SteamOS-powered headset sports semi-modular design, wireless "low-latency" PC streaming.
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Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
F*ck yeah! Lets goooooo!
Edit: my poor Gen1 lighthouses will hopefully finally be put to rest. I hope the inside-out tracking is good enough that tracking is pretty on par, but we'll have to see.
Edit: my poor Gen1 lighthouses will hopefully finally be put to rest. I hope the inside-out tracking is good enough that tracking is pretty on par, but we'll have to see.
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ManosTheHandsOfFate
Smack-Fu Master, in training
I strongly suspect I won't have enough disposable income for this, but it does look cool.
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Last year I was thinking about making the jump to VR. I didn't want to give money to Meta and some of the other options were just ho-hum. The Valve Index was still rated well, but the longtime rumors of a new version put me into a wait-and-see mode. So, it looks like I will finally take the plunge into VR on 2026.
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You beat me to this post - I'm in exactly the same situation. The Steam Deck is one of my favorite pieces of hardware, so I'm excited to see what Valve has done here. Years ago I promised myself I wouldn't buy yet another version of Skyrim. Well fuck.
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The mythical Steam OS based VR headset is finally real.
Damn, I wish I hadn't lost interest in VR several years ago. They're going to need to bundle Alyx 2 with this or something, because as amazing as Elite: Dangerous is in VR, there hasn't been any worthwhile games for it since, well, Alyx, back in 2020.
Damn, I wish I hadn't lost interest in VR several years ago. They're going to need to bundle Alyx 2 with this or something, because as amazing as Elite: Dangerous is in VR, there hasn't been any worthwhile games for it since, well, Alyx, back in 2020.
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Really wish they had made a cheaper, lighter, more comfortable version without the internal computer for those of us who would never use it.
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This looks like it might be my first VR device. The Steam Deck is so good, so reliable. They’ve earned a lot of good will in my household and seems like they’ve really dialed in a tinkerer-friendly, but mass-market-accessible, low setup required hardware philosophy that really works for me.
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That kinda sucks. I'd much rather have a headset with absolute minimal latency and no battery concerns than one whose useful life is tied to a battery that will inevitably go bad and a wireless standard that will inevitably be outdated in a couple years. That said, the pickings in VR these days are slim if you don't want to give Meta money, so assuming it's not PiMax expensive I'll probably give this thing a chance.
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Hmmm... maybe my VPX pinball dreams will come true with ValveCube + Steam Frame.
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I'd have preferred an updated wired headset over this. Improve the performance, specs, screen quality without adding all the cost of the onboard processing and wireless hardware.
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As an Index owner, it's pretty fantastic. Once this comes out, I guarantee there will be a flood of Indexes (Indices?) coming on the used market so if you're VR curious but not entirely sure if you want to invest heavily in the hobby, you might want to grab one of those at that point. The Index is still a great device, the biggest flaw IMHO is in the controller batteries eventually wearing out.
Speaking of, I REALLY hope Valve has thought more about battery replacement for this device. Especially given that the headeset itself is now battery-dependent it'll be really angering if this becomes a piece of junk in 1-2 years just because the batteries wore out.
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They must be crazy confident in the wireless tech if they aren't letting you plug it in. If they really have it all figured out, then this will be awesome, but even though it's Valve, I'll be waiting for reviews.
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The hardware is less capable than the Meta Quest 3 (B&W passthrough instead of color, etc.). I would be shocked if it wasn't something like $499 or $399. The specs seem tailored to hit that price point and compete with Meta's offerings. $499 seems quite realistic, but if Valve wants to be aggressive with pushing VR something like $399 is plausible.
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Agreed with other commenters here that what this is missing is a "system seller" title, something like HL3 would obviously help, but there hasn't been a big showcase for VR since 2020's HL: Alyx and nothing that's really come close since. A super cool device, but a very niche market.
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Been waiting for a VR frontrunner that isn't a sleazebag company to materialize before jumping in, and it's been a looong wait. Maybe the water's warmed up enough to finally take the plunge...
