In case you missed the news, I’ll briefly summarize: Valve has announced its new headset, the Steam Frame. The Steam Frame is a standalone device, but it is also amazing to stream content from your PC using a dedicated dongle. Valve has also announced a mini PC called the Steam Machine, where you can run all your Steam Games and stream them either to your Steam Deck or your Steam Frame. Steam Frame launches in early 2026, for a price that has been described as “less than an Index full kit”. For now, Valve is only shipping devkits to developers asking for them.
The Steam Frame is definitely a good headset, and I’m very happy it has been released. For sure, it is introducing some innovations, and for sure, it is going to bring some new gamers into VR. But at the same time, I don’t see anything that is disruptive for the market: the use cases it covers were already covered before, and its technology is just a good polishing of some technologies that were already on the market.
Frame is ideal for me. Just packed away my rift-s as I moved to Linux and didn’t feel like trying to get it to work, if it’s even possible. Never buying anything from meta again, so don’t have a quest, and this is just too perfect timing wise with Win10 ending.
No one who isn’t a venture capital weirdo actually gives a shit about “XR” or any kind of augmented reality.
Maybe I’m not phrasing that correctly for people with chronic brain rot to understand. Here:
Zero 👏 percent 👏 of 👏 ordinary 👏 users 👏 care 👏 about 👏 XR/AR.
For anyone doing the math at home, that’s even fewer people who than those who are potential VR customers in the first place, which are already objectively far fewer potential customers compared to, just for sake of argument, console sales or ordinary PC gaming.
I don’t know what it’s going to take for this to finally sink in for Big Tech. Possibly a shovel applied smartly upside the head. Users want to easily play VR games and watch VR porn, and maybe in extended use case scenarios have virtual work environments with multiple floating pseudomonitors or hang a virtual IMAX movie screen in space or whatever. The list ends right there.
No one wants to walk around outside with a bulbous display thingy on their face. No one wants to venture out into the world with their peripheral vision reduced to 110° and tripping over everything. No one has ever developed a compelling use case for ordinary consumers to have “content” (reality check: most of which will ultimately be spyware or ads) floated in front of their eyeballs mixed with the real world. The primary function people actually use the Quest/WMR/Frame passthrough for is brief stints for figuring out where they set down their coffee cup, or finding their keyboard, or avoiding stepping on the cat. That’s it. Monochrome passthrough is fine for that. Color would be neat, sure, but monochrome sensors are faster and have better dynamic range and higher sensitivity, which translates to better controller tracking performance, and that’s something everyone will bitch about if it’s bad.
Hololens was dead on arrival. The Apple Vision was dead on arrival. Android XR and by extension Galaxy XR are dead on arrival. Valve doesn’t need to make a bunch of compromises to compete in the “consumer XR market” because there is no consumer XR market. The Frame is a VR gaming headset designed as a VR gaming headset, for VR gamers. Period.
The Frame doesn’t have to “disrupt” anything. It has to do everything the Quest 3 does and manage do it roughly as well, while not being sold by Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy ass.
I’d imagine it’s less about innovating in the field and more about bringing those innovations to a wider market that isn’t gatekept by platforms.
I think this one is to get the ball rolling with the new self-contained paradigm. And then maybe the next iteration expands into AR. With the Steam Machine and its desktop mode, I think applications beyond gaming are going to start becoming a priority to Valve. I see many people buying these and just using them as their primary PC, which was much more rare with the SteamDeck. And then all of that will feed back into the headsets
Valve extensively dabbled with AR games in the pre-Index times and ultimatly those efforts resulted in a spinn-off company that failed. Valve probably made the right call to not persue this further.
The promise of AR seems to be mostly outside of gaming, so why would Valve as a pure gaming company be interested in that?
I think their open approach to software and hardware and the extension slot in the Frame will lead to it being a nice option for AR researchers and tinkerers, but I think it is unrealistic to expect that innovation to come from Valve itself.
We will see what comes of this. I am actually a little excited about the Steam Machine. I think it will make a great Steam console in my front room.
Black and white pass through is crazy. I really hated that on my Quest 2 but was glad they made it color on the Quest 3. I can actually walk around my house in color and do things when I pause my games. I couldn’t do that as easily in black and white on the Quest 2.
Feels like there’s going to be a situation like the Steam Deck OLED but with color…? I think I’ll wait on that reason alone. And there will likely be other upgrades too in a refresh a year or two later.
I was planning on ditching my Quest 3 for this, but doesn’t sound like it. It’s for the best because I don’t want to shell that much on a new headset so soon anyway.
I found the monochrome passthrough to be much more clear, personally. I could read a book or my phone in passthrough on the Q2. I can’t read shit through it on the 3 unless it’s really large text. Color is nice, but it’s much blurrier than the B&W.
Oh yeah, reading is crap on the Q3 for sure. I don’t remember ever trying on the Q2.
But just for walking around and seeing my surroundings, especially when the dogs or cat come around, was so much better in color, especially in lower lit areas. B&W was near impossible in low light.
The monochrome makes it track better. There’s also an expansion port under the nose gap that will let them put in color passthrough cameras later if enough people want it.
Hmm…I’ve never noticed much of a difference, even with hand tracking.
The only issues I’ve had between both in terms of tracking were related to controllers/hands going out of view of the camera.
If there was a difference, it was very minimal, at least for me.
That’s good to know about the bottom port. I like that Valve is somewhat future-proofing this right out of the box. I’ve been looking on Steam’s website about this but I can’t see that part. I am on mobile at the moment, so maybe it’s just not loading correctly for me. There’s some numbers on the headset that just aren’t showing up but are pointing to features on the outside of the headset.
It may not be in quality of tracking but efficiency, or something like that. It’s definitely going to be cheaper too.
The only disappointing part of the entire announcement was that they weren’t making any play at all for the MR space. I could see that depth sensing and SLAM on the environment to map space and anchor objects would be a lot of work, but it would be a major win for them to be the first company to successfully put a PC on your face instead of a phone/tablet (like Apple Vision Pro and Galaxy XR), and for it to be Linux, to boot.
Technically they could still add SLAM via a software update, the chip they chose definitely has enough oomph for it. Not sure if they are looking to go the MR route though.
I get the impression they aren’t. I’m just a little disappointed. But I can imagine several reasons they wouldn’t.
We gotta wait to see how good the tracking is in the wild. And what the battery life is. Hopefully it has good battery life while streaming.
