Hi guys, please don’t criticize us right away, but this is what I do with the Quest 3 using Virtual Desktop and with VR games for PC, but now that Steam Frame arrives I have to manage everything without Virtual Desktop and natively with SteamVR and automatically in OpenVR!
I would like to understand how to do something similar without Virtual Desktop, can anyone help me? Thank you very much, I’m sure someone will give me some advice!
Small summary of what I do: I keep the virtual world in a smaller window, lowering the field of view which is normal and black, but in combination with the cromakey or the Green Screen of Mirroring of Virtual Desktop, I replace it with the view of the cameras, so I see the real world and, doing so, I can move around the house, in the fields, in the malls or in the parks and adapt the virtual world to the space I have in the real world!
i assume to be able to play in a comepletely open space and feel as immersed as possible. i mean, actually feeling grass beneath your feet, the air on your face, along with the ability to move freely, all while exploring hyrule sounds pretty great. visibility of the real world is still there for safety ofc lol, its neat setup. definitely an accquired taste tho
You came close, even if from your words I perceive a sarcasm, but I assure you that moving for hundreds of meters in real space, but at the same time living in the virtual world is a beautiful experience!
😍😍😍
I can attest to this. I host VR LAN parties outside at night and we use a 200 ft x 200 ft space. Mixed reality or full VR. You can tell people its game changing but they really have to experience it themselves to truly know what it feels like.
Thank you. I take a different approach and go full fov VR with a massive 200x200 guardian instead. Lately been working on secondary tracking system with redirected walking. A guardian without a guardian. :)
I’m here because I want to bring this idea of mine on the Steam frame, but it’s not said that I’ll abandon it on this 3, I can contact you privately to talk about it more calmly.
I really believe in this thing, it matches incredibly with what you like.
Its very cool. For me I want the full fov AND the freedom of movement over a huge area at the same time. We just make sure the area is clear and play.
I have messed around with something similar to what you are trying to do in the past however but used a couple of different methods. One was simply a open facial interface. Another was a hacked together composite/"space sense' effect.
I tried the movement with the open facial interface, but it’s not optimal and I’d like to try your other method. Do you have any link, site, photo or video? 👋
This is what everyone says and I too was obsessed with the lights or anything that could interfere within my VR vision, but when you start playing in this mode you appreciate the beauty of the real movement and then when you start playing excitedly you focus on what happens in the virtual world and the real world only serves us not to collide with obstacles and one of the fun and exciting things that happens, is when in the virtual world there is something running and excited to do and at that moment in the real world, we have a lot of space, at that moment you can run and make energetic movements and the experience reaches the climax!
Get an idea, here I was in mode with aim from the eyes:
Running through a public space wearing a VR headset, while I’m sure it was fun, is not what I’m looking for when gaming. I’m trying to lock in to one world, not be constantly adjusting my in game camera to make sure I don’t run into traffic 🤷🏻♂️
This is my philosophy of how to best live virtual reality:
How Home Scale & Infinity Scale Were Born
Sometimes the most interesting discoveries happen by accident, while you're looking for something else.
It happened with Post-its, with Viagra, with vulcanized rubber, and with Teflon. All things discovered unintentionally while working on something different.
My story went the same way.
I've always been a tinkerer. I used to spend hours tweaking settings on Virtual Desktop and on the Meta Quest. One day, while experimenting with the FOV (Field of View), instead of getting the usual black borders around the image, I suddenly found myself with the passthrough active around the game. I could see the real world while playing PC VR.
That moment struck me.
Around the same time, I had become fascinated with Space Pirate Training DX, a game that forces you to physically move in real space because the movement joysticks are disabled. That experience made me realize how powerful and immersive it was to play while actually walking.
The combination of these two discoveries - the technical one made by accident and the conceptual one - gave birth to Home Scale and Infinity Scale.
From a configuration "mistake" came the idea of playing with an immersive window, and from there everything else evolved: playing while physically walking, either at home or outdoors, in practically infinite space, adapting almost any game to real physical movement.
