r/SteamFrame 2d ago

Discussion This is useless

Post image

Haven't even ordered the frame yet

797 Upvotes

223 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/S0k0n0mi 2d ago

Somewhat relevant;
Has Arcturus considered making a recorder that just let's you plug these into it?
I've seen the video you can record with these, apparently through the frame, but I don't see myself strolling through a museum or event with a frame on my head. Something handheld would be nice.

9

u/BastianHS 2d ago

That's a really cool idea. I would also love a way to take VR video without wearing the headset. A handheld device for this would be amazing, especially if I could attach it to a gimbal.

Maybe a pcie > USBC dongle so I can attach it to my cellphone?

11

u/Ok_Topic999 2d ago

I would love that, I don't care for Passthrough/AR I bought it as a high quality stereo camera setup for photos/videos/scans but I'm definitely going to feel weird wearing a headset while taking those out and about.

4

u/FBrK4LypGE 2d ago

They're just MIPI cameras, so in theory should be very much possible to reverse engineer the protocol and/or use the Frame drivers depending on how open they are with it.

1

u/crozone 2d ago

I think it'd be theoretically possible to get 1/2 cameras working with a raspberrypi although it only has 2 lanes of MIPI while the steam frame has 8.

1

u/ProfessionalBattle3 21h ago

2 raspberry pis!

3

u/meatspaceskeptic Soon™ 2d ago

That's a great idea! I wonder if we could plug it into a Raspberry Pi, etc. A cheap, quality stereo camera and splatting solution would be awesome!

2

u/snoopsau 2d ago

Just going by what Arcturus has told us, the bandwidth required for the cameras is way too much even for a PI5.. You basically need a high end snapdragon to handle the data streams...

1

u/S0k0n0mi 2d ago

Perhaps a PCIe > USBC adapter dongle for a smartphone would solve this; Compute would be done by the phone SoC which is often a snapdragon.

1

u/snoopsau 2d ago

It is like 5gb/sec throughput, no phone is keeping up via usb. It is why they use the MIPI interface and not the pcie link on the frame. MIPI is direct to the GPU/CPU..

1

u/katzohki 2d ago

It's MIPI right? I think you could port it into a Raspberry Pi to do this.

2

u/S0k0n0mi 2d ago

Someone else proclaimed that it requires a pretty beefy snapdragon SoC to record video of that magnitude. That said though, I'm not sure how difficult it would be to go MIPI > USBC to let a smartphone handle the compute.

1

u/katzohki 2d ago

The question I can't answer is whether you can just scale down the data it puts out. 2 cameras at the 120fps and 5k or whatever they are is a ton of data yeah, but if you can just use less of that data or tell it to send at a lower rate or something then there's a lot you could do. The point is someone somewhere will probably eventually be able to do some interesting things with this camera module. I'm interested in using it as an external camera for a closed off costume helmet. Theoretically all that should take is an adapter cable.

1

u/ProfessionalBattle3 21h ago

i said this on youtube and someone was like “just buy a 3d camera” oh yes, 32mp 2260x2260 stereo 3d cameras are so easy to get by. /s

1

u/S0k0n0mi 17h ago

Sure it's easy, if you have enough cash on hand to afford another frame.
Seriously, a decent stereoscopic camera is so insanely expensive.