Known for its many variants of VR headset, Pimax is back with yet more new products. This time, it seems to be following Valve's recent example, with a wireless VR headset, foveated streaming, ringfree VR controllers, and a very long Steam Machine.

Let's start with the VR headset, as Pimax isn't playing around when it comes to wireless capabilities on this thing. It's called the Crystal Pro, and it's totally wireless. Included in the box is a Wi-Fi 6E adapter, much like the Steam Frame, which hooks it up to a nearby gaming PC; however, Pimax is going one step further with an optional wireless streaming kit, 60G AirLink, that uses 60 GHz 2x2 MIMO for a higher-bandwidth, more robust connection.

"What if you could cut the cable and still send the image with no visual compression. That question is the reason this headset exists," Jaap Grolleman says in a prerecorded launch video.

Using two additional room antennas and two additional headset antennas, which poke out from the rear of the strap, Pimax is able to deliver up to 6 Gbps bandwidth—3 Gbps over each connection and each data stream sync'd up via the onboard Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 SoC.

Pimax says 60G AirLink adds much less latency than standard Wi-Fi streaming—1.8 ms to 12 ms by its own presentation—and it uses this technology to offer something called Native Foveated Streaming.

Sound familiar? Valve introduced foveated streaming with the Steam Frame as a way to save on bandwidth for virtual reality using eye tracking. The Frame only streams a frame in high resolution where a user is looking; everywhere outside of that focus area is streamed at a lower resolution. It works great, in my experience, as unlike foveated rendering, I've not been able to notice any sign of foveated streaming in action.

Pimax is using its Native Foveated Rendering in much the same way, tapping the onboard 120 Hz Omnivision eye tracking. The focus area in the Crystal Pro is actually streamed at native resolution. It's full quality—straight from your frame buffer. Further out from the focus area, the detail diminishes until the outer edges, where it's much lower quality. You shouldn't be able to perceive that lower detail, providing everything works as intended.

As for the headset, it uses twin QLEDs running at a resolution of 2880 x 2880 each and up to 120 Hz. It taps Mini-LED for the backlight, with 576 local dimming zones per eye, and 200 nits of brightness. I was only a little disappointed not to see Micro-OLED again here, but I suppose the Dream Air and Crystal Super are already offering that for a hefty sum.

Speaking of sums, the Crystal Pro does make the Steam Frame look affordable. It costs $1,399 for the base model, or $1,899 with the 60G AirLink system. That alone costs $599.

What's surprising for the Crystal Pro is that it uses aspheric glass lenses. Those require more room in the front of the headset than pancake lenses, which are in the Dream Air, Steam Frame, and Quest 3, but Pimax says they're better suited for eye tracking.

The Crystal Pro comes with SLAM 2.0 inside-out tracking, which is perhaps the most exciting thing here, in combination with the new ringless controllers. During my recent testing of the Dream Air, I found the inside-out tracking left me wanting more, and the old school halo'd controllers were a little wobbly at times. SLAM 2.0 combines four cameras, a motion sensor, and infrared illuminators for low-light tracking, which I'm hoping will help bring this in line with the Steam Frame's top-tier tracking.

The new ringless VR controllers take a leaf from the Steam Frame. They have dual triggers on both sides, TMR sticks, grip sensing, and the full complement of face buttons, which, much like the Frame, means they can be combined into one regular controller's worth of inputs.

Pimax is once again trying to do one better here, with a central module that sits in between the left and right-side pads to turn them into an actual controller. A neat idea, even if I can't see myself using it much in practice.

The Crystal Pro also shares another similarity with the Frame. It has swappable faceplates, adding full-colour passthrough and LiDAR, or Lighthouse support for outside-in tracking. It also has optional over-ear speakers that Pimax has rolled out before, but definitely take inspiration from the Valve Index.

To top it all off, Pimax is bringing out a gaming PC called the Pimax Spation, which looks oddly familiar. It's more or less a long Steam Machine.

If any of these have caught your eye, you'll have to wait a while longer before you can get your hands on them. There are no on-sale dates offered as of yet.

I've yet to get my sticky mitts on the Steam Frame, as our review sample is in high demand. But I've just learned it can be used as a makeshift pair of night vision goggles, as demonstrated by YouTube channel azadovski. And that's just freaking cool.

You mean I can wander around my house at night like some kind of Sam Fisher wannabe? Sign me up. Apparently, this is down to the Frame's impressive IR-sensitive SLAM cameras, combined with the set's passthrough capabilities. It also means no one will see me look like a wally with a headset strapped to my face. Two birds, one stone.

Valve has pushed yet another update for SteamOS on the Steam Frame. It includes power efficiency improvements, eye tracking accessibility, and improved streaming reliability. Also something about grabbing handles?

• Improved power efficiency and battery lifetime during both streaming and local gameplay, with gains of up to 12%. Note: Result vary depending on framerate and content.
• Added accessibility option for users who want to limit eye tracking to a single eye. VR Settings -> General -> Track Dominant Eye Only. (requires enabling "show advanced settings")
• Fixed an issue that prevented controller bindings from loading for certain games, including Google Earth VR and Thumper.
• Improved focus behavior when interacting with grab/resize handles
• Further VR streaming reliability improvements, including additional fixes for “Error 17.” Note: On the PC, you must also opt into SteamVR 2.18.2 or later to reduce “Error 17” connection issues. At the time of this release, SteamVR 2.18.2 is available on the SteamVR [beta] branch.
• Fixed steam frame wireless adapter connectivity issues that affected users in some countries.

It's the battery life improvements that most will feel the benefit of. A 12% improvement is pretty impressive for a single software update—the Steam Frame runs for around two hours while streaming, so you're looking at another 15 minutes or so from that bump alone. Though, as Valve notes, that's dependent on what you're playing and the power setting.

Valve also recently improved charging on the Steam Frame, allowing it to fast charge even when the headset is turned off. That dramatically decreases charging times in my testing.

SteamOS for Steam Frame is a whole new project for Valve. A version of its Arch-based Linux distro, used on the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, except built for virtual reality and Arm-based processors. Specifically, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Frame, though laying the foundations for any further Arm-powered projects. I'd love to see an Arm-powered Steam Deck, though a recent rumour suggests the Steam Deck 2 will use another AMD chip instead.

I hate the new mascot for Meta's Muse AI assistant. The company unveiled the fluffy creature, as well as the Tamagotchi-esque Muse Charm device it will call home, (plus a VR headset that isn't really a VR headset) during its yearly Meta Connect conference last week.

The goal with Muse is to offer an AI assistant that "you can talk to in real time and reach in more places throughout your day," according to Meta. User's own Muse avatars can look wildly different, but the furry fiend default avatar that has so offended me is the company face of the entire Muse operation. The mascot's name is 'Jolly' on account of its "jolly and completely customizable character and personality," according to company CEO Mark Zuckerberg (via NBC News).

I hate that this little freak has inspired such a depth of feeling in me. I mean, just look at it. It also doesn't help that it looks a bit like a Doctor Who creature, the Adipose. Whenever I see this thing, I just think about that one scene where a character screams as she explodes into a puddle of sentient fat.

Setting that horrifying image aside, everything about the Muse mascot's design makes me cringe as a connoisseur of cute. The rounded edges, the fur, the blank but pleasant expression—it's all so laser-targeted to mass market appeal that it makes my skin crawl.

Wired compares it to a Labubu, and asks 'Meta’s Muse Is Adults-Only. Why Does It Look Like a Kids’ Toy?' Indeed, at Connect 2026, Mark Zuckerberg made his avatar play dress up like a doll, with the mascot donning a toga.

System 1's chief growth officer, Andrew Tindall, gives further voice to some of my own reservations, saying to Business Insider that Meta is leveraging "our innate draw to cute, infant-like features, to make surprising new technology easier to accept."

VaynerX CMO Avery Akkineni also told the outlet, "In some ways, it does humanize the product a little bit. I am certain that their intention is to make this more widely available and accessible than just for the early-adopter crowd."

Given that Meta may have excess AI data centre capacity, and may be feeling the pressure to see a return on that investment, it's unsurprising it would attempt to pitch Muse to the broadest audience possible. Besides that, efforts to 'humanise' AI and machine learning tech in general are nothing new, and putting a cute face on a product perhaps hungry for your personal data is an obvious play.

Unfortunately, Meta's mascot inspires a feeling stronger than just dispensing with social niceties—this is the face of something I want to punt very far away from myself.

You can watch my teardown attempt above. I've sped it up at times, mostly through the bits where I have no idea what to do next. That's most of it.

My attempts to take apart the Steam Frame ended in me nervously replacing screws on our only review unit. I hadn't broken anything, but I expected I might do if I persisted in stripping the headset down any further. Thankfully, there's no need for me to go through all that again, as iFixit has published its own full teardown.

iFixit's Shahram Mokhtari doesn't mind prying things. Things that I didn't dare pry myself. For example, it's pretty easy to get into the Steam Frame's main 'core module', the bit housing the system-on-chip, optics, RAM, memory, and sensors. Beneath the magnetic face mask sit three switches, release these and the core module comes away from the strap. It's then just six Torx screws to remove the plastic cover that exposes most of the headset.