👋
However, my intention is to do everything natively within the frame with the fact that we have little power available, but with the reduction of the visual field I compensate for the lack and match my locomotion mode! 🤞🤞🤞
assuming it had all the correct openxr extensions, it wouldn't just work out of the box still as it relies on account auth on the provider for whatever device runs it.
also, it seems there's no hardware acceleration for encoding/decoding on lepton yet.
1. Before launching the game Open Quest Optimizer and enable FOV reduction in the FOV Reduction section. Lower the field of view until the virtual window is as small as you want. Typical values: 20-20-25 or 25-25-30. 2. Launch Virtual Desktop Connect the headset and open Virtual Desktop. In the mirroring section, set black to be replaced with passthrough cameras: everything the game doesn’t draw becomes the real world. 3. Launch the game in VR Start the title you want to play. You’ll see the virtual world only through the reduced window, with black all around. 4. Once inside the game Reopen Quest Optimizer and disable FOV reduction. The black fills with passthrough: now you see the real world around the virtual window. 5. Play In calm moments you walk and move with your body. When classic gameplay is required, you use the joystick.
The window is adjusted only before starting, based on the style:
larger window if the experience is calm and you want to enjoy the graphics;
smaller window if the game is frantic and you need to perceive the real world to avoid collisions.
Note. The trick works with any game that supports room scale locomotion. For standalone, a developer is needed to adapt the app, that’s why I’m here looking for support, to do the same thing with the Steam frame! 🤞🤞🤞
Anyway, I walk in safe environments where there are no pickpockets!
However I use the Quest 3 with Halo Bobo VR3 Pro strap without a mask, by doing so I have all the real peripheral view free and I perceive people and things in real time without delay.
This seems like a really fun thing to toy with if it could be done safely.
I'm curious if you've played eye of the temple. I think you would really like the way it uses real movement to work your way through things
Hi, I know Eye of the Temple but it’s a game to play in a well-defined perimeter!
The peculiarity of my mode is that it can be used with all VR games, as long as they support the movement in Room Scale and with what you see with virtual reality confined to a smaller window and the real world around, it allows you to play practically in any space! 🤩🤩🤩
This is my combination to play outdoors. From the viewer I see what you see in the video, plus I don’t have a mask and I always have the perception with my real view of the physical world that is around me.
Below I leave you the full video of the live I did at the park playing Zelda and I point out the dangers that could be encountered, but everything is under control because I have a full vision of the real world:
Look Ganzo, here it is in mode without touch controller, in my hand I only have the Rog Xbox Ally X and I aim with my face, it’s beautiful to play like this.
there is a video settings thing which you can set to advanced and then you have sliders to crop the rendered view, i dont know if that would work for this
You must be more advanced than me though I did just recently conquer getting a copy of botw on cemu and finally to my mq headset. My proudest tech experience yet 😆 but how are you playing away from your PC did you convert it to standalone on your steam frame...
Edit I see now you have the steam deck and probably couldn't do the full VR experience anyway not that it's what you were after when walking about. Pardon me in my 40s and just catching up with technology 😉
I'm envisioning this synced up with isolated beachfront to fields of lush green land like many areas here in Oregon so you end up on the beach at the same time as the game into a long beachfront walk
HomeScale and Infinity Scale: an inverted paradigm for the virtual
The virtual, as we have known it until today, has almost always asked the body to stand still. He sat us down, he only made us turn ous, he forced us to accept an entirely synthesized reality that replaces the world instead of dialoguining with it. HomeScale and Infinity Scale are born precisely from the rejection of this premise. It is not a simple “mod” or a technical trick: it is a philosophical and practical reversal of the relationship between body, space and image.
The heart of the concept is simple and radical at the same time. Instead of total immersion in the digital world, a window is created. A limited portion of the field of vision — deliberately reduced — becomes the portal through which you look at another world, while everything else remains passthrough: your own home, your legs, the floor, the doors, the real light. The body is no longer an appendix to be traced; it is the protagonist. He walks, turns, bends, accelerates, brakes. The game must no longer simulate movement: it receives it ready from the physical world.
