Steam Frame starts at $1059 | Hacker News Reader

Steam Frame starts at $1059

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745 pointsbsimpson649 comments

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

This machine runs Linux, it comes with KDE. This is the open Apple Vision Pro alternative that you can use as a real computer.

It comes with a black and white passthrough camera but you can add on a 5K color one.

There's ongoing work for a full Plasma XR mode, so you aren't restricted to a "virtual desktop" experience: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8671

I think even that's an understatement.

My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.

And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.

(edit: shameless plug for my recent, longer writeup on this @ bhmt.dev/blog/frame)

You can do this really well on $200 AR headsets that fit on your face like sunglasses and uses the battery of the device it's plugged into to last many hours.

If this is the biggest point, then I don't see why Xreal isn't more popular.

Admittedly my VR glasses are older, but for me this is a really terrible experience. If a game lacks native VR support, it's far more comfortable to just use my widescreen monitor in the real world.

I don’t see that as the biggest point. I really don’t have much interest in playing normal games in VR.

I could see how a kid might want that on Quest when they don’t have their own TV. And it might be nice on a plane.

But $1000 is a lot for that. I know people say that watching video in the Vision Pro is really nice, I wasn’t that thrilled when I tried it, but it felt to me more like a “you can do this because you have the hardware“ not a “this is why you buy it” feature.

> You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment

I can already run 100% of my Steam games on a flat screen in front of my real eyes

Honestly as a VR enthusiast this is the least interesting feature by far.

If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.

I was really hoping to realise the "Spatial Computing" dream of the Vision Pro, but was largely priced-out of the experience, considering it basically necessitates a MacBook to complete it too.

I would wager a simple browser and terminal session is probably all I need, so was looking forward to this device. However, the screen resolution is likely to be too small, I had done some experiments with Virtual Desktop, but the Rift S was too low-res, everything had to be like 48pt.

Reviews showing the desktop being fully accessible, does give quite a bit of hope, however.

How long is that comfortable? For sure not couple of hours in 1 go

Let's ignore that fact that you're saying "this isn't just a VR device" and then immediately describe the basic functionality of a VR device.

You really think people have been waiting to drop $1k for a device that lets them play games designed for a monitor inside of a headset rendering a larger virtual monitor with all of the additional complexity that brings?

I think its performance is quite underappreciated. It has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.

I have a tiny handheld with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and among many other things it plays GTA V and RDR2 almost perfectly, using FEX nonetheless. And because it's arm, battery life is so much better than on my laptop that I use it as a tiny mini linux laptop now.

Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.

Yes, this ability at this price point is very attractive indeed. I currently do this with Vision Pro, but it involves a mac and a capture card in addition to the steam deck.

That sounds like a worse experience to me.

They are simply uncomfortable for that. That is a niche for a niche use case.

Except far less comfortable and motion sick inducing for a non-trivial portion of the population. No thanks.

HL Alyx was awesome though, nothing else on VR has been worth it for me.

That's already true for most PC VR headsets.

Edit: I missed the point here, see reply.

You may not realise that we are currently in the midst of a VR Mod rennaisance:

https://pcvrcentral.com/

Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS. Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently.

I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home.

There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset only a month ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRGaming/

Interesting, a lot of cool mods including Mass Effect Trilogy. Thx for sharing this.

That seems like a really good fit, since they might actually run onboard at a usable framerate?

I played a few hours of Alyx and, I'll be honest, it started to kinda freak me out. I noticed myself getting a bit of anxiety when putting the headset on to play, and a relief when I took it off to see the real world was still there! I've never experienced something so immersive, but I haven't picked it back up to finish it yet. Someday.

I also still mini golf regularly. It's such a fun, low effort way to hang out with friends and family that we wouldn't otherwise see all that often.

I used to feel like that when I was younger and playing intense games, it was hard to "get out" and "come back to real life". I guess VR brings some of that back.

I know that feeling. I had it with Resident Evil 4 and other full games in VR. It's almost too immersive and I can't play more than an hour or so.

Even though its fairly cartoonish, when you see the life size gore of dead bodies with face huggers on them, etc - it hits really different in VR, at least at first.

Now imagine how intense that will become with even more realism. It could be actually seriously traumatic.

I said it when it came out, Alyx was the single best chance VR had to prove itself. It was going to be either the launching pad of the future or the high tide mark. 6 years on, it is looking like the high tide mark.

Unfortunately, it is a technical and artistic marvel but the relatively high cost to entry (decent PC and headset) meant that it was simply out of reach for most people. A high price takes it from an impulse purchase to try, and makes it a dedicated purchase and investment in the ecosystem. That killed any momentum.

I really suggest looking a bit into VRChat for some of the worlds people have created there - some of them are very complex & are telling stories by their environments that could be comparable to standalone VR games.

For some examples - PROJECT: SUMMER FLARE: https://vrclist.com/world/2924

Complex 7: https://vrclist.com/world/870431 (and Fins worlds in general)

1:1 model of an Oneil Cylinder space colony that cna be fully explored: https://vrclist.com/world/7780 (and Asagiris space/science worlds in general)

Far Future Propulsion˸ Museum of Nuclear Starflight (1:1 models of space propulsion concepts all the way to Project Daedalus) https://vrclist.com/world/1270747

Really, amazing things are being built in VRChat and most people even in the VR community itself are completely ignorant to that. At best they go "LOL SOCIAL VR APP" without actually checking what is possible with modern VRChat.

There needs to be a premium club around vr gaming, like there is for other activities like car/driving enthusiasm.

HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.

The race/flight sim market is still going strong, but I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. It's extremely difficult to make a non-vehicle-based game that actually plays well in VR.

I suspect that the current design of VR/AR is not likely to get cheap enough and light/small enough to catch on in a big way. Kind of seems like diminishing returns on headset improvements at this point.

I had the Oculus DK1, and now have a Meta Quest 2. I haven't had reason to boot it in the past... year?

I love the idea of the Apple Vision Pro 2, but its wildly expensive and it sounds too heavy to wear for very long throughout the day unless you're reclined. I'd just use it for virtual screens for development and in my workshop ideally - but that requires me moving around, and the weight makes that a no-go.

I'm into these things, but they still just aren't there yet- and the ecosystem is still lacking geniune investment beyond HL:A and some cool tech demos.

Until the hardware is ubiquitous it will remain so. But low profile AR/VR glasses that actually look exactly like normal glasses or goggles could bring it back from the dead

TBH in terms of intensity it maybe the best single-player game for me. The experience is so different from non-VR games that I struggle to even put it into the same category.

I'm looking forward to the modding community finally having full, unfettered access to a single hardware deploy target that will allow them to do a lot of interesting work that may be technically possible right now, but is very hard in a complicated and heterogeneous ecosystem, both because it is technically difficult to set up, and because the technical difficulty of doing the set up prevents any community from getting over the activation energy to grow and become self-sustaining.

In particular, I don't know if the Steam Frame will have the power for this, but something like a native ARM build of Dolphin (so no FEX) that exposes the 3D nature of polygonal games is very interesting to me. If you can cross your eyes to get stereo you can see what that would look like for something like Super Mario 3D Galaxy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgdqCL2toE (I find a conventional, unfolding phone to be a pretty good size for that. On a big monitor getting it small enough to cross eyes can be a challenge.) In general any emulation target that has 3D polygons is really interesting to me. I'm also pretty interested in what full 3D does to Skies of Arcadia (could be a complete disappointment, could be absolutely amazing) and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, where I feel like the game that was a bit crowded and struggling with being 2D in SD might just come alive. (Assuming they didn't play too many games with the distance that doesn't work if we see it in true 3D.)

I gather the modding community is already gearing up for modding more games to be true 3D in the VR space. That is, not necessarily VR (though there's a mod community for that as well), but having a visible screen floating in 3D VR space where the screen itself is fully 3D. There is also a wide variety of games from the past couple of decades that I suspect might be very difficult to "convert to VR" but might be relatively easy to trick into rendering full 3D instead of down to 2D.

Nothing really stops any of this from happening now, but I've tried to set it up before and I was unsuccessful with my current stack. Being able to give out instructions that say "Install the Dolphin3D Build from the Flatpak Store and load up your ROMs" rather than the current set of ad hoc complex instructions that I couldn't even get through successfully could be a game changer.

