Everyone knows that outside-in tracking is just better for VR gaming.
It's faster, more accurate, and it's more reliable. Well, here's the thing.
Valve isn't everyone, and the new Steam Frame took my expectations of a lousy, flaky experience
in a standalone VR headset with camera-based positional tracking and blew them away.
They also blew away my expectations for their new Steam Machine and Steam Controller,
but that's a separate video. We'll have that linked down below. In two words or less, this thing is impossibly good, and, maybe more importantly, impossibly versatile.
They managed to make it lighter, more comfortable, and higher fidelity than the OG Index for PC VR gaming.
They managed to bolt an ARM-based computer to it that runs mobile VR games and applications.
You can even just sideload an Android APK, and the whole thing runs freaking Steam OS
with a new element to their proton compatibility layer called PEX that allows you to play desktop VR games.
I'm talking x86 Windows VR games on your ARM, Linux, VR headset.
I would might drop this, but I think I'd get in trouble. The last part I wouldn't believe if I didn't experience it for myself,
but they did all of this with latency that is indistinguishable from the best VR experiences that I've had.
But is it indistinguishable from the best segue I've ever had to our sponsor?
Frame is a fundamental shift for Valve. Rather than being an accessory for your gaming PC,
it's meant to be a standalone device that can also be enjoyed alongside your PC using wireless streaming for VR,
which sounds horrible, but somehow it's not.
Let's take a closer look at the hardware. Then we can talk about how they did it.
The headset that I'm holding is actually made up of multiple components.
The core module contains the actual computer and weighs under 190 grams.
Then next is an audio module that can be detached with three clips under the foam gasket.
Then there's the head strap and a battery pack that is cleverly positioned at the back
to help counterbalance the device's improving comfort and also to make it a little bit easier
to cable manage if you wanted to have an external battery pack.
The optics are simply put flipping incredible, like other leading headsets.
They're using pancake lenses, but unlike some other headsets that use pancake lenses,
there was very little in the way of internal reflections visible in the demo applications that I use today.
It is possible that with brighter light sources, it could show up a bit more,
but that's going to be something that I'll have to save for the full review.
What I can tell you is that under each lens is a 2160 x 2160 LCD display
that's capable of anywhere from 72 Hertz, presumably for power saving,
up to 120 Hertz with a 144 Hertz experimental mode, just like we had on the Valve Index.
As for why Valve decided to use LCD rather than OLED,
it basically came down to the light losses due to the pancake lenses.
Since I'm pointing at them, on the inside of each lens,
maybe you can even see them if you went cross-eyed enough, is an eye tracker that's obviously going to be great for social VR experiences,
but perhaps more importantly enables Valve to do what they call foviated streaming,
which I'm going to have to explain later because it gets a little in the weeds.
First, let's take a look at the controllers. Valve fully acknowledges that these are very similar to other designs in the market,
but they wanted something that was both great for VR and also great for your non-VR applications
if you just want to use your headset as a giant virtual display.
And they still managed to add some Valve touches to them,
putting capacitive sensing on all input surfaces and on the grips,
so you can still do five-finger tracking just like the Knuckles controllers from the Valve Index.
They have two-stage actuating triggers, two-stage actuating grips,
which unlocks a ton of control customization. They use the same magnetic thumbstick as the new Steam controller for better reliability
and a very small dead zone, and they each have their own independent gyros that can be rebound for aiming or whatever you want.
I can't tell if they were being suggested there, given the popularity of certain VR applications,
but I can't say for sure that they weren't. Both controllers have an integrated IMU to track positional data
and 18 infrared LEDs that can be tracked by the four high-field-of-view cameras
that are integrated into the frame's core module. These were strategically positioned so that even if you were, say for example, drawing an arrow from a quiver,
it should be able to maintain tracking. Now, I didn't get a chance to try that, nor did I get to fire up Beat Saber,
my favorite application for evaluating controller tracking under extreme conditions,
but from just shaking them around in the menu, they seem to track extremely well.