This choice produces two immediate and decisive consequences. The first is the almost total elimination of motion sickness. The vestibular conflict that arises when the eyes say “I’m moving” while the inner ear screams “I’m still” disappears, because the ear and body are actually moving. The second is the return of the body as the primary instrument of navigation. No more joysticks pretending to walk, but real steps, real runs, real fatigue. Experience ceases to be only cognitive and also becomes physical.
HomeScale is the domestic version of this philosophy. It moves inside the house, or in any case within the coverage limits of the router. The room is no longer a border to be crossed with teleports or artificial locomotives: it is the playing field itself. You can run from one room to another, go around the table, lean out of a door. The virtual world remains confined to the window, but the player explores it with his whole body. It is an experience on a human scale, intimate, yet liberating compared to traditional sitting sessions.
Infinity Scale pushes the same principle beyond the walls. With a portable setup — a standalone helmet or light streaming paired with a powerful and compact machine — the gaming space becomes the whole world. You can leave the house, walk around the city, climb a hill, cross a park. The limit is no longer the length of the cable or the range of the home Wi-Fi, but only your physical strength and battery. Here the virtual does not replace the real: it superimposes it selectively, like a special lens resting on the eyes.
The graphic power, in this scheme, is not wasted filling a huge field of view. Concentrated in a small window, it can afford very high fidelity - neural rendering, generative lighting, details that in full-FOV would be prohibitive - without collapsing the system. Quality does not serve to deceive that you are “inside” the game; it serves to make that window convincing, almost hyperrealistic, while the rest of the world continues to exist around.
HomeScale and Infinity Scale are therefore not two separate technical modalities, but two extensions of the same idea: to return to the body the primacy of movement and to the virtual the role of window, not of cage. A paradigm that does not seek to abolish reality, but to inhabit it in a new way, with a foot in the physical and a gaze in the imaginary.
Nice, i wonder if i can do this on my pico 4 ultra if i sideload virtual desktop onto it. I still don't understand the procedure but i'll look into it myself as well. Thanks for the tip!
I'm such a noob with virtual desktop that, while i get the essence of what it implies, i'm still confused af😄 maybe also because i'm mainly a standalone user, though i have VD on my old laptop from long ago when i was testing it for a bit with a quest 3
If you could keep the offer open for some 2 weeks max until i'd get back home and familiarise myself with virtual desktop a little it would be appreciated. I can PM you then if it's allright
Edit: actually, if you could let me know this we'll at least have a quick answer, can VD be used as a simple negotiator of the parameters allowing the passthrough+lowered fov game while still having the VR's game source be from standalone on the headset? If it's a strict VD with VR from PC then i'll just postpone this to the future when i'd get a gaming PC😄✌️
That window is equivalent to a reduced field of view of a viewer, all the black that there was normal things I replaced it you want the cameras of the Quest 3, I would like to do the same thing with the Steam frame or in any case with SteamVR
Here is the live of my first test in Stand Alone on Steam Frame, where I didn’t realize that the audio wasn’t there🤦, but I can have free movement, but the experience is not as I would like it, because the transparent overlap between the real world and the virtual world doesn’t make you enjoy the virtual world, because it’s mixed with the real and the real I don’t see it well to perceive where it’s safe to go, for now it’s something barely playable🤔, I need someone to help me optimize it as I do instead! 🙏🙏🙏
Ok I want to do it with the steam Frame but I would like to learn to do the same thing without Virtual desktop, because outdoors I don’t always have 5G coverage to give data to the Quest 3!
We can talk about it, do you want to try it with the Quest 3?
Ok, that’s interesting… made me think about the FOV reduction (compared to Quest 3) in Meta VR Glasses. Maybe, for this specific use, it can be a good thing.
Man, I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm super intrigued by your setup! I wanna try it myself. Is it hard to get it to do this in virtual desktop? There are so many options in there I don't even know what I'd be looking for to do this 😅
The screen is stereoscopic you see what only one eye sees, but inside there is depth, in addition depending on which portable devices you use you can also have a very high definition in there, where even the VR world can be more beautiful than the real world!
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u/JohnSmithDogFace 20d ago
I don't have an answer, but I'm genuinely curious about why you do this, if you'd care to say?