I will giggle like a schoolgirl if the reason why Steam Frames sell like hot cakes in six to twelve months is that they become recognized as the premier way to emulate 3D systems from the Playstation forward. Overclocking, texture packs, modding, all that's great, but how about all those things and true 3D for a lot of games?

Yeah the games I most want to play on VR aren't only old... the servers have been shut down.

I remember playing this on my Oculus Rift 1 I think. It was such a better game than the other games I'd played in VR that had you put it on my head in a darkened room and told me it was the newest hardware tech I would have believed you.

Just the metaphors and "magnetics" for fiddling and dealing with your gun were so good. The conveyance system was also just so much more intuitive. I think they even seemed to have done something to deal with the very mild nausea I felt with some title.

Oh, and the game was fun.

I have a recommendation in a similar vein: Gran Turismo 7 in VR on PS5. I have a headseat graveyard and never really used my headsets except for that game. I've heard good things about Half-Life Alyx and now your comment has me absolutely intrigued.

Simulation games in general reached a whole other level with VR, just the added depth perception makes it impossible to go back to "flat" screens again. The degree of freedom to move your head to look around is underrated as well.

I dove into VR first with X-Plane 11 I think, which was janky at best, but nowadays Microsoft Flight Simulator has really good VR mode, and it's just such a great experience. Spaceflight simulators like Elite Dangerous are quite fun as well, but harder to relate to, so seems my brain doesn't get as fooled as more "real life sims".

Tangentially related: If I wanted to play Half-Life: Alyx, and spend as little money as possible whilst still having a good experience, what do I need? (I already own a beefy desktop computer)

Probably Quest 3S, and unless things have improved with the native solution you'll want to pick up the "Virtual Desktop" app for better wireless streaming.

It's not very good resolution by today's standards but it's the cheap entry point. Quest 3 (non-S) has resolution comparable to the Steam Frame but costs $250 more.

If you only want to use it for streaming, you might look a used Quest 2, which has similar optics and screens as the 3S. I'm not sure the state of software support or whether its worse CPU/GPU matter for streaming performance. But I bet they're very cheap secondhand by now.

I played it with a Quest 1 and VirtualDesktop to steam it from my PC. It worked well enough to blow my mind. Of course a Quest 3 would be much better than that nowadays. That's probably the cheapest good experience.

I played it with Playstation VR2 and it was great, cost me around 350 euros for the headset and the PC dongle during black friday some years ago, but it might be more expensive now.

Quest 1, the built in native streaming, with a wired connection from the beefy desktop to a WiFi 5 AP on 5 GHz in a low noise environment worked sufficiently. I'd get at least a Quest 2 if you're getting something new (not sure if the 3 is better than the 2).

What you want is a headset with fish eye lenses like the Quest 3 (not the S). Yes, it's more expensive, but you will avoid a lot of headaches with the frenel lenses. They are terrible. just buy it used.

https://youtu.be/-NBMdcUTC2M

here's a great video about exactly this, might be outdated as it's 6 years old

I was wondering, what could I play with it. But besides Half-Life Alyx (never played any of HF games), No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous, I couldn't find anything bigger (well, there is also SUPERHOT: VR).

I wonder why there are not that many 3D shooters, or 3D RPGs that use VR. The idea sounds great. Never used any of VR headsets and I was wondering if I should try out Steam Frame and if I don't like it I assume I could resell it later.

Also I wonder how well it would work with my headless linux gaming rig that I use for Game on Whales/Moonlight playing on my 3060ti card.

On the other hand, I still have Steam Deck that I used to play about 3 games total, it is unused besides that. But the initial investment is pretty high (well, it is AFAIR +50% from the Steam Deck 512GB price when I bought)

There are TONS of VR shooters. What subgenre interests you most?

1. Try Google Earth VR if you haven't. I've poured hours into it and it can be an almost emotional experience.

https://youtu.be/SCrkZOx5Q1M

2. There have been some big advances in converting traditional flat games to VR, especially UEVR (for Unreal games) and various custom mods. It takes a bit more work, but the experience is worth it, even for games you've played 1000 times before.

I feel like Valve will sell a lot more Steam Frames if they can get HL Alyx to run well on it and have every Steam Frame come with it.

“Not a lot of games” will soon be a thing of the past once people find out they can just vibe code all kinds of VR games and experiences.

I had the Quest 2 a while ago and did manage to play some games on it (PCVR through Virtual Desktop, cause they didn't have 1st party support for Intel Arc B580).

In regards to shooting games, while some of them were nice (especially modded H3VR, all of the guns you could build etc.), the shooting and movement always felt off - rounds not always going where you'd think they should regardless of the game, aiming being a bit clunky especially with scopes and so on, same with some RPG combat games. I also tried out Into the Radius VR, CONVRGENCE, SUPERHOT VR and Zero Caliber VR. There was something weird going on, like the world scale feeling off and even when adjusting through the SteamVR options, the experience still being odd, no matter what IPD or height offsets or other settings I'd try. Never really got used to it.

But let me tell you, vehicle games were on another level. It's perhaps the best way to fly in War Thunder because the proper depth perception completely changes the feel of it (if they'd fix the damn camera, I don't want to break my neck trying to look far back), same with VTOL VR and racing games like Dirt Rally and even Euro Truck Simulator 2. You'd think I'd get motion sickness or something but no, it just felt good and more proper than staring at a flat screen, despite the limited resolution and all else. Oh and oddly enough Derail Valley also felt nicer than the FPS games, despite you also moving around a bunch (though it's mostly a train game).

VR is definitely a cool novelty, if sadly underpopulated. There was also some cool productivity software like Immersed but they kinda ruined it by removing support for multiple physical monitors and also the Virtual Desktop program and SteamVR won't let you display like 4x1080p monitors all at the same time, what's even the point of being limited to just one or two in VR? You have 360 degrees around you (well, or however much your neck can comfortably do)!

Interesting that Alyx is still listed as "Windows only" even though the reviews say it includes a native Linux port:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

For good reason. Last time I checked (this year), Alyx crashes Mesa (i.e. your Vulkan layer) when the player enters an in-game load zone. This happens with native linux and the proton windows version.

It's pretty good, but it would have been good enough as a non-VR title. The thought of digging out my VR headset to play it makes me shudder. I never even managed to finish it, played through most of it and then couldn't bring myself to get my VR headset out again.

I think without the VR-bait parts like the starting room I would consider it to be the worst Half-Life game. There were some people trying to make it run without VR but I don't remember how far they got.

> It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

There are a lot of good games and unique experiences (Lone Echo). A lot of these games also get you moving i.e. you won't need to do cardio exercise if you play games. Many of these games aren't even considered fitness games

Batman

Beat Saber

Mother Gunship

Superhot

Pistol Whip

Gasland

Thrill of the Fight

Underdogs

Synth Riders

Guerilla Tag

Blade and Sorcery

Gorn

Les Mills Body Combat

FitXR

Creed

If you get a slip rig, just walking around Fallout VR or Skyrim VR will give you a lot of cardio while essentially enjoying a more immersive game than the flat screen version.

Name a popular flat screen game and there is likely a decent VR version. There are lots of good racing games and FPS's

Zero Caliber

Arizona Sunshine

Walking Dead Saints and Sinners

Bonelab

Pavlov

Breachers

Contractors

Into the Radius

Tactical Assault

It's also worth for having your own private movie theater. YouTube VR is great

There's a lot missing of games missing from my comment, and I didn't even touch on VR mods for games like Cyberpunk or even Zelda BOW

What your comment tells me is that you didn't really use VR for more than a few days.

Pistol whip, beat saber and audio trip are in my rotation. Also I expect you to die I/II/III or whatever the numbering is.

I've never understood the whole VR game ecosystem. There is a handful of titles (outside of Half Life Alyx, which even then looks pretty shit and clunky) that are worth playing on VR.

Most are short bursts of fun and don't really have any moat.