The optics (lenses/screens) are attached magnetically to a rail at the top of the headset. They're pretty easy to remove, too; however, the push fit connectors on the back of the are glued onto the back of the optics. I left these in place out of fear—fear of destroying a very valuable object ahead of our review date—whereas iFixit pried those off without a second thought.

It's much easier to access the rest of the headset without the optics flapping around. iFixit says: "this design is pretty darn good for such a complex assembly," and notes only the Bigscreen Beyond has an easier lens stack removal process.

The metal bar the lens stack sits on comes out next, followed by the proximity sensor. This exposes the metal plate, complete with copper heatpipe, atop of the mainboard. At this point, I tried to remove this plate, and in doing so, I also prematurely removed some of the cameras around the edge of the mainboard. When I couldn't remove the mainboard, I was starting to lose my nerve, and this is when I turned back. Though I'm heartened to learn that iFixit's expert also got a little confused at this step.

And here's iFixit's teardown video:

"Okay, so full disclosure," Mokhtari says, "I got a bit confused here and started to look for other things that might be holding the metal plate in place. I got the two forward-facing tracking cameras that also enable passthrough and after a few minutes I figured out the three screws on the copper heatpipe are also the last holdouts."

It's a shame I never made it any further because this is when we get down to the lovely-looking innards. At least once the thermal paste is cleared away. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is sat beneath 16 GB of SK hynix LPDDR5X in the bottom left, with the NAND chip above it—in this case, 256 GB of SK hynix-made storage. Many connectors sit around the rest of the board. These are all easy enough to remove with a pair of pliers or a spudger, though Mokhtari does say it's a bit much for a user repair.

"In context, there are very few repairs that would need this level of disassembly, so I've got to hand it to Valve," Mokhtari says, "they layered the critical components really well with an eye towards user serviceability."

The best bit is when the entire mainboard is removed and flipped over. There's a fan, a larger heatpipe, and a board with barely any space without a visible component. Six IR emitters, three on either side, are present around this side of the mainboard. The fan is the one thing that iFixit thinks should be easier to get to here, as that is an active part and could slow or break altogether.

With the headset mostly torn apart, iFixit offers a quick glance at the controllers. What's interesting from their analysis is these also have loads of IR emitters—like, seriously, loads. That explains why I felt the tracking on the Steam Frame was so accurate and consistent during my testing.

The battery on the Steam Frame should be pretty replaceable, too. There's only a handful of screws, a press connector, and a bit of glue between a user and it. The glue is a bit of a pain but it comes away easily in iFixit's teardown. The company expects third-party battery packs should be fairly easy to add in here, due to the design, and we know Valve is already working on its own strap with interchangeable batteries.

So, altogether, another win for repairability from Valve here. Considering the Steam Controller, Steam Deck, and Steam Machine have also received a thumbs-up in this regard, it's not too surprising, yet it feels a little more impressive for the Frame. Making a compact, standalone VR headset user serviceable sounds like hard work, but with a few exceptions, it looks like Valve has done it.

Meta has announced a new virtual reality headset, complete with Micro-OLED displays, pancake lenses, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chip. Except it's not a new Quest. It's not even much of a headset. It's a pair of glasses. Oddly compact virtual reality glasses. With hand tracking. And AI. Don't forget AI.

Announced at Meta Connect, the new Meta VR Glasses are "five times lighter" than the Quest 3. That's a touch over 100 grams. That's roughly on par with the Bigscreen Beyond 2 at 107 grams; however, Meta's come with an additional tethered puck weighing in at 300 grams.

The puck contains the Snapdragon chip (XR2 Gen 3), 12 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, and a battery that should last around three hours. The glasses contain the pancake lenses, displays, and sensors.

The optics are powered by two Micro-OLED displays, at 2412 x 2288, 120 Hz, and 37 pixels per degree (PPD). The Quest 3 offers 25 PPD and the Pimax Dream Air, also with Micro-OLED, offers 53 PPD. So that's pretty good. What's not so good is the 70 degree field of view. That's according to Road to VR's Scott Hayden, who notes the passthrough is excellent.

You can see what the experience with these is like from Meta's demonstration on stage, filmed by our sister site, TechRadar. One thing that's pretty clear from a lot of this is that, despite the VR branding, it's much more an XR experience. Akin to the Apple Vision Pro, but I guess also where the Quest has been going with the new interface. You can also get a look at the AI assistant built into these specs, which Meta says you can "just talk to" to play movies, open apps, etc.

The VR Glasses support hand tracking. Meta has already published a list of games that are launching or being updated with hand tracking support by the time they arrive, including Beat Saber, Two Point Hospital, and Tetris Effect: Mixed Realities. Though Touch Plus controllers are supported—the same ones used by Quest headsets—none are included in the box.

Sean On Tech had a go with the glasses at the event and suggests there's also a heads-up keyboard, projected in front of the user when required. He's very complimentary of it, suggesting he can type at near full speed.

Here's the kicker, then. Meta's VR Glasses will cost $1,300 at launch this coming spring. Whatever the plan may be with a Quest 4, I'd sure hope it's cheaper than that.

A new version of SteamOS for Steam Frame has just landed. The company has fixed a few issues with the VR headset following its launch last week, which I'll get to in a bit, but one change stood out to me in the patch notes: Valve has added "substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping."

I found the Steam Frame to be slow to charge during my time testing it ahead of my review. It took over two hours to go from totally depleted to fully charged (you can see the full timings in the battery section of my Steam Frame review). When I installed a power meter between the charger and the outlet, it read just 11 W, which is much lower than the maximum output that could be delivered by the official power adapter, which is 45 W.

So, I reached out to Valve with my findings. Mostly to see if this was some sort of protection measure for the battery's long-term health.

Valve responded: "An empty battery takes around two hours to charge to full capacity. However, the charging is not linear. There is fast charging from 0 to 65%, and regular charging from 65% and up. Charging to 65% is expected to take less than 40 minutes. (Note: these values may be optimized over time, and are therefore subject to change.)"

I hadn't noticed any fast charging myself—it was always 11 W or thereabouts on my power meter throughout a full charge cycle—so this led to further experimentation. It might seem normal for most users, but when you're actively trying to test charging times, you tend to let the device run flat first. This time I didn't.

I ran the battery on the Frame down to around 4%, then started charging it. Lo and behold, the power meter read roughly 31 W, and the Steam Frame went from 4% to 65% in 35 minutes. Valve's timing was pretty spot-on. After that, it dropped to 18 W for the final charge to 100%, with a total charge time of just 75 minutes.

I thought I was doing the right thing by leaving the Frame switched off during charging to save power and charge it faster. Turns out, I was doing the exact opposite, and I'm sure others would've fallen foul of this too once the headset was in the hands of thousands of customers.

Thankfully, this is one of the first things to be addressed in the latest version of SteamOS for Steam Frame, version 0.3.0. I've had a quick test with the update installed, and my power meter now reads 27 W with the Frame switched off. That's much higher.

This makes way more sense to me; I can now enjoy the headset until the final juice leaves the cell, and not have to worry about needlessly doubling the charging time in doing so.

Here are the other changes in the update:

General

• Substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping
• Improved controller tracking while haptics are active
• Improved system stability and reliability under high load
• Fixed "garbled audio" microphone bug

UX

• Fixed per-app Motion Smoothing -> "Force Always-On" setting (was getting ignored)
• Improved motion smoothing behavior in Alyx
• Added VR Settings control for "Game dimming when dashboard is visible"
• VR Settings -> Play Area no longer auto-shows bounds

Developer

• Change Playable performance criteria to allow any resolution (was: 1440p)
• Vulkan layer fixes for increased game compatibility
• Multiple improvements to overall system / OS performance
• Multiple improvements to graphics performance (Mesa)

Valve is still building out the library of games that are officially certified to run on Steam Frame via Proton and FEX layers, but it looks like that's one area of focus for the company as units start to arrive with customers.

Did you get a Steam Frame reservation? You can do your bit and help shape our understanding of availability by logging your answer on this community website.

If you signed up for a Steam Frame, it's time to check your inbox for an email from Valve. The company has run its 'one-time randomisation' to decide who gets a unit from the first batch and who is left on the waitlist. Once you know where you land, head over to this community reporting website; we're already getting a good idea of the odds of buying a Steam Frame from the results so far.

The odds were stacked against us. That's the picture I get from this tremendous website by coah80 that asks the community, 'Did you get a reservation?' Users can respond with: waitlisted, reserved, or no email yet.