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Wait, so it runs traditional games using SteamOS, but it's running an ARM SoC? Does that mean Valve has SteamOS and Proton working on ARM?
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Other than the foveated streaming, what is amazing me is how this is SteamOS running games on ARM... how the hell is that working??? That opens up steam to so many new devices potentially.
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I've wanted a headset for PC usage without base stations for a long time, but I've always held off because I wanted to see what Valve would come up with. I was confident that it would be better than the alternatives on the market.
However, the lack of wired operation makes me very concerned. My previous experience streaming VR content over Wifi was atrocious, with dropped frames everywhere and unacceptable input lag. Has streaming tech really advanced far enough that that's a thing of the past?
Also, the article says it comes with a wifi 6 dongle for your PC. Will the signal be going directly from the PC to the headset, no router involved at all?
However, the lack of wired operation makes me very concerned. My previous experience streaming VR content over Wifi was atrocious, with dropped frames everywhere and unacceptable input lag. Has streaming tech really advanced far enough that that's a thing of the past?
Also, the article says it comes with a wifi 6 dongle for your PC. Will the signal be going directly from the PC to the headset, no router involved at all?
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I'm not sure interested in VR but this is the part that interests me most. If they have SteamOS on ARM then I can only hope for Switch 2 homebrew to eventually get SteamOS on it and become a makeshift Steam Deck.
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Would love to see the knuckles controllers work here at some point. Those things are epic.
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If their new Foveated Streaming tech can bridge the gap between zero-latency wired options, and latency/lag-prone wireless options, this will be the headset for VR gaming. Now we need more full-featured VR games! There's Alyx, and that viking one, but what else?
We need these FMV CYOA-style games to go the VR route.
We need these FMV CYOA-style games to go the VR route.
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Will not be more expensive than the Index per Valve, so hopefully decently affordable
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That was the part that stood out to me also. Not sure what it means for the industry at large...unless - could Valve be planning Proton on the Mac too? Codeweavers are great and all but there are a ton of games that aren't supported while Proton's support is incredibly broad.
Also, my Windows Mixed Reality headset doesn't work properly on Linux yet and even Microsoft has left us behind with Windows 11. This could be the headset for me since I'm not going back to Windows just to play my VR titles.
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As someone who would have bought a Quest 3 for PC streaming and some standalone gaming, but haven't because Meta sucks, this is almost an instabuy for me.
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I would really bet that this is a direct dongle-to-headset connection. Addition of a router would lead to additional, effectively unnecessary, additional transmission delay from an intermediary device and there really is no point to that if a direct connection can be made (it's not like you're expecting to have to have some packets go to other devices). Hopefully they've figured out a way to deal with Wifi traffic congestion and packet loss in a robust fashion.
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Perfect, I hadn't even seen that video yet! It also looks like there's a USB port for charging, that should mean that when the internal battery starts to go you can use a external USB battery bank to run the device.
Damnit Valve! Let me give you my money now shakes money in fist!
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In this video:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7q2CS8HDHU&t=1080s
(time indexed at the relevant part)
They explicitly say if you have good enough home networking, you can use it via Wifi.
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I wonder how they're going to get "traditional Steam games" to run on Snapdragon. I'm guessing they have a x86 translation layer?
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At a basic level it's just more hardware platform independence, well as much as Arm is these days, relative to being stuck with Intel or AMD at least. For Valve specifically, perhaps it opens the door to an Arm Steam Deck for next gen. Or other Steam Machines powered by Arm even.
I'm a Mac user myself so thought of that too when the rumors were swirling around a while back. Roughly speaking, would Proton work at the user land level (a la Wine), or does it need to be more a system level thing? If the latter I was thinking they could just roll a whole SteamOS virtual machine.
Yeah it was mentioned a bit up thread, FEX. It's an existing project they've apparently been investing and presumably contributing to:
https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
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