You can even run Half-Life Alyx on Steam Frame itself (standalone mode), albeit at around 36FPS according to Tested https://youtu.be/C9JyWAVj94E?t=3330

36 FPS makes running it on the device a rather theoretical possibility for a VR game.

Gonna try it out on my m1 mbp because of this comment. Been waiting to play alyx forever but I didn't know a way to get mac to work - theres a solution now.

Also VR headset has limited re-playability ... table tennis was my VR golf.

What headsets work on M1? The hoops I tried to jump through for a Quest 2 made me give up about a year ago.

I got a Legion Go 3y ago for this reason. Alyx and SteamOS were both draws as a lifelong Mac/Nintendo kid.

Idk. After having THREE Quest 3s brick themselves within the extended warranty period, I really want an alternative. I can do normal cardio but rhythm games like Beat Saber and more are just such a better time of knocking out a decent hour of cardio several times a week for me. Beat Saber is more easily modded on PC and while the number of games I play is really low, this is worth it for me.

I have owned a quest 2 and now 3 and have always heard about that game but yet to try it. I forgot about it. I don't often get to play the quest as my kids seem to have taken over it. But there are definitely some gems out there. Echo VR was so fun it was sad to see it shut down. I also love Google Earth vr on the quest.

>> a steep proce for a niche with not a lot of games

Porn. This, like every other vr device, will see more use streaming 3d porn than it will vr games.

This is not unussual. Porn has often been at the forefront of the internet, from the first cc transactions to the first streaming video.

If you enjoyed alyx , and did not play anything else interesting on vr headset you likely missed the huge pc vr flat 2 vr comunity that let us play incredible vr expériences like cyberpunk 2077. The trend these days is some random dev creating ok to full fledged VR mods for a lot of games viecoding these things. Check reddit virtualreality sub to see each week many more awesome vr content don't miss uevr too with an extensive game list ready : https://myuevr.pages.dev/

The Arizona Sunshine series are also really great VR-native games. Not AAA but far closer to a complete game than most VR games.

VR would be a perfect device for sharing or an arcade if it wasn't for the usual issues with sharing anything.

I recently did a moon exploration in VR with a whole bunch of other people. They had a whole bunch of those pico headsets somehow syncing all their locations to each other, overwriting selective parts of the environment, and simultaneously showing the same location in English and Japanese. That was by far the best VR experience I’ve ever had.

Plays really well but it is very yucky.

What do you mean?

I spent 5 min in Alyx and almost vomit :(. Mean while i can play beat saber all day.

PC is the flight simulator platform. They're probably amazing to play in VR.

My biggest use case for the Quest 3 is Euro Truck Simulator 2. That is, until I got a wheel and pedals to replace the controller, at which point I got immediate motion sickness with the headset and had to go back to big screen and head tracking. Bit disappointing, and will keep me from jumping on the Steam Frame until I can try it properly

VR is a solution in search of a problem

GamersNexus released a video comparing the Frame VR vs Meta Quest 3 today, worth a watch for the Frame review alone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g

I appreciate that the review goes into the privacy issues and legal disclaimers with each. I don't doubt that everyone expects the Meta product to be much worse there, but wow it's a stark contrast.

Meta are objectively worse than Valve because Valve don't allow ads in games or offer advertising services and they're generally more trustworthy, but that's really only part of the privacy story. Each app/game usually has its own data collection and usage on top and I don't think either of them do much to police or constrain that.

The comparison difference of terms and conditions was hilarious and spot on. Well done GN!

How do they find the time while simultaneously researching massive spywar scandals, dram cartels and gpu black markets.

They get paid for the reviews probably

Would be great if the Meta Quest could be jailbroken to run SteamOS

If you have a pc to run steam, you don’t even need to jailbreak

Quest 1, all firmwares, Quest 2 and 3 on some non latest hardware, can already be rooted, so that's not the bottleneck.

I know everyone is singing the praises of the Steam Frame's wireless capabilities but honestly, I just want my wired VR experience back.

I had a Rift 2, Reverb G2, then Quest 2 and eventually Quest 3. Despite the Quest 3 having a resolution similar to the G2, it looked more like the Rift 2 than the awe inspiring G2. Wireless gaming never looked as sharp and streaming over USB was also a very poor experience, with input latency and artifacting.

Wireless headsets also _suck_ for simulators and productivity - where a battery only adds weights and a wire is not noticable.

Personally, I would love to see a wired headset that resembles the bigscreen beyond but with inside out tracking and a universal face gasket. For wireless experiences, I'd love to be able to plug my phone in, put it in my back pocket and use it that way.

That sort of "head mounted display"-first approach would make it practical to use the device for productivity / screen replacement while gaming would be dependant on your phone or computer.

> Personally, I would love to see a wired headset that resembles the bigscreen beyond but with inside out tracking and a universal face gasket. For wireless experiences, I'd love to be able to plug my phone in, put it in my back pocket and use it that way.

Been doing this with my wired XREALs for the past few months. They are light enough to be unnoticeable and can display a large monitor when plugged into my phone or computer. Since I have a Samsung phone, it just opens DeX on my glasses and the phone screen becomes a giant trackpad. Completely seamless except for the onscreen keyboard.

For my laptop it's good enough for all the coding I need and I use it in the office because I'm used to ultrawide.

Like $500.

For another datapoint, I took the plunge on a pair of xreals and trying to do real work in them felt like a joke. They’re not comfortable enough to wear as normal glasses, so you end up using them more like you would a VR headset. And at that point, they’re just a semi-transparent low-res screen that’s never quite in the right spot.

For sit down, say flight, driving sims and productivity, then things to look at to compare would be things with a cable and no local compute taking weight, heat and component cost. There's the Pimax Dream Air SE and the Big Screen Beyond 2e as two recent updates in the ball park of Steam Frame pricing. Both that have eye tracking for better high resolution performance. The Pimax has a variable quality reputation and the Big Screen Beyond requires a deprecating Lighthouse tracking system, so no easy answers. None will be as smooth an experience of the Frame but are more geared to head mounted display.

FYI, virtual desktop (and steam link) on quest 3 recently got beta updates for wired modes (they just tunnel ethernet afaik, but its better than nothing for your usecase probably) since the OS has seemingly recently unblocked this.

Wireless gets better if you mount a dedicated AP on your wall, but that's a pretty big ask when an appropriate AP isn't cheap.

Steam Frame is solving this with a dedicated dongle, if I recall, which I think is a good choice.

I had a dedicated router plugged directly into my PC's second ethernet port. That was the best wireless experience I had - but it still wasn't a great experience. Again, my Quest felt like a hot, heavy Rift 2 rather than a wireless G2.

> Wireless headsets also _suck_ for simulators and productivity - where a battery only adds weights and a wire is not noticable.

you could... just plug it in? unless the frame cannot be used while charging, but i haven't seen anyone claim that.

At least with the Quest, the video quality over cable was only slightly better than wireless. The heat and weight of the extra hardware also becomes noticeable when sitting for a while.

For example, there's no way I could do an 8 hour work day inside a Quest - but I imagine a cool lightweight bigscreen beyond would be fine.

I used to love shooting games in my G2, I got the Quest and, despite having a similar resolution, I could hardly make out distant targets whether wired or not. It entirely killed VR for me and I haven't used it in over 6 months.

That doesn't fix anything. The battery is still heavy whether it's plugged in or not.

For anyone interested, in the Tested video he states that you can use it plugged in but you will only be able to use it this way uninterrupted while streaming, because using the Frame itself will use up the battery faster than the rate at which it charges

The USB-C port for charging is on the battery itself; their store diagram doesn't show if the battery itself can be disconnected for power passthrough.

Wired is only great if you're sitting down, playing driving or flying simulators. If you ever need to turn or move, wires get annoying really fast. Even with Beat Saber, it's terrible

I agree but, my experience with wireless has been so bad that I'd rather be able to play games with a wire than avoid them without one.

I liked shooters and going from the G2 where I could actually use sniper rifles to barely being able to make out people down a corridor - wired or wireless - really killed it for me.

I have pretty much given up on VR as a result.

Hacker News should be all over this device. They won't lock it down like the Meta stuff. Go ahead and install BeOS on it.

I think a hackable Linux PC in a VR headset is very exciting. But the major problem is the screen resolution is not good enough to make it a viable desktop replacement. It'll work great for gaming or media consumption, but reading smallish text will be difficult at best.