With 35,000 (and counting) results so far, it looks like around 44.7% of respondents were lucky enough to get a reservation, and 51.6% are on the waitlist. 3.8% say they haven't received an email yet.

A quick reminder of how this works: those of us who signed up for a Steam Frame via the Store page were entered into a one-time raffle that took place on September 17. This determines who has a unit reserved for them and who was added to the waitlist. The reserved units are offered up first, and if someone doesn't buy theirs, the unit moves to the next person on the list. Once those reservations are sorted, Valve will start working through the waitlist.

If you sign up for a Steam Frame today, you'll join the back of the waitlist. That's at least 18,254 customers long, at time of writing, though you have to assume that many of the people who signed up for a Steam Frame have no idea this website even exists. There's a good chance it's a lot higher than this site suggests.

The Steam Frame comes in two capacities: 256 GB and 1 TB. As I wrote in my Steam Frame review, I'd rather the 256 GB model. It's considerably cheaper and while you can't upgrade the internal storage, you can slot in a microSD card to expand your library further. If you're mostly going to use the Frame for game streaming, you don't need a huge amount of space on the device anyways.

Good news, looks like a majority of users also agree on storage sizes. The community site also asks which model a user signed up for and offers the option to share their location, which many have, giving us even more data to go on. The 256 GB model is the more popular option country-by-country. It only takes $240 to change hearts and minds, as I think with a smaller premium in pre-memory crisis times, we may have seen those stats reverse. The 512 GB Steam Deck was a popular choice when it first launched.

I trust AI about as far as I can throw it—and I'm definitely not strong enough to lift up a data centre server rack. Flinging a facsimile of the OpenAI logo around VR is a little more realistic for my weight class, and now a software developer at Epic (no, not that one) has at least in part fulfilled that vision.

Earlier this week, Hank Berger shared a short clip of himself in VR, picking up the aforementioned model from his 3D software, and hurling it to his 3D printer, where it begins printing. Berger wrote, "I've never felt more like Tony Stark than I do now."

So, yes, it's more a project borne out of AI enthusiasm rather than sharing in my scepticism. The Bambu Lab printer API allows users to control the 3D printer locally, though Berger notes in a follow up post that "Unfortunately, it makes the mobile app stop working." So, the developer "spun up a quick webserver" on his PC, and then leveraged GPT-6 Astra to get his Meta Quest 3 headset, the mobile app, and his 3D printer to all 'talk' to each other.

He shared on X that the project is "not up on GitHub yet, but I might consider it if there's enough interest," explaining that it "needs a bit more polish to be distribution ready." Berger has also posted a number of his other AI-assisted experiments in recent weeks, including completely unofficial VR ports of Luigi's Mansion and Super Smash Bros Melee.

As we've covered in the past, a number of independent developer communities have been picking apart retro games and meticulously putting them back together again so that they are playable on PC. This retro game decompilation scene has become the new AI vibe coding battleground, due to an influx of 'AI rush jobs' as our Wes describes them.

While Berger's VR-take on Super Smash Bros Melee is based on an 'AI accelerated' decompilation, his Luigi's Manson VR project isn't; he explains in a follow up post that "Astra can help you install an emulator and modify the ROM" to run Luigi's Mansion in VR. He also stresses "Decompiling is a very long and intensive task and will burn through your [AI subscription] usage!"

Personally, I would prefer to work out my own frustrations about the AI-induced memory crisis by donning my own VR headset—if I had any.

There was a time when VR was pretty much exclusive to the PC. I'm talking about when the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift were the pinnacle of technology, circa 2016. I have very fond memories of those two headsets, often borrowing them from friends and colleagues, then ferrying them around to various spots to evangelise the new and exciting world of VR; VR that was then entirely tethered to a gaming PC. Then came the Oculus Go, later the Oculus Quest, and all of a sudden, VR was mobile.

It took a while before standalone VR headsets really took off. It wasn't until the Quest 2, and later Quest 3/Quest 3S, that these headsets started to dominate the conversation around virtual reality. Nowadays, these three dominate the Steam Hardware Survey for August 2026, accounting for over 60% of headsets plugged into a PC by those surveyed. The Valve Index, which launched in 2019, remains in fourth place. Few new arrivals in PCVR get anywhere close: the Bigscreen Beyond has just 1.25% of the share, which is less than the original Vive.

Many are using standalone headsets to play VR games powered by their gaming PC, hence being registered on Valve's survey at all. So, in a sense, there's still so much to play for on PC.

"Some of the other mobile devices, like the Meta Quest, for example, are some of the most popular headsets on Steam," says Jeremy Selan, a software engineer at Valve who worked on the Steam Frame. "So there is a real draw with PCVR even today amongst the millions and millions of VR headsets out there, and that's, I believe, because there's a lot of unique VR content that can only be accessed with the capabilities and power of the PC and the experimentation that comes on it."

Yet it'd be fair to say that the market has shifted attention away from PCVR experiences. I've had a look around SteamDB at the number of VR games that are released on Steam every year, and it's not a positive trend.

The number of VR games on the platform reached peak around 2017, and since that time, it's either remained flat or dropped with each subsequent year. By SteamDB's figures, 2025 was the worst year for VR games on Steam for a decade. Just 481 VR games released on the platform, and you have to go back to 2015, prior to the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, to see a lower figure. Compare that to the exponential increase of non-VR games released on Steam each year, and it looks like VR has struggled to maintain a foothold on the platform.

In 2017, VR games accounted for 15% of all game releases on Steam. In 2025, they accounted for just 2%.

In comparison, the Quest Store has only seen an increase in new releases each year since 2020. Though Quest Store DB doesn't note how many of those are actual games. From a quick glance, many appear to be learning or XR experiences.

I'm not turning my nose up at the games that have launched on Steam in the past year, especially as that's 481 more things to play with a VR headset on PC. Moreover, many of the best VR games on PC came out years ago, such as Half-Life: Alyx, and they're still as enjoyable as ever. We're not short of things to play, but we might end up that way if something doesn't change.

The ongoing tally for 2026 suggests there have been 270 new VR games on Steam so far. We're already three quarters of the way through the year, and at this rate, we're looking at yet another poor yield; potentially the lowest since PCVR began.

So, what might help reverse this trend? Valve hopes that its new hardware, the Steam Frame, might turn the tide for Steam's VR catalogue; or, at the very least, bridge the divide between PCVR and mobile VR for gamers and developers.

"We love the PCVR community," says Steam Frame hardware engineer Joy Lyons. "We've been making VR devices for decades now, and so we've been there since the beginning."

The Frame offers something new for Valve. The ability to stream games from a local gaming PC over a dedicated wireless connection and run games on its very own hardware, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. This dual functionality is nothing new for virtual reality, but from my time testing the Steam Frame over the past few weeks, it's definitely at its best when playing PCVR games streamed wirelessly via the included adapter. In that sense, it feels more a PCVR headset with standalone functionality than the other way around.

Lyons explains the rationale behind Valve's approach with the Steam Frame:

"We think it's great for customers to have more access to different types of games," Lyons says. "And I think what we're seeing is a maturing of the platform with these sort of fundamental technology movements just to make the emulation layers work, for example. And we see this as a sort of a broadening and maturing of the market; sort of an opening of the tent to more potential customers, more potential gamers."

The Steam Frame uses Proton, FEX, and Lepton to support a wider array of games. We're pretty familiar with Proton from the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, offering a way to play games made for Windows on a Linux machine. FEX is the emulation layer that makes it possible to play games designed for x86 chips on Arm chips. Games that run well on the Steam Frame from both Proton and FEX will get a badge to say so via the Steam Frame Standalone Verified programme.

Lepton is a container for Android games using the APK file format, which will allow these to run on the Arm-powered, SteamOS-run Steam Frame. Android games are now arriving on Steam, too. This will, in turn, boost the number of newly-released VR games on Steam. It just may take some time for many of the Android games mostly made for Quest to arrive. A good way to bump the numbers for next year and beyond.

"We wanted to, with the emulation, be able to have access to more games in the VR space," Lyons says. "And so I think some people who have done PCVR maybe haven't had access to some of the APK type games and so we're growing the catalog on that side as well."

Now, you might argue that's not really expanding PCVR so much as injecting Steam with lots of mobile VR games. I guess you'd be right, you ol' stick in the mud, you. But Valve engineer Jeremy Selan also counts PCVR experiences among those that they hope to get a much-needed boost from the launch of the Steam Frame.

"This is designed for PCVR streaming and to do that really, really well," Selan says of the Steam Frame. "So we've been giving these units out to developers. Our hope is that this will help rekindle the excitement of what you can do with PCVR.

"Our hope is that out of the box, obviously, no work is needed," Selan continues. "Your existing catalog of VR titles on Steam will just work. But over time, as we sell more of these and the economics improve, we think this will give a new life to the ability to take advantage of the large compute of your PC while still having a great wireless VR experience."