Valve is claiming about 40 hours of battery life off of a single AA,
and this battery compartment is a perfect transition into the customizability that's on display with this headset.
They're going to have an optional accessory kit that includes knuckle straps for the controller,
as well as a second head strap with a top Velcro piece if you like a bit of additional support.
I personally liked it better, but I also didn't feel like it was necessary,
like it is on the much heavier Apple Vision Pro. There's a lot more to customize on the frame itself, too.
It includes a spacer gasket for folks with long eyelashes,
and to improve compatibility with glasses, but Valve fully acknowledges that not everyone will want to use that,
because it does take away a little bit from their claimed about 110-degree field of view,
so they are working on prescription lenses for the headset itself.
We even saw a box of them, but there's no specific timeline on that.
IPD adjustments are handled with a little knob on the top that spins a cog on the core module,
and this is really cool. Right between the goggles at the bottom here is an expansion port
that allows up to two 2.5 gigabit mippy cameras,
or a single camera with a PCIe Gen 4 by one slot,
allowing all kinds of possibilities for additional accessories,
like if you wanted color cameras, for instance. The built-in ones are only monochromatic,
or if you wanted, I don't know, a smell sensor.
The sky's the limit. Since we're on the subject of the cameras, Valve says that they will work for inside outtracking even in pitch darkness thanks to IR emitters
that are built into the headset itself, and you can expect tracking performance on the order of about 200 to 250 updates per second,
which is about on par with the Valve Index.
Not something that I expected. Now that I've had a chance to gather my thoughts and eat some crappy airport food,
let's talk about how Valve is delivering a PCVR-like experience wirelessly
when big names like Apple and Meta have tried and never really succeeded.
It starts with the least interesting looking part, this 6 GHz Wi-Fi dongle.
Valve built the headset with two radios and two antennas for Wi-Fi,
along with a third dedicated antenna for your controllers or your Bluetooth peripherals.
One of those Wi-Fi antennas handles 5 GHz for your game downloads,
your multiplayer data, your voice chat, etc. The other one connects to a very high-end home router,
or more likely, Valve's dongle using the so far mostly unused 6 GHz band.
This is a perfect use case for 6 GHz,
since it lacks the wall penetration that you might want for home Wi-Fi,
but it excels at avoiding 2.4 and 5 GHz channel congestion
while pushing huge amounts of bandwidth. With that said, while the theoretical maximum is right up there with wired connections,
in the real world it falls well short of that, so what's the secret?
Foveated streaming. Seeing this in action blew my flipping mind.
Basically, the idea behind it is similar to foveated rendering,
where the headset tracks your eyes and tells your GPU,
hey, only render the area of focus at full fidelity
and save your resources on the rest of the scene. It's a technique that's been used to great effect on the handful of PSVR2 titles that exist,
but has been largely untapped on the PC side,
largely because it depends on game developers to implement it.
And also, most headsets don't have built-in eye tracking, so why would they bother?
Foveated streaming then. Again, same idea.
Focus your resources wherever the eyes are looking.
Except in this case, it's not the GPU saving on rendering resources,
it's the video encoding stream saving on bitrate.
So you get crystal clear, high bitrate encoding,
exactly where your eyes are looking, and then a little bit blurry everywhere else.
At least in theory, in practice it reacted so fast
that no matter how quickly I tried to move my eyes, I wasn't able to catch it.
But I also don't feel too bad about that. Valve put on an incredible demo for me in Half-Life Alyx,
where they highlighted the maximum fidelity window as I was looking around.
And even though they say it's only about 10% of the total video stream,
it ends up being a pretty large window, wild as for the encoding latency.
Well, thanks to some clever parallelization of the encoding,
you can expect anywhere from 1-2 milliseconds of extra latency on a modern GPU
and 4-5 for a slightly older but still VR-capable one.
Not enough to notice or to contribute to significant motion sickness.
