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: 
So a steam machine.
A very compact, portable steam machine.
With battery too
Just makes me think of Voidstar Labs. It sounds useless as a gimmick, it involves 3D printing, and it could turn an entire gaming device into wearable tech. Amazing.
Someone send this to Zack.
How are these glasses? Any good?
That actually is something that I’ve been contemplating doing. I never use the built-in display - HMD glasses are just much nicer.
Recommendations?
Previously, I’d have recommended Xreal Air but the company is allergic to open-source and doesn’t have a great track record of supporting their own software. At the moment, Viture seems a better bet, from those that I’m aware of. For screen replacement, the high pixels-per-degree of birdbath optics, like both use, are extremely advantageous and cause much less eye strain. And that’s while being far cheaper than waveguides or pancake optics.
Thanks!
A slight modification as I have new information: If you can justify it, the Xreal One might be worthwhile as they have added an ASIC to do away when the buggy software and dongle nonsense. Still not super open-source friendly (they’re not actively hostile either) but that seems to solve my biggest issue with the experience. They seem to have better quality optics as well.
I may end up getting a pair of those to replace my Nreal Airs that are held together with tape and CA glue (I’m unfortunately hard on my electronics).
No problem! My “dream” HMD would be birdbath optics with ~2k displays for each eye and probably some simple hardware upscaling. The glasses being “dumb” is a real perk. Doubling the pixels/° would make the experience that much better.
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.
Reminds me of mods like the GameCube Nano. I dunno if it’s possible, but it would be kinda cool if someone figured out how to shrink the Deck further.
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?
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.
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.
Every day we stray further from the light …
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.
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.
I say “”””yes”””” you might disagree. Here’s my findings https://startrek.website/comment/13646875
The PS4 could drive VR. I suspect this would be similar. A bit fuzzy, crap framerate in places.
You could run the simpler games like Beat Saber well enough.