"We love the PCVR community," Lyons says. "We always will. This is our heritage. These are our customers, and we see this as a great product for them. We made it for them. But we also want to grow a healthy ecosystem for both the gamers and the game developers."

I guess we'll have to check back in on the stats once the Frame has had a chance to shake things up. As Selan says in our chat, there are also some VR games that will always be tied to PC, like flight sims or racing sims, but those often feel pretty clunky in my experience. I can't even boot the latest F1 game in VR, let alone join a race. Nevertheless, I agree with Selan that more can be done with VR with a PC powering the experience.

Perhaps Valve should lead the way with its own first-party VR game, like it did Half-Life: Alyx. Of course, I asked Lyons and Selan about any plans for future release, but they told me Valve has "elected to pour all our efforts into making our partner games available," and "don't have any new titles coming out." Though, Half-Life: Alyx came out nearly a year after the Valve Index, so I'm holding out hope yet. Credulous? I don't know the meaning of the word.

The Steam Frame is here and it's one of the best VR headsets I've ever had attached to my face, just don't ask me about the price. But when we spoke to two of the people at Valve who helped create the device—Joy Lyons and Jeremy Selan—they told me the company actually had its new VR headsets ready years ago, but they made the tough decision to pull the plug on those designs.

"We had the headsets ready three, four years ago," Selan explains, "and they were big, bulky devices. They were more in the style of the Valve Index, and we put them on, and we're just like, this doesn't feel like what we would want the next round of our product to be."

We'd asked why now, why is this the right time to release a new VR headset? With sales dropping year over year and 2026 potentially being the worst year effectively since records began for PCVR releases, it doesn't necessarily seem like the perfect time to be putting out new virtual reality hardware, and that's before we even mention the memory and hardware pricing crisis.

"You asked, why now?" says Selan. "The answer with all Valve projects is 'as soon as we can'. Right, this was the soonest we could release the headset, but we had to make sure it was ready.

"The hardware engineers went back to the drawing board many, many times to finally achieve sort of the very small form factor, the comfortable, the lightweight. Figuring out all the system trade-offs with regards to power versus battery weight, versus cooling, and thermals. So this was absolutely the fastest we were capable of shipping the device that we were proud of.

"Now we thought that was going to be early 2026, and it turns out due to supply and component shortages and economics that in fact now was the soonest we could release it."

But it's not just about the hardware. As Valve engineer Joy Lyons notes, "The focus was on being lightweight and being comfortable", but while it's the hardware that makes that possible, all of the work Valve has been putting in with its previous releases on the software side have made this headset the one that actually gets released.

"We learned a lot with our portable systems," Lyons explains, "including the Steam Deck launch and all the work we did for emulation and the operating system, with Proton being able to run Windows-based games on Linux, on the SteamOS operating system.

"And so we've been continuing that work, and now we've got an ARM device, and so we think this is a great time to take advantage of Proton, being able to do FEX, which allows us to run x86 games on a piece of ARM hardware, and Lepton, which is the new work to do Android-based games, and have that work also on our SteamOS platform. And so we're able to have all these come together, as well as all of our work on the hardware side."

It's this kind of VR nexus point which has made the Steam Frame the right device for Valve, and at the right time. It is, of course, a PC VR device, with its almost uncanny ability to stream games wirelessly from your PC utterly seamlessly, but it is also a standalone device able to translate your x86 PC's Steam library and have that run inside an ARM-based VR headset. Again, almost seamlessly.

And then you also now have the ability to play Android games through Steam via the Lepton translation layer. Now, that's not just Candy Crush writ large on a massive virtual screen, this is specifically designed to capture the wealth of VR content released for the Meta Quest and its Android-based Horizon OS. And with this new world of potential content available to the Steam Frame as a portable device, it's been a bit of a journey of discovery even for Valve.

"I'm like, 'I wonder if this one will run?'" says Lyons. "And you download it, and you open it, and it runs, and you put it on the huge screen. That was the moment where it's just like, 'this is fun. I'm gonna take off my engineer hat. I'm gonna stop nitpicking every little thing that I know about the device, and I'll definitely address that tomorrow. But right now, I'm actually having fun.'

"I think I went through 89 games in a two week period… that's kind of the moment where it's like, 'yeah, this is great'."

"We're our own best testers," adds Selan. "So I do remember in those days I would have access to this secret prototype VR hardware, and I would take it home… and I'd still use my Steam Deck.

"And there became a transition point with this round of hardware, where when I took this home and this was my favorite device to use. And so, for me personally, that's when sort of a switch flipped in my head, and I was like, 'This is going to be a real thing'."

After many years of waiting and a few false starts over on Reddit, the Steam Frame is finally here. We even have a price for the virtual reality headset, which is set to ship imminently to customers. Hold onto your headsets…

• Steam Frame (256 GB) w/ VR controllers: 1,059 USD/ 1,529 CAD/ 1,049 EUR/ 889 GBP/ 1,609 AUD/ 4,539 PLN
• Steam Frame (1 TB) w/ VR controllers: 1,299 USD/ 1,859 CAD/ 1,279 EUR/ 1,089 GBP/ 1,969 AUD/ 5,549 PLN

An additional Ergonomic Accessories Kit is available to purchase alongside the Frame. It includes two hand straps for the controllers, a head strap for the headset, and an extended light blocker. This costs 49 USD/ 69 CAD/ 59 EUR/ 49 GBP/ 89 AUD/ 229 PLN.

Be honest, were you expecting this sorta price for the Steam Frame? Some called it, due to the similar cost of a Valve Index for most of its lifespan; though I expect many of us adjusted our expectations following the onset of the memory crisis, and the subsequent launch of the Steam Machine. Our Andy called that the biggest victim of the RAMpocalypse, and you could argue something similar for the Steam Frame.

It's certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame's launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it's launching the Frame for today.

Here's Lyons on the memory crisis:

"We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we've made choices to make sure that we're making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world."

Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.

"We don't know what pricing is in the future. We try to monitor these things, but we're certainly very aware of it.

"We think it's a great, compelling product, and we are still happy to have it out there. We're happy to have our customers be able to have hardware during this RAM crisis, and we think it's important to launch new hardware out there and have new experiences available. But, yeah, I think everyone's disappointed by the RAM crisis."

Selan was the person that guided me through the Steam Frame and all of its features back at Valve's HQ in late 2025. They also lament the increase in price since that time: "I wish we could have shipped it at the price that we were at last year. It's still awesome today. It is amazing, but we were targeting a lower price, and I wish we could have done that."

The price puts the Steam Frame at a big disadvantage to the Quest 3. Even following a price hike, which Meta justified on similar terms to Valve, you can buy a Quest 3 for $600 today. Admittedly, I feel the Steam Frame is a better all-round device than the Quest 3, but the significantly higher price point of the Frame does leave the Quest 3 fairly unchallenged in the mainstream market, especially when it offers a similar level of fidelity to the Frame.

Memory is one factor for the Steam Frame's higher cost; the Frame has 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, while the Quest 3 has 8 GB of LPDDR5. We asked Lyons and Selan about this decision and whether there was any discussion of shipping the Frame with less memory to save on cost.

"We looked at the Steam Frame pre-launch a few years ago, we said we can access this huge fraction of the same catalog [as the Steam Deck], or we can slice a major component off it and make sure that'll never run, if we do a lower limit," said Selan. "Now, granted, the trade-offs and cost and performance were a little different at that time, but even in hindsight, having a single target where we know what this generation will be capable of running is great, and we're very happy with that."

Meta also has the benefit of happily burning billions every quarter on its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for its Meta Quest headsets as well as its latest Orion smart glasses. While Valve isn't exactly strapped for cash, as far as cash flow goes, very few companies can spend as much as Meta without seeing much return on investment and not worry about it. That doesn't change much from a customer perspective, mind, many of whom will now have to weigh up whether Valve's device is worth an extra $450. Tough call.

The Valve Index might be outdated in many ways today, but it still holds a special place in my heart for its excellent audio solution: twin speakers that deliver impressive spatial properties without actually touching your ears. The Steam Frame doesn't take the same approach, sadly, but word from Valve is that it's working on a first-party accessory that'll add a set of Index-like speakers to the compact Frame.

The Steam Frame is modular. Three small switches are all it takes to completely remove the core module, containing the chip, RAM, storage, optics and more, from the strap. The strap also includes the battery, SD card slot, and speakers.

"So the battery, the thermals; I think those will be the ultimate limits of the device," said Jeremy Selan, software engineer at Valve during a pre-launch chat. "We thought of that early. It's no surprise. So that's why we were very proud of making a modular design where the core module is separate from the rear.

"And in fact, you might say, 'Hey, what is Valve going to do with this?' We're working on a future first-party accessory where it will plug in and replace the existing [strap]. That head strap will include a hot-swappable battery, and then premium Index-style off-ear audio."