And it keeps getting better. I managed to get almost 50 feet away from the dongle
without a noticeable difference in the experience. Now, granted, this is still line of sight,
but it's a lot further than I can get with a tether.
Now, I did bring up the possibility of more than one of these devices
causing interference with each other. And Valve said that while they have operated multiple headsets concurrently in the same space,
they haven't explored more demanding use cases like packed VR cafes.
Moving on to audio, the built-in solution is both incredibly impressive
and also a little disappointing. I'm impressed by the audio quality.
They apparently had to use opposing drivers to cancel out the vibrations
to make sure that the inside-out tracking wouldn't get messed up, and they sound fantastic.
As for the mic, I didn't get a chance to test it, but Valve assured me that the mics should carry on the index's incredible reputation
for stellar microphone performance. I'm disappointed because I literally had the engineer who worked on the index
and this new headset in the room with me, and when I asked her for a gaming headset with all this same audio black magic,
she just shrugged. So, sorry, y'all.
I tried. In all seriousness, the speakers don't fire directly into your ears,
so there is a bit more sound bleed than with the index, but it doesn't seem like a game breaker,
depending on what you're watching and who's around. The last couple of experiences I want to talk about are a huge deal
whether you plan to use them or not. The first is FEX, an open-source project that Valve has been contributing,
and this is a quote, quite heavily to.
It's a translation layer that allowed me to experience
a completely standard Windows x86 game,
Hades 2 in this case, running directly on the hardware on the frame.
I'm talking x86 code designed to run on Windows,
running on a Snapdragon 8650 running Linux.
Holy freaking mind-blown.
They're planning a compatibility list, a la great-on-deck for the future.
But wait a second, running on Linux? Yeah, Valve's been busy porting SteamOS to ARM.
How did they drop so much news on one day?
The frame does everything that you know and love about SteamOS,
like fast suspend and resume and performance overlays,
except on your VR headset directly.
And as I mentioned briefly in the intro, if you blinked you might have missed it.
With this new ARM processor comes the ability to, supposedly,
run Android APKs by directly side-loading them onto the Steam frame.
And given how many VR experiences are designed to run on mobile devices,
this is a colossal win. And with Valve's commitment to putting microSD card slots on all their devices,
it can't be too hard to install. Now, there are still some areas where the frame doesn't seem to be industry-leading.
The light seal isn't perfect, especially if you compare it to the Beyond 2 with its custom 3D printed gasket.
The pass-through cameras, they're just monochromes, so don't expect to be wearing your frame out and about
like people did with the Apple Vision Pro for the first week or so.
From my very brief and admittedly not side-by-side experience,
it's also not the highest clarity nor highest dynamic range display I've ever seen,
and it's not as light or compact as, say, the big screen Beyond 2.
But it's the overall package that should have the entire rest of the industry stopping and going,
how did Valve, who, as of 2021, supposedly had less than 350 employees,
manage to outmaneuver monsters like Meta, who spent 17.7 billion on Reality Labs just last fiscal year?
I would ask Gayben how it happened, but I'm pretty sure he's busy on his yacht.
All I know is that I want one, whether it's for wireless PC gaming,
native gaming on the road with minimal bulk in my bag, or even just relaxing on the couch watching movies on the big screen.
What kind of sucker needs a big TV when this thing exists?
So, with the frame clearly taking the place of the Index and Valve's lineup,
what happens to all the users of the Index and, maybe more importantly,
the third-party ecosystem that exists around its base stations and knuckles controllers?
The short answer is the Index is EOL. But the long answer is Valve would love to see other players in the VR space approach them
about continuing to support or even continuing to manufacture these devices.
Whether that'll happen, I don't know, but at least Valve is open to the conversation.
If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out part two on the Steam Machine,
as well as the new 2026 edition of the Valve Steam Controller.
Mind-blowing stuff today. I can't believe they blindsided me with this.
They're like, come down, we'll tell you nothing. You have four hours to do everything.
Nyaaah!