Valve Announces the Steam Frame VR Headset
Competition is good, we've been a bit lacking in VR options lately.
Valve have announced the Steam Frame.
It's a mobile headset running on a Snapdragon SOC (similar to Quests). It's also got wireless streaming (with a few interesting tricks) and uses 4 camera inside out tracking with inbuilt IR LED illuminators for dark rooms.
Here's the specs.
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU (more powerful than the Quest 3 Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2).
- 16GB ram.
- Micro sd card slot for up to 1TB storage.
- Back of the head mounted battery pack.
- 2160x2160 per eye LCD screens.
- 72-144Hz refresh.
- Pancake lenses.
- 60-70mm IPD
- 110 degree fov (so similar to Quest 3).
- Four monochrome IR cameras for inside out tracking and controller tracking.
- It can do pass through video, but only monochrome.
- Two eye tracking cameras.
- IR illuminators to light up dark rooms for tracking.
- Expansion port (maybe this could do better than USB 2.0? Don't know)
- Dual wifi 7. One wifi (5GHz) for internet, another separate wifi (6GHz) for streaming video audio from PC. (So internet doesn't affect your stream quality)
- Comes with a 6GHz wifi 6e dongle.
- 440g (the Quest 3 is 515g).
- Runs SteamOS instead of Android.
- Has a PC emulator, you can run PC Windows games standalone on the headset without a PC (probably very limited performance).
- Controllers copied from the Quest series, including using AA batteries. Slight different is the left controller has a dpad and the right controller has ABXY buttons and index finger trigger and bumper on each, so it can fully mimic a gamepad.
- Capacitive finger tracking on the handles.
One interesting feature is Foveated Streaming. It uses eye tracking to prioritise streaming pixels where you are looking. (Foveated Rendering helps with FPS, but not streaming quality)
It probably isn't going to handle USB streaming. The specs say the only USB port on it is only rated at USB 2.0.
So we have a very interesting Quest 3 competitor. Slightly lower pixel count (4.5 vs 4.6 MP of the Quest 3), more powerful CPU/GPU, expandable storage, optimisations like foveated streaming and dual wifi to give the better PCVR, controllers that have feature parity with console controllers, lighter, better weight distribution with rear battery, and pancake lenses.
On the other hand, it can't do colour pass through and the cameras don't match your eye position, so it's going to be like a Quest 2 with monochrome and reprojected distortion (hopefully higher res though).
It's running Linux (SteamOS), so it's going to be far more open than Meta's headsets (look at the stuff Google is trying to lock down in Android to stop side loading). Also no social media account, so you aren't going to get banned from VR because somebody hacked your instagram (this forum has had years of complaints about how the accounts get tied together and Meta still can't fix it).
I hope when they copied the Quest controllers they didn't copy the misalignment Meta did.
No prices announced yet. It will come out early 2026. Best news (I'm sure you were all wondering), Australia is getting them on day 1, no waiting years like for the Index.
Unless I hear something really bad, I'll definitely add one to my VR collection. Although I haven't read any reviews yet (been working), so maybe it sucks. :)
Edit: From the Gamers Nexus video on it... turns out the Steam Controller (the new one not the old one) has IR LEDs in it so the Frame can track the gamepad position. That's cool.
Another detail, the Frame has a PCIe Gen 4 expansion port (above the nose gap) that they say can handle dual camera feeds using 8 lanes at 2.5 Gbps. That sounds like there could be an optional colour passthrough addon.