When pushed for a date as to when this accessory might be available, Selan joked that he was one of the people who was confident that the Steam Frame would land in early '26, and no longer felt like a credible source on these things. Fair enough. He ended up saying, "we're working to make it available as soon as we can."

"The Valve Index audio is, I mean, it's awesome, and so we wanted to give people the opportunity to have that," says Joy Lyons, hardware engineer and audio expert at Valve. "And so it's a modular design. You just snap in, like Jeremy mentioned. That's not available at launch, but it's coming soon, and we'll have pricing and details on that."

The Steam Frame's speaker system is totally serviceable, anyways. I've been using the headset for three weeks and I've no complaints in that specific department. Lyons explained how this solution ended up being implemented.

"One of the design principles for the headset is being lightweight and also being portable, so you can collapse it. And so having any additional structure in the headband, that was something where early on it was clear, hey, that's going to interfere with our ability to collapse it and take it with you. And so we elected to put the audio into the head strap."

Lyons explained how they decided on two drivers on either side of the headset, but that these ended up pretty close to the core module. The core module contains all the camera and sensors for the Frame's inside-out tracking, which makes it very sensitive to vibration.

"The vibration caused the screen to jump with the bass, which is not as exciting as it sounds," Lyons said.

"So we were able to, with that early architecture, flip one of the drivers, and so the sound's coming out in phase. So you're getting your double sound output per side, but the vibration's been cancelled. And so we wanted to have this open-ear experience, so that really gives you that sense of immersion; you're not closed in, you're not hot, and it just builds a very natural sound."

The Steam Frame is a great way to game in virtual reality. I've been testing it for three weeks and I've played more VR games in that time than I have in many months. That's because, above all else, it's convenient. What used to slow me down with other headsets is mostly a thing of the past. I place the Steam Frame on my head and pick a game to play; VR has never been easier.

But I haven't always been sold on the Steam Frame. I spent the week prior to its arrival playing on the Pimax Dream Air, which includes the most spectacular Micro-OLED displays. That is a tough act to follow for any VR headset, let alone one with optics not dissimilar from the three-year-old Quest 3. As a long-term VR user and someone that's been privileged to play most of the best VR headsets in recent years, the Steam Frame felt too familiar an experience out of the box.

Over many weeks of testing, I've noticed more how the Steam Frame has eased a few of my fundamental gripes with virtual reality; things that cause me to leave my other headsets to gather dust on the shelf. Like how often I need to set up my playspace, set the floor height, peer out from my headset at my computer, adjust the strap, or untangle myself from a cable.

A wireless dongle included with the Frame takes care of the cable, delivering a seamless and reliable connection between it and a gaming PC. The fully-featured SteamOS means the first step upon donning the headset is choosing a game, and the second step playing it. The included controllers work with every game, VR or non-VR, and are tracked with pinpoint accuracy. And with such a lightweight design, this is one headset I'm not in a rush to take off.

I want to use the Steam Frame more than any other headset I own right now. That includes some that are double the price. Ack, I've mentioned money. Now I have to do the hard thing and bring this spiralling back down to Earth: The Steam Frame starts out a $1,059 for the 256 GB model. I haven't spoken to anyone, even Valve employees, who has much positive to say about the price. The memory crisis has done a number on the Steam Frame, as it did the Steam Machine.

The Steam Frame isn't a cheap way into virtual reality for the masses. It has to be viewed as an enthusiast offering; or, at the very least, you have to care a bit about VR to purchase one. Those of us wanting to try VR for the first time are still better off with a Quest 3 or Quest 3S for value for money; and those of us that already own a Quest 3—that's a lot of us—it's a tough upgrade, lacking any major visual overhaul. There are undoubtedly better options for enthusiasts looking for that, like the Bigscreen Beyond 2. Yet it is far more convenient than high-end headsets that still rely on Base Stations or heavy tethers.

Ultimately, I believe VR to be a holistic experience. Focus all your efforts on one aspect of a headset and the user experience is likely to suffer moreover for something else; the weakest link. Take it from me, even high-end optics fall flat after the umpteenth time resetting your playspace due to poor tracking. The Steam Frame does, then, have its virtues: It's by far the best all-round VR headset for user experience, with no major faults besides the price; it's just that price matters more than most.

Steam Frame - Gallery

Steam Frame - Features

Steam Frame - Optics

The Steam Frame's optics are, on paper, the least exciting thing about it. We've seen a handful of headsets with similar configurations, from the Quest 3 to the Pico 4 Ultra; neither of which are brand new.

Graphical fidelity feels much the same on the Steam Frame as the Quest 3. There's an amount of aliasing (jaggies) on straight lines and sharp details, which adds a touch of flicker as your head moves around. There is also a slight hint of chromatic aberration to the edge of some brighter details, such as the Steam Frame logo upon startup, though this is quite minor.

Text is clear to read when scaled appropriately, though can get tougher to make out when it's outside of the fairly large focal area of the pancake lenses or at a greater distance. Similarly, some details in game worlds can be lost when viewed from far away, and objects with meshes can get a little distorted or flicker—something that higher-end headsets, like the Pimax Crystal Super or Dream Air, don't suffer from. Those two headsets are available with Micro-OLED displays, which offer much more vibrancy and range of colour than the Steam Frame, but for huge price tags.

The Steam Frame offers, more or less, a level of quality that I've become accustomed to in relatively affordable VR headsets.

Where the Steam Frame outperformed my expectations is in binocular overlap. This is the amount of an image (given as a percentage) that is covered by both left- and right-side displays at the same time. It's not as often talked about as resolution and refresh rate, but it's hugely important for long-term comfort while wearing a VR headset. The Steam Frame has a pretty high binocular overlap, according to my own testing in the 'What is my Field of View?' application (more commonly called WimFov). This is with an IPD set to 64.

• Steam Frame - 77%
• Meta Quest 3 - 69%
• Pimax Crystal Super 50 PPD - 77%
• Pimax Crystal Super Micro-OLED - 86%
• Pimax Dream Air (standard FOV) - 86%
• Pimax Dream Air (wide FOV) - 77%

The Steam Frame is right up there with the best of them for binocular overlap, beaten only by the Micro-OLED optics used in both the Crystal Super and Dream Air. The Quest 3 has a lower level of binocular overlap, which can lead to discomfort or worsened 3D effects, though it does depend on your IPD and various other biological factors. I tend to struggle with headsets with a low overlap over time; they strain my eyes.

Binocular overlap, as measured in WimFov

Valve is pretty honest when it comes to the FOV. The Steam Frame's horizontal field of view (HFOV) is noted as 'up to 110 degrees', and lo and behold, I measured it at that. That's not as common as you might think. I often find the effective HFOV to be lower than the stated FOV. For example, all three of the headsets in the table below have a listed HFOV of 110 degrees.

There are a range of factors that can have an effect on effective FOV, not the least bit my own biology. Yet one big factor is the design of the padding between one's face and the lenses. Valve seems to have nailed the padding design to maximise the effective FOV; thick enough as to not be a detriment to the long-term comfort yet ensuring a one's eyeballs are right up to the lenses. Using the glasses spacer included with the Steam Frame will knock this back a touch.

Beyond the numbers, the Steam Frame's optics plonk you right into the game world. There's no visible distortion until the very extremes of the lenses, and even then it's not that bad by comparison to some. The gap around the nose is a little noticeable during gameplay, and made worse by the glasses spacer, but you have to be kinda looking out for it to notice it too much. That can be reduced with the extended light blocker in the Ergonomic Accessories Kit for an additional $59 (89 CAD / 69 EUR / 59 GBP / 99 AUD).

There is a degree of glare, as I find with most headsets with pancake lenses, but to a lesser extent than the Quest 3. It's only really noticeable when there's a very high level of contrast being displayed, which isn't all that often in my experience.

For the most part, when I'm trying to throw barrels, bottles, and cans at headcrabs in Half-Life: Alyx because I've run out of ammo, I'm not thinking about the FOV, binocular overlap, or glare; I'm thinking, 'Ah, ah, ah! No, no, please, just die already! Oh, god!'

That's positive, right?

Steam Frame - Performance

The best way to play on the Steam Frame is over the included wireless adapter. It's a USB Type-A dongle providing a 6 GHz connection beamed directly at a dedicated antenna on the Frame. Another antenna on the Frame connects directly to the local Wi-Fi. The Frame actually taps both connections for game streaming from a local PC; selecting between the two in real-time for the lowest packet loss and most robust connection.

I'm yet to notice any connection issues over the dedicated dongle, whether in my own home or in our busy office. Nor any visible dips in quality for the game being beamed across. That's really impressive, as Valve's is using what it calls Foveated Streaming to reduce the bandwidth requirements over the wireless connection. It does so by only streaming the game in the highest detail in the area where one's eyes are looking. The rest is streamed at a lower quality level. The Frame's built-in eye tracking has to keep up with your pupils to ensure a smooth experience—and it does a superb job of it.