If they made a more expensive version with a better display it would potentially be interesting as a portable workstation/laptop alternative. But I don't think the SoC they're using supports displays much larger than this, so they'd have to upgrade that too. When you have such a wide FoV the number of pixels you need to cover it all at high resolution becomes very large.

It's still VR. It's still niche.

There are still many issues that VR hasn't solved (and may never solve).

- You still have to wear a device on your head

- You still (can) get motion sickness and/or headaches

- There is still not a lot of great content around VR

- Many people still prefer the flat screen medium and content

The openness/closeness is only one of the many issues this solves, and it doesn't matter when all of the other above issues exist.

Yeah. The primary draw for me is being able to try out VR stuff on Linux (finally).

There are other devices with what seems like unofficial Linux support, but this seems like the only modern VR system with official support for it.

I’m excited. In addition to VR games I’m pretty interested to see how viable it is to do things with the Frame that I’d usually do on a Linux laptop.

I hope the openness of the OS leads to lots of cool 3rd party options. I’d love to see a standalone headset the size of the Bigscreen Beyond 2, and I’d also be much more willing to pay $3000 for a premium VR/AR device that runs Linux than an Apple or Meta device.

As a hive mind representative, I will be the first to say: I was already waitlisted before I saw it on HN.

It’s the year of the Linux Headset!

> Go ahead and install BeOS on it.

How unexpected! I love this comment.

Now the only problem is I'm not sure if I really have another $1059 worth of playing VR golf and rhythm games in me. Cool hardware though & even cooler software.

Is that confirmed? Arm devices tend to be awkward to install your own OS on in general. E.g. look at Android phones.

I mean Valve definitely are very open-source friendly but I wouldn't just assume.

I do hope Valve's work on ARM64 for this, alongside improvements to performance in Honeykrisp, make for a dramatically better experience with Linux on Apple Silicon Macs.

They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.

fwiw, I’m already playing windows games on my Retroid (Android ARM Snapdragon) console and it’s already really good at least compatibility wise.

I mean, you can comfortably play GTAV on this thing and it’s powered by a smartphone processor.

Your dreams are going to become true.

I use my RP6 (and RP5 previously) quite a bit. Its amazing what those devices can do nowadays.

I've never been interested in VR headsets and am not very educated about it.

Can someone explain why you'd want to actually run things on it instead of having a much lighter screens-and-headphones-only unit that plugs it into a more powerful machine that renders things for it? What's the benefit of having to strap all this extra hot hardware and batteries to your face.

Is it just about it being wireless? Surely there are wireless protocols that can stream high-bandwidth videostreams from your PC to VR goggles.

Not trying to be snarky or facetious, but genuinely curious.

I'm surprised no one really has answered the implied question. Wireless protocols are hard for VR not because of bandwidth, but because of latency. Head tilt motions have to be processed extremely quickly to not be nauseating. Even with wired systems, the headset often ends up doing all kinds of motion prediction to process motion and shift the image before the game has time to process it, because engines aren't going to round trip input to video output at 120fps/8ms (double buffering doubles your latency!).

Of course, that multiplies with bandwidth requirements, which are also quite extreme at 4k 120fps.

To be clear, you don't have to run things on it, you can stream wirelessly from your PC.

An advantage of a standalone unit is you can take it with you, or for people who don't already have a gaming computer.

You're also asking why not have it plug to a more powerful machine. The answer for that is simple: wires get snagged and pulled on, in practice it's a poor experience (remember, you cannot see the wires when you are wearing the headset).

The real question is why did they release this as a standalone unit for $1049 and then claim they couldn't sell it for less due to the RAM shortage - when that implies they could have released a dumb unit that depends on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine for far less?

I like wired for the better graphics and unlimited playtime. In practice even a single cable gets wound up, stuck on things, and generally feels in the way. It's a difficult trade off to accept, even with a long and light weight cable.

Being able to play without a bunch of setup in your room and without worrying about getting tangled in cables seems great. I have a Valve Index—which is a pretty remarkable device, that I definitely enjoyed—but the hassle of cable management/etc adds some real hassle. And I say this as somebody who actually set up a pulley system to make it work better in my home office :P

The wires really get in the way, even in a seated context. I often use a Rift S for rally games, and the wire will get caught in the backrest, the wheels, my legs. VR is immersive, so you instantly forget and it's a thick and fragile wire so there's a degree of stress.

Not to mention the trip hazard or ripping it out of the PC while playing room-scale games.

I concur, given hardware constraints that a far more slimmed down unit would have been appealing, and more future-proof, but I believe there's still a requirement for onboard compute for inside-out tracking and handling disconnection events, at some point making it self-sufficient (at the time) was seen as not much more expense.

Unless you are standing still (like sitting or playing Beat Saber), that cable really is annoying. You can't spin around for instance.

As for wireless communication. I also thought it would be easy, but the lack of options despite the demand in the Oculus Rift / HTC Vive days proved otherwise. There have been some attempts, some worked, none of them great, and they usually involved hot hardware and batteries.

Steam Frame is apparently the best at being a wireless, PC-driven headset.

As for standalone functionality, my guess is that a headset hardware powerful enough to deliver a good wireless PC VR experience is powerful enough to work as a standalone headset for less demanding applications.

There are two use-cases. Already sitting at a PC and you just pop your headset on - your idea makes sense. But traditional VR means standing up in a dedicated space (2m x 2m) and demands uninterrupted time. That's a high friction activity, and adding setting up a PC and Oculus Link and Steam VR before you start playing makes that friction even higher to the point where it's a niche hobby. Most casual players are doing stuff like VRChat and Beat Saber which can run on low powered hardware, so having a basic game-playing ability is a good idea.

1. Unless all you play is a sit down driving or flying simulator, the wires will get in your way. You can mitigate it with ceiling and wall pulleys, but it's still a really terrible experience that kills immersion.

2. Fitness. If you're moving and turning a lot, you're just going to hate wires. Your arms will slam into them and you'll almost trip on them and pull your computer down.

Wireless to a desktop isn't perfect, but it's doable. Stand alone is ideal if you don't the visuals being turned down a bit.

It's a lot easier for developers to target a known platform.

When you’re in VRChat you can be your fursona

It is designed to stream wirelessly from a powerful computer too

I suspect the answer is actually very simple, when you compare this device to one that is made deliberately dumber there are far too few actual differences to make it make sense.

If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go.

With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.

> hard sell against a new or used Q3

That depends. Having had a Quest 2 and dealt...nay, put up with with Meta and their god awful ecosystem you couldn't pay me to touch another one of their headsets. I'll take an open linux based one over a Q3 any day. That alone makes the price difference worth it to me. Throw in the foveated streaming and the vastly superior quality and latency of streaming and it makes for a fairly decent offering.

Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes?

Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.

For these devices, I always enjoy Adam Savage's Tested videos. Here's the one they posted today for the Steam frame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9JyWAVj94E

It's full of technical details and down-to-earth analysis, and includes interviews with the Valve engineers.

Thanks. This was great.

Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one. I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today. They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.

Given the entire hardware world is experiencing multiple important shortages that are unlikely to improve before a while, I wouldn’t bet on it

The scalpers will probably be all over this too.

> It's still out of stock in France today.

You might look at why it's out of stock. Here in the US, it looks like they're out of stock of the base stations, the right controller (but not the left!) and replacement face gaskets. [0]

> They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.

shrug I've little doubt that there were a great many periods between the Index release and now that you could have gotten a full set of equipment. I'm very suspicious of the claim that you never found a time when you could purchase one from the Steam Store.

The Index had the misfortune of being released during the start of The Global Plague when everyone with a sizable chunk of disposable cash found themselves with a great need for new toys to play while stuck at home... and global manufacturing got turbofucked by said plague, which didn't make it especially easy to ramp up production.

The Steam Frame has the misfortune of being released in the beginning of The Great Abandonment of The Consumer PC Market, which has just screwed the availability of parts and their price.

