland app windows that are fully supported. You can already do a lot of this with Termux but you can't easily reposition windows and it's not as easy as it should be. There is also just weird limitations about resizing sideloaded apps in close distance mode.

Yes! That's exactly what I'm picturing. Running i3wm/sway (depending if I get X11 or Wayland) with N number of monitors laid out like I want.

Then the actual development happens on my laptop or maybe the cloud with something like codespaces or whatever the competitors are. I don't really know much about that space. In my head, I can imagine it being amazing.

On the other hand, I can't see myself ever using the AVP, because I'm sure Apple would lock it down too much. Right now, I'm pretty sure my girlfriends iPad pro would be good enough to replace my laptop. All the hardware is there, it even has usbc so theoretically I could hook up an external monitor and my keyboard. But the software is just too locked down to be of any use. I'm fairly confident that will be the case with the AVP as well (it definitely is today).

There is an open source screencasting app that can take windows from macOS and have them as multiple windows in the Apple vision from a laptop.

Productivity apps are already a part of the quest platform that allow for rdp or something similar but they require tethers.

You would need a powerful system to tie that with. Even the Vision Pro deals with this by laptop integration . But the biggest problem in that is UI and UX. Also you can cast systems to oculus already but it needs a tether. Furthermore both solutions need a keyboard and mouse.

You don't need a tether to cast. There's plenty of solutions on Oculus that work wirelessly (e.g. Immersed, Meta Remote Desktop).

The Quest 3 is decently powerful for a lot of tasks, not for everything but certainly basic office stuff.

If Valve can do Steam Deck, we can soon get Steam VR

I preordered a simulavr.