The Frame supports a refresh rate up to 144 Hz, though it defaults to 90/72 Hz, depending on the power mode selected. In the battery-saving Playtime mode, it will only run at 72 Hz, which is pretty passable in my opinion. At the expense of battery life and processing power, it can run anywhere from 90–144 Hz in the settings menu.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) chip does a pretty good job of rendering games locally. It does, however, require gentler programming in the graphics menu.

Take Half-Life: Alyx, for example, as Valve has created a version of the game that runs natively on the Snapdragon chip. It is of much lower quality than you'll experience by streaming the game from a local PC over the provided dongle. Valve has added foveated rendering to the game (dynamically changing the rendering level based on where one's looking) in order to improve performance. Unlike foveated streaming, foveated rendering is far more noticeable in my peripheral vision.

Though Half-Life: Alyx running at all on the Snapdragon chip is impressive, as are other games that are able to run just fine after being chopped up by the two compatibility layers, Proton and FEX. Proton deals with Windows to Linux; FEX deals with x86 to Arm. I tried out a few VR and non-VR games standalone on the Steam Frame and it often dealt surprisingly well with them. These included a few Steam Frame Standalone Verified games and one that hadn't yet been checked.

• Eleven Table Tennis (verified): smooth, high fps
• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered (not verified): failed to run past splash screen
• Escape Room VR (verified): smooth, decent fps
• Hades (verified): smooth, high fps

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered is Steam Deck Verified; however, that doesn't mean it will run on Frame, as it using FEX as well as Proton. Essentially, there are a few more hoops to jump through.

Hades, on the other hand, runs great via both translation layers. It's likely a boon to the Frame that the game has a Vulkan version already available. If I understand it correctly, Vulkan should let Valve skip some of the translation work and improve performance. The game reached around 100 fps, so it definitely didn't seem to suffer for any of the funny business in the background. It's best to set the Steam Frame's cap to beneath this figure, anyways, as it keeps the visuals steady and stable. Once I set the system to 144 Hz, which it couldn't reliably hit in Hades, moving my head would cause the game screen to shudder.

Eleven Table Tennis is a great reminder of when low latency and high refresh really matter in VR. I've been trying to beat the silver-level AI in that game for weeks now. I had, at times, thought it impossible, especially after trying and failing on three different VR headsets (Frame, Dream Air, Quest 3).

Installing the game on the Frame and running it locally at 120 Hz, with the ergonomic straps removed from the controllers to aid my front spin, I finally cracked it. I nailed some fast return balls that the stupid cat (the AI has a cat's face, don't ask) couldn't return. It was a silky smooth experience, even on the Frame's internal 'Turnip' Adreno GPU. I feel the local processing and high refresh really helped me here; but it drained the heck outta the battery on this thing: 50% gone in under 30 minutes.

Nevertheless, the standalone functionality feels less crucial to me. I will almost always stream games from my gaming PC via the wireless connection, due to the performance, quality, and battery life improvements I'll get onto shortly.

Steam Frame - Ergonomics

The Steam Frame weighs in at 440 grams. On my scales, it's more like 403 grams, but that's more a criticism of my crappy scales than anything else. What's important is that it is exceedingly light; the second-lightest from my own measurements.

• Steam Frame: 403 g
• Quest 3: 437 g
• Quest 3S: 454 g
• Crystal Dream Air: 280 g
• Crystal OLED: 848 g
• Crystal normal: 837 g
• Sony PS VR2: 499 g

Comfort in a VR headset is not all about weight, but in this case, the Steam Frame's small stature helps a helluva lot. Valve has balanced the weight of the Steam Frame across the front and back of the device, with the battery as a counterweight to the headset's 'core module', containing the optics, SoC, and most other technical bits. With the weight of the battery elsewhere, the core module weighs only 157 grams. Valve has that at 185 grams but hey ho; crappy scales.

Ample cushioning around the face and on the rear of the battery help to alleviate most discomfort from the weight of the device during play sessions. Unlike the Quest or older, heavier headsets, the weight does not feel like it is localised to your cheekbones or around the eyes. Even after hours of play to test the battery life, I didn't notice any patches of red or indentation lines on my face.

If you wear glasses, the Steam Frame is pretty accommodating. There's a spacer included in the box that adds another 4-7 mm between your face and the lenses. It's the easiest to add into the headset that I've used to date, too. It's all magnetically attached—the padding and glasses spacer can be replaced in no time at all.

Ergonomics accessories kit

Valve is offering an Ergonomic Accessories Kit as a separate purchase alongside the Steam Frame. It costs 59 USD/89 CAD/69 EUR/59 GBP/99 AUD and includes three premium upgrades:

• Controller straps w/ compatible battery doors
• Extended light blocker
• Top headset strap

I reckon most Steam Frame customers would buy the Ergonomic Accessories Kit without question. I probably would, too. But I've done my duty and played extensively with it fitted to the headset and without, and I have to say, it's really not a must-have.

The headset doesn't move around much with or without the added top headset strap. It is, however, useful if you're planning to pass the headset around a large group of people, as it makes it easier to adjust from person to person in a dash. I suppose if you're playing Beat Saber or anything a little more active, you may want the added support, but again, I don't think it's all that necessary.

The extended light blocker does a pretty good job of keeping light out from your nose, and that's especially true if you wear glasses like me; however, I've played mostly without and it's not been a detriment to my time in VR.

Then there are the most contentious upgrades of the three: the controller straps. These replace the cord straps included with the controller with straps that tighten around the entire hand, akin to the Valve Index design. Once installed, I can make better use of the finger sensing features of the Steam Frame controller (capacitive buttons combined with some sensing of the lower digits) and they're easier to slip into than the standard cord option.

On the flipside, the Frame's controllers are not as elegantly designed for this sort of strap as the Index's. I had a few members of the PC Gamer team try out the Steam Frame one by one in the office, and on numerous occasions I received the feedback that they cannot comfortably reach all the buttons. Take away the straps and that issue goes away.

In my experience, the straps are an improvement for games where grip plays a large role, such as Half-Life: Alyx. I can launch an item towards me and catch it naturally without thinking twice. Whereas without the straps, I had to sorta relearn to lift and grab, as two separate movements. But I definitely don't mind using the controllers without the straps, and for playing 2D games, the more natural position without the added straps feels best.

Steam Frame - Controllers and tracking

The tracking on the Steam Frame is excellent; perhaps even its strongest feature.

It's inside-out tracking using four monochrome cameras, combined with IR illuminators for low-light conditions. Those monochrome cameras aren't the best for passthrough or XR play—they offer a rough blue fascimile of the real-world behind the headset—but they work great for mapping the movements of the headset and controllers. That means no more Base Stations, as were required with the Valve Index; just the Frame itself keeping track of its position in VR.

What impresses me most is how consistent the boundaries of the playspace seem to be when using the Frame. It's yet to lose track of a boundary, floor height, or its own location within that space in my many weeks of testing. Whether I place it on the floor, move it around, turn it off and on again, or even move furniture around it, the playspace is locked in.

The headset does a great job with the controllers, too. The pair provided with the Frame support 6DOF and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to correctly orient themselves in the world with excellent accuracy.

I'm yet to experience a single moment where one or both of my virtual hands go wandering off into the distance. Neither have I experienced what I will shamelessly call a floppy hand problem, where my virtual hand feels stuck on some invisible object and flops around like a fish as I try to wiggle it free. I have had both of those happen to me in the past couple of weeks with another headset, the Dream Air, but none so far with the Frame.

The Frame's controllers are similar in shape and style to those included with the Quest 3/3S. That's no bad thing; both are comfortable and intuitive. Yet Valve has also added more buttons to its latest pads, including ABXY on the right controller, a d-pad on the left controller, and bumper buttons to both.

These extra inputs aren't required a whole lot in VR; most devices don't make use of them. They are instead useful for playing 2D games on a virtual screen within the Frame. I've been testing this out with the original Hades: dragging the screen to a massive cinema-like size and putting my gaming chair into its deepest recline. It's pretty good, and even though I think the novelty of playing on a virtual big screen is already beginning to wear off, I can see why Valve says you can slip the Frame on and then decide which game to play. It can pretty much play whatever from your library with minimal fuss and without switching controllers.

For the record, you can pair up an external controller, keyboard, or mouse to the Frame over Bluetooth, including a Steam Controller. I haven't found much need to do so as of yet.

Steam Frame - Software

SteamOS is going places. Once limited to the Steam Deck and whatever one dared to load the ISO onto, it has since made its way into the living room and other handhelds. With the launch of the Steam Frame, the Arch Linux-based operating system breaks into the third dimension.

The Steam Frame offers a familiar interface for any PC gamer. It's just SteamOS, or Big Picture Mode, except its hovering in front of you. It has extensive menus for adjusting various settings on the Steam Frame, a status bar with some handy functions for VR, and a slightly tweaked interface for moving and enlarging windows within your expanded field of view. Otherwise, it's just Steam.