I'd say that neither of those things are Valve's fault, but what can I really know? They're a secretive private company, so maybe they engineered both catastrophes. ;)

[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059530/Valve_Index_Heads...>

I've been astounded by how many older games are suddenly getting surprisingly good VR ports/mods (I suspect AI-assisted tooling is playing a role in some of this) There's a youtuber Beardo Benjo who has been documenting a bunch of them where some are tethered to a PC while others have been ported to run natively on the Quest.

A few of the more interesting ones, newest to oldest:

Left 4 Dead VR [9/14/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-blXLU_oy8

DOOM [9/11/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkxVI2KEKrk

Call of Duty Zombies VR [9/2/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9VjFpInLiU

Dead Island 2 VR [8/28/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=notfg5bjUdM

The Simpsons: Hit & Run VR [8/26/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQJZKjkRzyI

GTA: Vice City VR [8/18/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH5k5Un8_HE

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time VR [8/6/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzhbhrotI1Q

Cyberpunk 2077 VR [8/4/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXho2LdD1qo

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild VR [5/17/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Mpqk2X3ww

Pokémon VR [9/1/2026]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlEl1IVU8PA

Ready or Not UEVR Mod [9/8/2025]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnGfQBQJP8Y

Hopefully they have solved the issues but... the only times I got VR sickness from VR is

(1) trying GTA5 in VR using a patch. It was amazing once the game gave me control. But by that time I was already sick from the unskippable in game intro

(2) Breath of the Wild - Labo version. When Nintendo came out with a cardboard holder for Switch and a VR option for BotW, I tried it. The fact that it wasn't designed for VR made me sick really fast

I was surprised by both. I'd played 100s of hours of VR by that point and no sickness. Both of those games made me feel seriously ill and it took a while (30-60 minutes?) to recover.

Some of the Resident Evil series is in VR, and is also very good.

https://github.com/praydog/REFramework

Also exciting, Valve has finally started shipping native ARM/FEX builds of Proton 11: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/vr/valves-latest-proton-11-bet...

Will be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!

AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.

Yeah this could open up a whole new category of lightweight gaming PCs.

At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high.

Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware

For me a lot of the value comes from the freedom you get with frame. Valve says “it’s your PC, install what you want” and it runs an open source OS. It’s the first truly Linux friendly headset (it runs arch btw) and I don’t have to send my data to Meta. Also foveated streaming means, according to reviewers, a pretty decent wireless PCVR experience. I can’t wait to play half life Alyx without a tether. Valve is just doing something very different from meta.

I'm ready to pay it to not be forced into using Facebook's terrible desktop software that they frequently break the PC Link functionality of. The way it's Windows-only also sucks; it's one of the few things that's prevented me from switching my gaming PC to Linux.

And yes, I've tried third-party solutions like Virtual Desktop under Windows and ALVR under Linux. Even with some of the best WiFi 6E hardware available standing within 10ft of the router with the PC being wired into the network with ethernet, nothing has beat a tethered USB connection using the native Link functionality on my Quest 2.

Any SteamVR based solution fixes most of these issues and the Frame sounds like it might make wireless actually viable. Even if it doesn't, tethered with Valve software instead of with Facebook software is still a meaningful improvement.

2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.

[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

Everything from meta is a spyware and should be only touched inside a VM like with any other malware vendors.

Money is just a number and far less precious than personal dignity and privacy. I don't even get the idea why people really would compare something around 1k usd range in developed countries, it's a no brainer.

Not having to faff about with Meta's developer program or whatever to side load my own homebrew stuff, and then get locked out, then have to do whatever hoop jumping six months later, is a huge bonus. I have an OG Quest 1 and the damn thing needs a new copy of meta quest ...whatever, installed every 2 weeks if I want to use it. It's exhausting.

Quest 3 is cheap for the same reason that 80 inch TVs are sold at or below cost. If you value your privacy at zero and want to strap a surveilling, billboard on your face for pennies on the dollar be my guest.

This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.

Quest 3 is a mindblowing piece of hardware completely ruined by the runtime and vendor. This is basically it as a Linux machine you actually own. That being said, my Quest has sat on the shelf for years now since purchasing. I just don't really see a market for these things outside of driving/flight simulation enthusiasts. The whole "smartphone strapped to your face" paradigm is a dead end for actual VR.

There's an incredibly simple product case I think HN is missing: I bought a Vive and then an Index. This has higher resolution than the Index, lower mass (even with a battery!), and easier setup that can enable more spontaneous use. In addition, I now get the benefits of "standalone" headsets that I previously did not think were worth hundreds of dollars on their own.

Am I paying $1000 for a minor improvement? Yes. It's a hobby. It costs money sometimes. I don't do this for nearly anything else, like phones that other people seem fine for paying $1000 every other year. I expect this device to last until another 6 years when I can justify spending another $1000 on another iterative improvement. Similarly, I may spend $1000 on a new setup for simracing soon.

Spending $6k on a gaming PC, a VR headset, and wheels and pedals is an experience you otherwise cannot get. I would spend money on VR even if it only worked with one or two driving games and nothing else. For those of us in that niche, VR has been anything but a "Failure", that business people seem convinced it is because it couldn't be the next "Platform" to put an app store on.

But, that's the market for VR. It's a niche toy for people with expendable income. It's not a mass market to rival the smartphone.

I have barely even considered VR until the Steam Frame.

I'm just not interested in closed ecosystems like Oculus.

That said, I have barely looked at VR so much that I'm not sure whether to bother with the Steam Frame.

Is it just for gaming/movies?

The price is basically the same as the Index was at launch 7 years ago. With the devaluing of the currency, the increase in specs and capabilities, and the current component suppy crisis, it is a deal. Adjusted for inflation the Index would cost $1300 today, which now gets you a Frame with 1TB of internal storage.

I feel much the same. I don't think I'll be moving on from my Quest 3 until the hardware kicks the bucket.

Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.

It's so weird to me that people would even consider buying a device from Facebook of all companies.

lmao. n o. thats meta and this steam. iykyk

I want this for one reason and one reason only: DCS.

Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet?

I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.

Something to keep in mind that a lot of simmers (DCS specifically) don't get when they want to jump into VR:

Once you hit the advanced 3rd Gen or any 4th Gen fighter or attack aircraft (essentially anything where you go "heads down" for any significant portion of the aircrafts mission profile) VR becomes more of a liability than an asset.

For those aircraft being a pilot is secondary to being a systems operator.

Think of an F-14; you have the front seat who would want to be in VR because they fly the aircraft, but the RIO would NOT want to be because they have very little need to be, especially since it makes interfacing with their mission systems so much harder. AH-64's are the same split.

Now if you are the sole person in the aircraft and need to do both missions being able to operate the systems fluently and smoothly via dedicated interfaces FAR exceeds any benefit from being in VR.

I've done it all, and I far prefer flying in VR. But for accomplishing complex mission profiles multiscreen with each being an MFD and a rich control set far beat that immersion.

Perhaps the best mix is using a curved UW and trackir plus dedicated MFD screens. Once you get that setup its amazing for that advanced capability set.

All of this assumes you want to use the full capability set of an airframe, or use an attack profile at all. If all you want is to use them for A2A, then VR is wonderful as long as you have a full HOTAS set, understand the preset modes on everything, and memorize the controls and alternate control schemes properly for BVR to close in conversion, countermeasures, etc.

For DCS only, I wonder how this slots between a Q3 and a bigscreen beyond. The beyond with no controllers is probably about the same price all in as the 1TB, but would be better screens and lighter. If you dont care about the standalone stuff it might be another good option. The frame does bring more versatility, but at the cost of battery/weight. Wireless VR in sims is unbeatable in terms of immersion though.

I bought an HP Reverb G2 for DCS about 5 years ago and it worked great. When Windows started deprecating the Mixed Reality services random things started breaking, though.

If you enjoy DCS give VTOLVR a shot as well. Fantastic fun.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/667970/VTOL_VR/

I used a Rift for DCS and it was amazing graphically. Hard to go back to playing on a screen and using a HOTAS hat to capture your view (or head tracker).

But you better have your HOTAS controls memorized because it's a pain not having visibility of them.

At current hardware prices, this is worth buying to use as a server!

This does make me excited for the possibility, several years down the line of a Valve ARM Linux laptop with decent battery life. I wonder if anyone will rip out the compute unit out of the headset and try to use it as mini PC, just because you can, it seems like fun.

