Valve "Deckard" VR Headset Touted to Launch Around Late 2025, with Speculative $1200 Price Point

[TheGeekn°72]

"Hit"... Nintendo Switch was a "hit" and so will Switch 2. But that gaming experience isn't for everyone. It's aimed at gamers aged 25 years and younger.

It's really not just for that, for example we have museums offering reenactment experiences with VR headsets, laser game locations with VR arena...
With price lowering over the years, the entertainment industry is on the verge of getting more and more AR/VR/MR attractions and that will introduce more and more people to it

$1,200 VR headset with (assuming) direct PC connection to leverage +$1,000 GPU is for the adults in the room.

though yeah, at that price... thank gosh for Pico and *eugh* Meta who make much more affordable -while still feature packed- HMDs, Pico's FBT tracking kit is really really cool and easy to use, I really hope to see more evolutions like this in the future !

 

[Clawedge]

You’ll be waiting until 2035 for specs like that.

There are already higher res headsets out there

 

[razaron]

If it's actually wireless, will be neat having a new mainstream wireless headset other than Meta. If not, I don't see the point.

It's like when you start wearing wireless headphones at home and realise you can go to the bog to take a dump without taking them off. Life is never the same after that.

 

[N3utro]

They only put the high end Pro model on hold. The word is we will see another Pro model from Meta 2026. Have you seen their Orion AR glass? The MR (VR/AR) landscape is about to get a lot of new players. Google and Samsung have a new HMD coming out this year. Check out the new Play for Dreams hmd. So far if Valve can release a new HMD that's standalone for 1200 bucks then it will be very interesting.

Apple discontinued their high end headset because people said "no point having something that cost this much to use it only occasionally".

I think that's the issue with VR, and midrange headsets like the psvr2 and the quest 3 both have flaws that makes people reluctant to get them (blurryness for the psvr2, faded colors for quest 3).

I wish that for the next gen we could get a $600 oled set with better lenses than what the psvr2 has

 

[Chrispy_]

Valve needs a $500 headset. VR doesn't have enough market permeation for developers to really care about it, and shrinking the market to flagship models isn't going to help.

With the death of WMR, there is a shortage of affordable headsets to keep the market growing, and every sale of a Meta Quest is shoving Meta's own storefront and experience front and center - with users having to jump through a few extra hoops and additional software/accounts just to get SteamVR working.

Valve basically needs a simple, cheap, wired, modern, headset with inside-out tracking and passthrough, that is just plug and play with a Steam account and nothing else. Controllers can be optional, since many people will be using wheel+pedals, HOTAS, gamepad, keyboard+mouse etc. A super-basic, one-button wand with huge battery life for menus and UI would be a great optional controller too, but now I'm falling into the category of "wishful thinking"

 

[bitsandboots]

I'm genuinely surprised at the lack of mentions in here of Pico's HMDs, I got a Neo 3 Link last year, the damn thing fucking rocks, along with the Full Body Tracking ankle pucks (they are amazing ! thought they do lack game support since FBT isn't exactly wide spread) and I'm thinking about reselling to get a Pico 4 Ultra (better all around) which only costs 600€ so Valve possibly pricing the Deckard at 1200 ? yeah no, I'm sorry but fuck that.

I've heard of a few people with them that like them. It's just that they fill the same space as oculus and if I'm hesitant to use something owned by facebook, using something owned by the tiktok company doesn't improve things.

Apple discontinued their high end headset because people said "no point having something that cost this much to use it only occasionally".

I think that's the issue with VR, and midrange headsets like the psvr2 and the quest 3 both have flaws that makes people reluctant to get them (blurryness for the psvr2, faded colors for quest 3).

I wish that for the next gen we could get a $600 oled set with better lenses than what the psvr2 has

I'm not convinced price is the adoption problem of VR.
I think it's that people have some expectations of VR that aren't being met.
I don't think VR is a good platform for most video games and never will be. But that's what a lot of this is marketed as, so its a marketing failure.
VR does better as a social experience, AR does interesting things as a productivity experience, and both have a fitness angle. I guess they're just having trouble getting this point across. But $1000 to meet new people and have a good time with them is a much better deal than $1000 to play like 2 games a few times a year. Yet it's the same hardware, same purchase.

 

[TheGeekn°72]

If it's actually wireless, will be neat having a new mainstream wireless headset other than Meta. If not, I don't see the point.

There already is, I'm genuinely shocked at Pico's lack of popularity, the Neo 3 Link was a banger and so are the Pico 4 variants now (then again, I've almost never seen any marketing from them whereas I've seen Quest ads every other week...)

It's like when you start wearing wireless headphones at home and realise you can go to the bog to take a dump without taking them off. Life is never the same after that.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Apple discontinued their high end headset because people said "no point having something that cost this much to use it only occasionally".

Hah, who would have expected them to be bothered by such a thing to sell a 10k device !

I think that's the issue with VR, and midrange headsets like the psvr2 and the quest 3 both have flaws that makes people reluctant to get them (blurryness for the psvr2, faded colors for quest 3)

Sony really shot itself in the foot with a shotgun for the PSVR2, what the hell did they think with platform locking it ?? And then closing the studios making VR titles for the PS5 one after the other ?????
Took them over two years and accumulated stockpiles to actually get them to make a solution for PC and it's an 80$ adapter, blistering idiots...
HDR screens, eye tracking, capacitive controllers and haptics feedback, all gone to the trash because they couldn't let themselves think outside of their own platform...

I've heard of a few people with them that like them. It's just that they fill the same space as oculus and if I'm hesitant to use something owned by facebook, using something owned by the tiktok company doesn't improve things.

Pico was owned by ByteDance after they made the Neo 3 Link, they launched the TikTok account locked Pico 4, it flopped hard, they resold it back to the guys they bought it from, the TT account lock has been patched out of the headsets with an OS update, then they released amazing stuff like the FBT pucks and the Pico 4 Ultra
TL;DR : ByteDance owning Pico is already old news !

 

[yfn_ratchet]

Pico was owned by ByteDance after they made the Neo 3 Link, they launched the TikTok account locked Pico 4, it flopped hard, they resold it back to the guys they bought it from, the TT account lock has been patched out of the headsets with an OS update, then they released amazing stuff like the FBT pucks and the Pico 4 Ultra
TL;DR : ByteDance owning Pico is already old news !

Citation needed? I can't find anything about Bytedance selling off the PICO brand, let alone to the founders; only that there was a big wave of layoffs that mostly targeted restructuring (and likely centralizing) toward operations in Asia. By all means, they may have axed the TikTok account idea (because the achilles heel of the entire Quest brand is that damned Meta account contract you gotta sign in blood, why would you replicate that) in favor of the usual fare of 'make an account with us so you can update the headset and buy games off our super-special store' schlock the rest of the industry's bought into, but that doesn't indicate that rights changed hands there.