All your games in your library move over to the Steam Frame upon signing in. There are new categories automatically added to the interface to separate VR titles from non-VR titles, and in some cases, games are divided by those installed on the headset and those that can be streamed from a nearby PC. Once you select a game, you can click the arrow to the right of the green play button to select between playing it locally or streaming it from your gaming PC; depending on if it is installed on one or both devices.

Valve also offers the Steam Frame Standalone Verified program to give an idea of whether a given game is going to play nicely while running on the Frame's own hardware. Few games are built for the Frame—as far as I know, it's just Half-Life: Alyx—most are going to be either Android games running through Lepton, Valve's Android container, or use translation layers, Proton and Fex, in order to be made to run on Linux and Arm.

The Steam Frame wouldn't be around were it not for SteamOS, Proton, and FEX. Meta has Horizon OS, Google has Android XR, and Apple has visionOS for their respective headsets. Only Horizon OS feels in any way a fit for gaming, but even so, Meta has shifted to a more XR-centric interface and put a hold on third-party headsets using it. So that's out. That really means Valve had no other option than to do it itself with the Steam Frame.

And thank God for that. The biggest selling point for of the Steam Frame and SteamOS in virtual reality for me is that Meta has nothing to do with it. While you no longer need a Meta account for the Quest 3/3S, you still have to use the services of a company with big AI aspirations and a problematic privacy and safety record.

As for games available for the Steam Frame, it has plenty to choose from already on Steam, and it's set to benefit from Valve recently adding support to Steam for Android games. The Steam Frame also comes with a free copy of Half-Life: Alyx, and I can think of no better game that this to show off what it can do; able to both be streamed from a gaming PC and run locally on the Steam Frame's Snapdragon processor. It's the best VR game around today, despite being released over six years ago.

That touches on one issue facing VR in general today: the availability of new games and experiences. Plenty of the best VR games are the same ones we have been playing for many years, such as Beat Saber, Phasmophobia, Skyrim, Blade & Sorcery, Job Simulator, Arizona Sunshine; which I've pulled from Steam's own popularity rankings, among a sprinkling of newer titles. One newer title I've really enjoyed in the past year is Ghost Town, made by Fireproof Games, but even it is a year old now.

While Steam itself sees ever-increasing numbers of games published to the platform every single year, virtual reality games published on the platform have plummeted since an initial surge around 2017-18. Meanwhile, the Meta Horizon Store appears to still be trending upwards each year, though I can't be sure how many of those are actual games. A lot seem to be training applications.

If Valve can attract new developers to share their existing and future Android games on Steam, perhaps we will see a renewed surge of VR games on the platform. As of right now, it feels like fresh experiences are few and far between.

Steam Frame - Battery

You don't have to constantly worry about tripping over a cable with the Steam Frame. Instead, you have to be aware of your battery level.

The Steam Frame comes with a 21.6 Wh Li-ion battery, located at the rear of the strap. It has a USB 2.0 Type-C port off at an angle from its left-hand side, which is used pretty exclusively for charging the device due to bandwidth limitations for data.

There isn't an adapter included with the headset. Instead, it can be charged with any suitable power adapter up to 45 watts.

Valve is selling its own adapter for $29 (49 CAD/39 EUR/29 GBP/49 AUD). While I'm personally not too bothered about the lack of charger in the box—I have plenty already and I'm all for cutting out excess chargers—some of my colleagues feel it's a bit of a miss at this price point.

It takes a while to fully charge the Steam Frame from flat. In one test, using a 140 W Anker power adapter, it took 151 minutes to go from completely empty to fully charged. In another, using Valve's own power adapter, it took 142 minutes. So a good two hours and change for a full charge.

Here are the battery levels and times recorded from my testing:

Using a power meter on my wall outlet, I recorded the power draw in both tests around ~ 11 W at all times.

I asked Valve about the battery charging behaviour ahead of launch. They told me:

"An empty battery takes around two hours to charge to full capacity. However, the charging is not linear. There is fast charging from 0 to 65%, and regular charging from 65% and up. Charging to 65% is expected to take less than 40 minutes. (Note: these values may be optimized over time, and are therefore subject to change.)"

I hadn't seen any sign of fast charging to 65% in my own tests at the time I reached out; however, prompted by Valve's response, I tried one last test. I ran the battery down to near-flat, and while the headset was still turned on but not playing any games, I plugged in the charger.

This time, the power meter read ~31 W—three times the draw I recorded when the headset was powered off. When it reached 65%, it dropped to ~18 W.

I have felt a little impatient with the Frame on a few occassions—a feeling of having to wait too long between sessions once the battery had died. Though I did improve things by not letting the Steam Frame die completely between charges, using a suitably powerful power bank in my pocket (around 25 W should do it), and using the Frame's various power saving modes.

Depending on the mode of use, the Steam Frame can last between one and two hours of play time:

• Half-Life: Alyx (Arm version, running locally): 63 minutes
• Half-Life: Alyx (streaming from PC w/ Frame set to Playtime mode): 114 minutes

So, for every hour played in a game running on the headset, you'll be more or less charging for two; however, the longevity of the headset while streaming from a PC is pretty impressive.

I took these figures with the Frame set to Playtime mode, which favours battery life over performance and limits the frame rate to 72. You can push higher performance at a cost to longevity.

I noted the power draw of the headset in each mode while playing Half-Life: Alyx. When the game is running natively on the Steam Frame in standalone mode, the whole system draws around 17-19 W. Instead beam the game from my gaming PC using the included dongle and the Frame draws as little as 10 W. Nearly half as much power draw; nearly double the battery.

There may be another option for extending the Frame's battery life in future, too. Valve has confirmed to us it is working on a new strap with hot-swappable batteries and BMR drivers to match the excellent speakers on the Valve Index. This will be a swap-in upgrade for the modular Frame. No launch information for that one just yet, though.

As for the controllers, I'm yet to swap the AA battery located in each one since I began testing. Still going strong today at 74%.

Steam Frame - Value

There's only one Steam Frame worth buying. That's the 256 GB model. It's a VR headset that works best when streaming games installed on your gaming PC, and if you want to take advantage of the standalone functionality, there's an SD card slot for easy expansion.

That 256 GB model costs $1,059. So let's compare that price to its competition. The Steam Frame costs:

• 76.5% more than a Quest 3 512 GB;
• 8.6% less than a Bigscreen Beyond 2E, or 10% more than the Bigscreen Beyond 2;
• 53.9% less than a Pimax Dream Air;
• 6% more than a Valve Index at launch;
• 202% more than a Quest 3S 128 GB.

The Steam Frame is not as affordable as I'd like it to be. Nor my colleagues, some of whom literally winced as I told them the price. It's also more costly than Valve's original price target.

"We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind," says Joy Lyons, hardware engineer at Valve, "... that price target shifted just due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world."

"We're happy to have our customers be able to have hardware during this RAM crisis, and we think it's important to launch new hardware out there and have new experiences available. But, yeah, I think everyone's disappointed by the RAM crisis."

I wish I could go one review without mentioning the damned memory crisis, or one chat with Valve without bringing it up. It has undoubtedly put a dampener on the excitement I felt for the Frame coming out of Valve's office in Bellevue nearly a year ago. One of the people that ecstatically showed off the Steam Frame to me during that visit was Jeremy Selan, a software engineer at Valve working on the Frame.

I had a chance to catch up with Selan again recently, and I asked him, 'if you could click your fingers and change anything about the Steam Frame today, what would it be?' Selan responded, "Price. I wish we could have shipped it at the price that we were at last year."

That's a question I stole from our Andy Edser during an interview he ran earlier this year with Valve on the Steam Machine. The response then from engineer Yazan Aldehayyat was much the same: "Make it cheaper".

So if you're disappointed about the price of the Steam Frame, you're not wrong to be, nor are you alone in that sentiment. It sucks.

What's tricky for Valve is that Meta seems to have inventory or money enough to have staved off another price hike for the Quest 3. For now, at least. The company raised the price of both the Quest 3 and Quest 3S in April, though remains at lower price than Valve can offer for not totally dissimilar hardware. Meta said at the time of that price hike, "we’re making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly." And if trillion-dollar Meta is feeling it, you can bet Valve is too.

I wouldn't chastise someone for buying a Quest 3. You do get a lot for your money, even after the price hike. Yet if it were me with some money to burn on a VR headset today, I'd buy the Steam Frame. Convenience is king; and the Steam Frame has it nailed. While I might be in the minority of PC Gamer writers surveyed about this, I'd be willing to pay more for the ease of use and comfort provided by the Frame.

I'd also be willing to pay a bit more for the upgradeability that is being talked about here. It's only after taking the core module out myself and chatting to Valve about the modularity of the device that I've begun to realise why it's called the Steam Frame.