Heh, I use one of my Steam Decks as a small home server.

I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).

One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.

For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.

You're fooling yourself if the quest provides any advertising data value, let alone 600$ The device is simply just being sold for as a loss and is not a data harvesting operation.

Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.

I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?

There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.

For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)

vrchat is just weird enough (and for, maybe, weird people) plus the new user experience/children yelling slurs situation makes it hard to even bring up to general audiences

I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though

The Meta model (of cheaper hardware, highly subsidized) is probably not long for this world, with the recent increase in component costs.

Lower volume with consumers fully covering the device cost will probably become the norm, which doesn't bode particularly well for this industry (at least in the short term)

> Lower volume with consumers fully covering the device cost will probably become the norm

dont know about lower volume, but having the consumer pay the cost of the device fully (instead of subsidized by the later sale of games on the system) is better aligned with the interests of the consumer. You'd be less likely to get monopolistic device sellers signing exclusivity for games like the consoles of the past.

I want the device to be as good as it can be, rather than wanting the device for the exclusive game that it has.

Kind of bizarre tbh, given the software market for VR seems absolutely dead. Announcing it with a 7 year old game is like, what? What's Valve's plan here?

I think Valve’s plan is that some of their engineers wanted to make the device. That was the plan.

I also think they just couldn’t justify selling the valve index anymore because of the current state of technology, but didn’t want to discontinue offering VR entirely. A large percentage of Steam sales are back catalog games. A game being 7, 10, 20, 30 years old doesn’t mean it’s bad or that someone won’t buy it.

Another aspect here is “steam store on everything” is a strategy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a niche, because the mere presence of endless hardware options adds value to the Steam store. You can be confident in buying lots of games on Steam because you know they’ll run on more stuff than games you buy on PS5 or Switch or the Microsoft Store.

They’re not a public company, they don’t have to make stock price go up. At the same time, this thing existing is a net positive for them.

Agreed... I already played Alyx years ago and there's no other game of similar quality... love the hardware, but it's hard for me to imagine dropping a grand on this

Well they are the ones trying to build market. And they have money to invest. Cycle most likely should be lot faster but it doesn't seem unreasonable thing to try.

I don't game much nowadays; can I just use this to replace my monitor, and work within high fidelity VR?

You could do it, but the resolution isn't high enough for it to be a good experience. (2160x2160 per eye sounds like a lot, but with a 110 degree fov it's only ~19 pixels per degree. Which is like sitting very close to a 27" 720p monitor.)

you can even replace the whole computer if you tinker enough, since it runs Linux. whether or not that is a good idea in principle with _any_ vr headset is debatable.

AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.

Actually more reasonable prices than I assumed. I know it’s a position of privilege, but just pre ordered the 1TB.

I'm thinking of selling my Index and my Vision Pro for one. The screens/tech in the Vision Pro is remarkable, but sadly the iron grip of the App Store Guidelines means none of it is really accessible for any interesting applications. The AVP App Store is a pathetic ghost town. I'd much rather have a less technically capable headset but have it be completely open.

It's absolutely wild to me that they didn't include, and have devs ship profiles for some of their games, SuperDepth3D or some other depth map shader officially in some form in the Steam UI for this. If a big focus is playing your pancake library on a huge screen (due to there not being not many native VR games), having that huge screen be 3D would be a huge value add. And they're big enough to get some developers to ship profiles for their games officially guaranteeing some form of workingness(?).

This. This is what I am looking for. I remember using iz3d years ago, with their anaglyph renderer. Playing Half Life 2, Halo and others in stereoscopic 3D was a great experience. Dead Space was particularly nice, as the game uses no HUD.

I guess most of it could run as a Vulkan layer?

Isn't it bit odd that there is no basic wired connectivity option? Or am I just old-fashioned? As far as I can tell you only options are 6GHz streaming or stand-alone mode

You can pick up a Valve Index if you want to do this, which is a fantastic device, but I think the reality is that the market for the wired to a desktop head set just isn't there to support the product.

Apparently the beta just added support for this.

The streaming is good enough now, especially with foveated rendering, that there's no reason for them to eat the extra support cost and user experience drag of focusing on a tether.

> Reservations are currently not available for customers who have not made a purchase on Steam before Mon, April 27, 2026.

As someone who made a purchase on steam (that I can't even play) after the release of the Steam Machine, but before the release of the Steam Frame, in the hopes that the date would be later, I am disappointed that they used the same date, such that that purchase still does not unlock the ability to order.

Unfortunately, your behavior is identical to what a reseller would do.

Just ask someone you trust to make the reservation from their account.

Hopefully it's possible to use eye tracking as a pointer in desktop mode. I'd like to connect only a keyboard and use binds to emulate clicks.

With the software being open source I wonder if the quest 3 will get owned so that eventually we can run steam frame sw on it

Foveated Streaming seems to be buried on the page, this feels like a true game changer, especially for PCVR. Coupled with eye tracking it unlocks about 2-3x more compute for rendering. Now sparkle DLSS-like upscaling and you can render 144hz native resolution PCVR games without buying a 5090. Truly exciting stuff.

I still remember Michael Abrash's talk from 2016 where he talks about Foveated Rendering + Eye tracking as one of the key pillars of next-gen headsets https://youtu.be/o7OpS7pZ5ok?t=5438. Interestingly, his prediction was that it would be widespread as of about 5 years ago. Is next-gen finally here after 10 years?

Not quite: foveated streaming only affects the bitrate of the stream. For improving rendering performance, there is a similar technique called foveated rendering. It's still somewhat unclear how well that works while streaming, though. In theory, it should work, but no reviewers seem to have covered it for some reason.

DLSS adds lag, as does wireless, that 144hz may not help as much in those cases. For me it's the lag that gives me headaches.

I do wonder if they use local upscaling after foveated rendering/streaming. The screenshot I've seen look a bit aliased in the periphery, which I hope isn't too distracting.

With every VR release I check the resolution per eye to see if I can use it as a work desktop replacement. IMO the current Meta Quest 3 is not there, and this roughly matches it. I am not sure what the resolution needs to be to render good text...but I'm hopeful we get maybe 50% more pixels at some point in some version. Unfortunately, i think the screen stack at that level is well outside mobile usecases so there is kind of a chicken and egg. Manufacturers don't want to work on advanced VR display tech without demand, and it can't be used for work purposes until display tech improves.

I wonder how well fex will work with older 2d-3d games before, say, 2003, of the PS2/Xbox era and earlier, and whether controling mouse pointer is viable using the default controller.

For me personally steam frame would be worth it if only for running these kinds of games on a large virtual screen, watching movies and intermittently using it as a linux computer (with a limitation that text is likely not readable if the screen is comparable with Quest 3). And some VR native apps like Alyx.

Basically the stuff that Steam Deck already does save for all the new games (which run worse and worse with each year anyway)

Damn that's expensive but well now if they made the streaming stuff openly accessibly for any headset that would be nice.

I see no reason meta quest headsets couldn't do it next gen.

My personal ambition is to see VR/AR be cheap enough.

Why they decided to include standalone functionality is beyond me. It's a $1000 dollar VR headset. 99.9% of people buying this will already have a beefy gaming setup and will much prefer to stream from that instead of play standalone. You're not traveling with this thing, you're not using it on the go, it's not heavily subsidized like Quest headsets...

Including standalone and an SSD and ram and stuff does nothing but jack up the prices drastically, for functionality that nobody's gonna use. Rest assured, I will not be buying one.

The standalone functionality is the selling point for me

>Your Steam Frame headset easily pairs with your Steam Controller. Stream from your PC, laptop, Steam Deck or (coming soon!) Steam Machine for an immersive experience with any of your favorite games.

How are they even intending for the Steam Frame to be used with the Steam Deck? As far as I know, it’s not meant to be used with a cable, and the wireless adapter it ships with is USB-A.

Not sure what their plans are, but the Deck has a wifi 6E radio, so maybe they can use it to connect to the Frame directly. Given modern wifi chips can usually operate both as an AP and a client at the same time, this might just be a software feature they add to SteamOS. Worst case you can stream without a dedicated wireless link via your normal wifi with potentially reduced quality.

If this actually works, this is quite a nice, if a bit niche, combination. I really like the control layout of the Deck and it has more performance than the Frame. If you can put the screen on your head instead of having to look down on it, it might be a bit more comfortable. Sadly it seems the Deck has no IR LEDs so it can get picked up like the Controller by the Frame. Maybe a case/sleeve for the Deck can add those LEDs for full integration.

That’s a better price than I thought it would be, but still quite high. I will consider buying it someday, but today it’s a luxury I can’t afford…

I wanted so much to play with VR back in the 90s, but most 3d games give me motion sickness. I could barely play 5min of Goldeneye on N64, 2min playing Metroid and I was sick to death (headache, vomiting if I forced myself, feeling sick for hours).

Although I can play many, it's really a hit and miss. And thus I avoided VR not really knowing how it would render me useless.

You should try it out! There should be local stores around you, and many libraries set up an oculus corner.

Although IDK... "3D games" is a shockingly low bar. Can you watch movies...?

Underpowered where it really counts. The GPU is barely better than that in a Quest 3 (Adreno 750 in Steam Frame vs Adreno 740 in Quest 3,) and while the CPU is almost 250% better overall than what is in the Quest 3, CPU power hasn't really been the limiting factor in most VR games I've played, it has been the GPU, both in PCVR and in standalone devices.

I imagine thats why they've gone so far with the dual stream setup that can use the 6ghz dongle + your wifi for ultra low latency to a dedicated machine.

IIRC VRchat is usually CPU limited in practice.

overspecced cpu is useful for x86 translation, but yes the gpu is disappointing

This feels like kind of a weird set of trade offs. I'm sure they'll be able to fix a bunch of polish issues in software later (better gamepad support, adding hand tracking, etc). And the enthusiast crowd will likely fork out the money for the ecosystem advantage alone. But I feel like I'd be hard put to convince a non-enthusiast

The Steam Frame looks like a heck of a device. At the cost, though, I question why they didn't include a better pass-through camera. A device with onboard processing and a good pass-through camera would be very neat. If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.

There's an accessory that adds high-res color passthrough: https://arcturus.vision/

> If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.

It costs less than a third of the Vision Pro, and less than the Meta Quest Pro. It's relatively affordable, for a RAM crisis.

They use a generic phone chip so have to do camera processing using CPU and not dedicated accelerators.

Great news: SteamOS running on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, ARM64

Bad news: I'm poor. Just wish I had pocket money for niche products like this.

> Great news: SteamOS running on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, ARM64

Bad news: It's trapped in a VR headset and not a pocket-size steam deck

I'm so happy that they DONT SELL TO 75% OF THE WORLD(No options in Asia, Latin America or Africa. 3 ENTIRE CONTINENTS)

They do sell to over 50% (based on purchasing power) of the market for high end tech gadgets though. Selling a physical product around the world isn't that easy and they can't just ship there without ignoring regulations since they do business in those countries with Steam. Sucks but there are always resellers if you want it badly enough.

> This item is not available for purchase in your region

I'm a little late to the party but is there any list for recommended VR games?

I had Quest 3s for a couple weeks but I returned it because I didn't liked it and wanted to buy the Quest 3, but at the end I just decided to wait for the Steam Frame.

Superhot VR and Half-Life Alix, in that order. Sprinkle in some Beatsaber to taste.

Playing Superhot VR for the first time made me experience actual physical euphoria. I hadn't had that reaction to a new tech thing since I first got a ZX Spectrum as a little kid.

The only downside of starting with these is that it sets the bar incredibly high. But I still recommend it - it's hell of an introduction to a new medium.

> 2160 x 2160 LCD (per eye)

The 4K we've all been waiting for - the (2x2)K.

I think this is a good chance to try and port Alyx (ARM64 build) to visionOS and run it on my Vision Pro headset which has been running around unused for the last two years xD

Aussies are getting it at a premium, too.

USD$1059 (256GB) should be AUD$1483, retailing for AUD$1609 - a AUD$126 premium.

USD$1299 (1TB) should be AUD$1819, retailing for AUD$1969 - a AUD$150 premium!

Taxes aren't included in the US prices; I'd have to pay 1138USD for the 256GB model, which is 1593AUD, so it's only a 16AUD premium over where I live.

Not so bad, New Zealanders won't get it at all :(.

It’s hard to meaningfully compare prices across countries due to differences in tax regimes.

That is nothing, less than 10%.

Ther are countries that get it at 100% or even 200% more.

It includes GST right? US prices are before sales tax.

Fascinating that the linked page leads with specs rather than customer experience.

Many of the comments here do speak to the experience, which is helpful!

Anyone recommend light-weight VR (or AR) setup that’s just good for watching movies on a big screen? Nothing fancy just good for that and portable.

Xreal or Viture

> Steam Frame starts at $1059

I see no price in the linked page. I only see "This item is not available for purchase in your region."

(Still waiting for the Steam Deck...)

What country?

For those in Japan who are interested but getting blocked (or waiting) for access via Komodostation.com:

199,980 base 256GB

244,980 1TB model

considerable markup even over the current USDJPY rate

What is the thing with Komodo having exclusivity for Valve hardware in Japan by the way ? We wanted to buy a SteamDeck OLED in Japan last year and it all the big department stores in Akiba it was sold out - kinda indicating Komodo is not really handling this very well if they have no stock.

Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?

I think technically it can, but the cameras are black and white, so it would be very subpar for AR out of the box.

There is some chatter about using the expansion port to add a 3rd party colour camera to get over this, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Edit: I stand corrected, there is such a 3rd party camera linked on the page!

At this price I don't think you can expect the high quality cameras and processing power needed to do AR.

I use VR a lot and have not needed AR except for getting a drink from the fridge. What am I missing?

It can do AR, especially with this addon arcturusvision.myshopify.com

It's SteamOS on ARM64 platform, which means now you can run PC games on phone chips, definitely should be a revolution product.

You could already do that with gamenative. There are many videos.

Also you can run steam os on arm portables. https://armadaos.dev/

So all this was possible before the Steam frame was launched

Macbook neo has been playing PC games for ages now.

This might be a stupid question, but presumably this (and similar devices) won't cater to people without 3D vision?

I think it would still work. A lot of people claim VR is about immersion, but I disagree. There is nothing less immersive than having a giant headset strapped to your face. To me VR is about the control scheme. Playing games with your hands with full freedom is very different to playing with a standard controller. That wouldn't be affected by a lack of 3D vision.

Some VR games assume you have depth perception and so you may have trouble with them, such as Beat Saber, but I honestly think most VR games would be perfectly playable without 3D vision. You may not be as good at the games as someone with 3D vision, but you'd probably still enjoy it.

My second favourite VR game is Gorilla Tag. I think that would play fine without 3D vision... as long as you don't get motion sickness - that game can be a lot.

You mean people blind in one eye? I think it still works, but obviously depth perception will not be there

You can get a used or cheap headset for a similar experience. VR has a couple of games you get bored of pretty quickly :0

been there

That’s a remarkably cheap storage upgrade too. First time I’ve ever thought the upgrade would be worth the money.

No better than the rest of the VR headsets that came before it and almost no-one wants them. These headsets will end up collecting dust with the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest Pro.

We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.

Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.

> Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets

Far into the future, perhaps. These glasses may be fine for short stints, but not for serious 8+hrs of productivity. I have a Viture Beast and I regret buying it. Even for short gaming stints, I still prefer my laptop or smartphone display as these glasses are such a downgrade.

The current XReal models are very underwhelming. Very narrow FOV more or less equivalent to using a 27" monitor, lots of fuss with the cable, switching sound to headphones because the built in speakers are garbage. Issues with HDR support.

The XReal is practically guaranteed to have sold less units than any generation of the Quest hardware.

I think the only way this is really compelling is if it's able to effectively function as a virtual Linux desktop with a reasonably clear floating monitor in front of you.

I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.

Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?

I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.

VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.

It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...

> I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.

Unfortunately none of the current generation VR/AR/XR glasses come close to replacing a monitor full-time. They may be okay for using in a pinch (like if you're travelling and need a bigger/secondary/private display), but they suck for long term use.

Biggest issues:

- Screen resolution is still pretty low. At 2160x2160, it feels like you're just sitting really close to a 27" 720p monitor. You will see the pixels. It may not matter much for movies and some games, but you will notice it for productivity. If you have a decent monitor already, it's a very noticeable downgrade, even when compared to using any modern laptop display.

- They're just not comfortable for long term wear. I can work 8+ hours in front of a regular screen with almost no issues, but that's just impossible with current generation VR/AR/XR glasses.

- The big screen promise is a lie for productivity. You'd need to constantly move your head around to be able to see the whole screen; you can't see it all in one go, without dealing with blurry/distorted edges. If you do want to see the entire screen in one go then not only does the image become smaller (breaking the big screen promise), the clarity of text drops sharply.

So if you're considering getting any of the current generation glasses for long-term productivity: just don't.

I’m somewhat surprised nobody has pointed one of those hacking models at a Rift CV1 and said “make it work without all the Facebook junk, preferably in Linux.”

Man, the increase in price really killed the post-deck steam hardware

Anyone knows how the passthrough compares to visionpro with the add-on?

Who are they targeting with this product?

What’s the appeal? Can someone enlighten me? :)

VR users who want no Meta spyware.

People who want a VR system that runs Linux

10 years later and VR headsets are still too heavy, hot and sweaty. Short of having brain implants or magical contact lenses, nothing will ever change that.

Can't be used more than 30min without major discomfort for most people. Any talks about it replacing monitors are lies.

Headsets like the Bigscreen Beyond 2 are basically the weight and size of goggles. Wearing headphones isn't actively comfortable either but very few people would say that that is prohibitively uncomfortable relative to their desire to listen to music. It's not unreasonable to think that the privacy and convenience of a VR workspace could eventually reach that level of convenience for a significant number of people.

The real issue for replacing monitors seems to be screen fidelity.

in my experience this is only an issue when headsets are unbalanced between the front and back, since this results in the weight going on your nose/face rather than straight through your head to your neck. the frame's battery is on the back specifically for this reason in addition to the whole thing being relatively light anyway

It has 16GB ram so the device is only like $500 actually.

I'm wondering how long the battery is in one charge.

Ars Technica's article put it at 1.5hrs in performance mode and over 2 in a power saving mode, but noted that the lower saving mode wasn't enjoyable. Of course it's I am sure that is going to be highly subjective to what you are doing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/09/steam-frame-the-ars-t...

Valve confirmed a separate strap with hot-swappable batteries 'coming soon'

If only it were OLED

Yeah, cannot comprehend why it isn't. At that price tag.

The usual "images burn in" OLED concern isn't even at all applicable on a VR headset, where the entire image naturally changes every frame.

The contrast, low-latency and power efficiency of OLED seem a no-brainer.

Maybe Im just poor

Same

Does anyone make VR games anymore?

Just duct tape your smart phone to your face for free

This is everything and much more than i wanted from a VR system, it feels like its designed exactly for me. Also tbh i thought after the steam machine price shock i got that this will be like 200 more.

1. It is SteamOS with desktop mode, the SteamDeck made me really miss that feature on any newer console i use like my ps5 or switch 2. Like even if we just limit it to games, playing games like The Binding of Isaac or Minecraft unmodded is a pain for me. Even just using websites for Streaming Services that dont have their app on every system ever, PS5 and Switch 2 dont even have webbrowsers you can just access, I think you have to edit DNS settings to make it think you have to sign up for a free wifi in the browser IIRC.

2. Wireless Streaming without the (Quest 3S) downsides of Wireless Streaming. I have a 6ghz router in my room, connected to my Laptop with an ethernet cable and tried the streaming on a quest 3S. I dont want todo that ever again, it was so inconsistent. It felt like the beatsaber song and gameplay speed up and slowed down like 1-5% in waves to catch up with the stream. Also sometimes my right eye turned into a chess grid of black pixels but i would assume that was more of a Linux Quirk. Also since i use a Laptop i dont want any wires from my headset to the Laptop, I dont want to pull my laptop and possibly more off my desk in the middle of a game. Also for movement games like beatsaber i find cables really annoying when you want to quickly accelerate.

3. Both the Windows mixed reality Headset and Quest 3S had TERRIBLE software. To continue using the WMR i had to reinstall windows like once every 1-2 months. Which just ended up with me stopping to play VR (Like why would i reinstall my PC like 6-12 times a year just to play those 3-4 games. From what i know from the steamdeck, the frame will be so so much better in this regard. On the Quest i wouldnt even have my steam library without connecting to a PC.

4. An ARM linux device that doesnt contain 10-15 year old somewhat mid phone hardware. Like i had been thinking about getting a macbook for asahi linux for a long time now just because it seemed like the best in that regard and i really really wanted a finished, high performance ARM device. And if i can run that many steam games on my non actively cooled phone already without the frame even being out (Since both use the FEX layer) (which has the same chip as the frame) I feel like i will really enjoy it for local Minecraft VR and Beatsaber and probably more.

5. The controllers. LTT complained about the "Default Xbox layout" because reaching all buttons is a bit hard, but for me, both the meta quest 3S and Samsung odyssey + controllers had a severe lack of buttons to bind game actions to. Also i like bigger controllers anyway, I like the Steam controller, I like the Wii u Gamepad, I like the steamdeck and I even like the OG xbox controller. To me those werent big clunky controllers, they were (or are) the most comfortable controllers i have used so far.

The only 2 things im eagerly waiting for more Info on is the "Much better comfort" i have been hearing about and the ability to install .APK files.

Either way im already sold on this thing and believe i will LOVE it for years and years to come.

Fuckfuckfuck. Not now, I will need to now offset this with a present for wife. Not to mention, it will mess with how fast other projects move. Fuck.

Funny, I'm now finding my first thought with new hardware like this to be "how good is it at running AI models locally?"

I mean.. I could consider renting a pair over a weekend or something. But buying? No way

Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600.

Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.

Yikes, what a terrible price. 55 minutes playing on-device Half Life Alyx. 1hr 30min streaming from a PC with dongle. 3 hours charge time. It's just pretty lame tbh. Damn :(

Is it really that bad? The hardware processing and storage is effectively a S24 which retails for $800. Add the additional displays, cameras and controllers, an extra $250 doesn’t seem that out there.

I played it on my Quest 2 so that's not really the price of admission

This is a huge step backwards for VR. The headset is heavy, hot, and worst of all, expensive. This is the opposite of progress for this field.

Slim, lightweight form factors similar to that of the Bigscreen Beyond are not going to be practical in a self-contained headset for quite some time to come, at least if the goal is to play anything more demanding than Terraria on it and its price range is anywhere remotely within reach of the general consumer.

The only reason why Facebook has been able to swing such low prices is with steep subsidization, and the Quest hardware itself isn't much less bulky.

Weighs less than Quest 3 on the first review I saw? They also said weight was better distributed, not as heavy in the front area as others.

Watching the gamers nexus review, that seems not true? Outside of expensive.

It's not heavy, it's very light. I bet it's not hot either.

The focus on mobile game graphic quality of the Quest was the real step back

Nitpicking a bit - once again another FOV of ~110. Sigh.

Maybe I’m just being picky, but I feel like I’m playing a submarine periscope simulator when I use these things. It’s been over a decade since the early VR headsets like the Rift, and it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been.

The only headset that didn’t give me this tunnel effect was the Pimax 8K, but it had its own problems.

Did you try it?

I don't really actually understand how Valve can answer "no" to the data collection questions.

If they have an inside-out tracking system, then they implicitly obtain biometric and environment data (user height, room layout). If they have a microphone, then they implicitly obtain data about humans talking inside your house. If they have an App Store, then they implicitly obtain data about apps installed on your device and the use time thereof.

Now, what they do with that data after the fact is almost certainly less nefarious than Meta - but they do by definition collect that data.

Only if you think of the headset as being Valve’s. I think the think it’s the user using their own headset to run software that tracks them.

I know, that’s an almost absurd concept in this day and age. But apparently it is possible.

Your computer using data and their servers collecting it over the internet is different.

Does Valve collect that data or the owner of the device?

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