There's potential for plenty of upgrades here. From the full-colour RGB passthrough module from Arcturus that I've just started playing around with, or the hot-swappable battery strap from Valve, to whatever modders turn their mind to next. Building out my own Steam Frame to suit my needs over time is an exciting prospect.

The Steam Frame is ready for launch, and Valve has finally announced pricing and availability for its streaming/standalone VR headset.

There are two models of the Steam Frame available:

• Steam Frame (256 GB) w/ VR controllers: 1,059 USD/ 1,529 CAD/ 1,049 EUR/ 889 GBP/ 1,609 AUD/ 4,539 PLN
• Steam Frame (1 TB) w/ VR controllers: 1,299 USD/ 1,859 CAD/ 1,279 EUR/ 1,089 GBP/ 1,969 AUD/ 5,549 PLN

Valve has two additional purchase available alongside the Steam Frame at launch.

There's the Ergonomic Accessories Kit. This costs 49 USD/ 69 CAD/ 59 EUR/ 49 GBP/ 89 AUD/ 229 PLN and includes two hand straps (similar to the Valve Index's), over-the-head strap, and extended light blocker.

There's also a power adapter, which costs 29 USD/49 CAD/39 EUR/29 GBP/49 AUD. There's not one included in the box, though any USB Type-C charger of 45 W should cut it if you want to save the cash.

How to sign up for a Steam Frame at launch

If you don't mind the price, signups for a Steam Frame reservation can be made anytime between now and September 17 at 10 am Pacific Time on the product page.

Valve will be doing a one-time randomisation to determine who has a unit reserved for them and who is stuck on the waitlist. This takes place on September 17. From this, Valve will determine who has a unit reserved in their name and who is stuck on the waitlist.

Here's Valve on how the reservation system works:

• Folks can sign up for the model they’d like to purchase between September 14 and September 17 at 10 am Pacific Time
• When signups close, we’ll do a one-time randomization to determine reservation and waitlist order
• Based on the results of that randomization, customers receive an email later on the 17 indicating they are on the reservation list or waitlist
• Anyone coming to the product page after September 17 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time will be able to join the waitlist and will be added to the back
• We expect to send the first batch of purchase emails out on September 18, and will continue sending those out as units become available to ship
• For those on the waitlist, it means their place in line is beyond the number of Steam Frames currently available for reservation, and we will notify folks if and when they are moved into the reservation queue.

It's a similar system to the one Valve used for the launch of the Steam Machine, which so far seems to be working as intended. Orders for the Linux box were said to be going out daily back in July, with Valve believing then that it will be done with the reservation queue for the Steam Machine by the end of the year. In some regions, it had already begun offering units to those on the waitlist.

"We found the reservation system to be helpful in limiting resellers and improving the purchase experience," says Valve.

The Steam Frame is a different beast altogether, with a varied range of components and heaps of LPDDR5X memory chips, which could make life more difficult for Valve, but it seems the reservation system is at least working as intended. The main thing to note is that, by signing up ahead of September 17, you secure the best chance at a Steam Frame anytime soon.

While I've largely enjoyed any time I've dipped a toe into virtual reality, I definitely do not own a VR headset. As cool as the tech is, that hardware remains an expensive niche within the increasingly pricey PC gaming landscape.

Global VR headset shipments apparently declined by 18% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026, according to the latest data from Counterpoint Research. That doesn't surprise me—though it's also not great news for Valve or the potentially imminent release of its Steam Frame VR headset.

A dearth of major game releases is one reason why VR headsets aren't the most in-demand hardware. For instance, Valve's Half-Life: Alyx remains an unsurpassed high bar six-years after release. Counterpoint Research also highlights that VR isn't immune to the same pricing pressures as the rest of consumer hardware, citing Meta’s decision to raise the price Quest 3 and Quest 3S due to the memory supply crisis as adding "further pressure to an already cooling market."

Interestingly though, VR appears to enjoy consistent demand from businesses. "Enterprises and governments are generally less price-sensitive than consumers when adopting VR’s digital twin and spatial computing capabilities to address operational challenges and enhance productivity," Counterpoint Research says. "Meanwhile, driven by the continued development of the robotics industry, particularly in China, demand for VR headsets used for data collection and remote robot control is expected to grow this year."

Contrastingly AR devices, like Meta's smart glasses, have had an incredible year. "Global shipments of AR devices surged 138% [year-on-year] and 10% [quarter-on-quarter] in Q2 2026, driven by new product launches, international expansion by OEMs, and China’s 6.18 promotional campaigns."

Meta is easily the largest player in this space outside of China, with a 54% share of the AR/VR OEM market in the second quarter of 2026. There's definitely a lot I could say about the privacy concerns surrounding Meta's smart glasses—not to mention the money pit that is Reality Labs—but allow me to start bringing things back to Valve.

As far as we're concerned, the best VR headset overall is the Meta Quest 3, which will now set you back $600 at least. The best budget option, the Meta Quest 3S, now costs $350. Given the already mentioned RAMpocalypse, it will be impressive if Valve can offer its latest VR challenger at a price point that can compete. But given the pricing woes of the Steam Machine amid this here memory supply crisis, that could be a struggle.

Given that recent data mining suggests that, rather than making a debut with something new, the aforementioned six-year-old game might be the key launch offering instead, I'm a little unsure about Valve's footing. If you're already all-in on VR, then you've likely already got the hardware and you already loved Half-Life: Alyx when it first came out—but is the Steam Frame keeping a trick up its sleeve to justify Valve re-entering the 'cooling' VR market? Time will tell.

A release date for the Steam Frame has not yet been officially announced. However, data mining by VR leaker Brad Lynch has unearthed a reservation system in Valve's back-end, suggesting the hardware may not be far off.

Lynch shared a look at the definitely not yet live reservation system on X. "Expect nothing. It isn’t ready," he posted, accompanied by a screenshot of a lottery drawing notification email claiming the draw results would be revealed on the placeholder date of 31 December, 1969. Obviously, Valve aren't time travellers, and this date was likely chosen to avoid any part of this system going live before it's meant to.

Lynch wrote that the reservation system "is already up in Steam's backend for these two SKUs" in an earlier post, but shared no further hardware details. The data miner then added, "Before you ask: No. You can’t do anything with this information to beat the lottery system."

A reservation system isn't all that surprising, as Valve had these in place for both the Steam Machine and the new Steam Controller. The queue appears to have shortened for the Steam Machine since its June release, but Valve likely won't catch up on new Steam Controller reservations until 2027.

Uncovering a similar reservation system for Valve's VR headset is significant mainly because it implies a Steam Frame release could be close enough to touch. It also suggests stock may not be abundant to begin with—at least, not to the point that a reservation system wouldn't be necessary.

I've made my feelings about Micro-OLED displays pretty clear: these tiny screens are the future of high-end virtual reality. They're stunning; with deep blacks, a stunning range of colours, and none of the usual pitfalls of non-OLED displays. The Pimax Dream Air has two of them, hidden away beneath a compact pancake lens system. It's the only VR headset I've worn as of late that made me say "wow" out loud—I haven't done that since, well, probably the first time I wore a VR headset.

The Dream Air is tiny, too. It more closely resembles a pair of ski goggles than the company's other VR headset, the Crystal Super, which looks more like a prop from an '80s sci-fi movie than a modern-day wearable. Both are impressive in their own way—my first time experiencing Micro-OLED was in the Crystal Super—but the Dream Air's diminutive size and light build make it far more comfortable to wear over long periods.

So, it's the best VR headset, right? I wish it were that clear cut. I've not tried anything that gets close to the Dream Air in terms of visuals, size, and comfort; however, it lacks finesse in tracking. The model I've been testing uses Pimax's own inside-out tracking technology called SLAM, and whether it's this or the run-of-the-mill controllers that Pimax bundles with all its headsets, it's not up to the job as well as others. I wish that weren't such a dampener on the whole thing, but it really is the Achilles' heel of the Dream Air as it stands today.

Not every VR game requires controllers. Flight sims, racing sims, and anything with immersive, non-standard controls are best suited to the Dream Air. Though these games often come with their own set of challenges to deal with. While the Dream Air doesn't have the widest field of view (FOV) for these sorts of experiences, it has something even better, in my opinion. So, let's get into the details.

Pimax Dream Air - Features

The Pimax Dream Air has an enviable specs sheet. The stuff one could only dream of when first trying on a HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.

Let's start with the optics. It comes with twin 1.35-inch Sony Micro-OLED panels with pancake lenses over top. Pimax calls these 'ConcaveView'; the first of three lenses making up the pancake optics has a deep, recessed design, as if someone pressed a golf ball into the glass just as it was out of the kiln. Two further lenses together adding up to a 110-degree horizontal FOV.

That's the same FOV as the Crystal Super Micro-OLED, using the exact same optics in a much larger optical engine such as the Quest 3, and Steam Frame. With a 140-degree FOV, the Crystal Super QLED has it beat (Ultrawide version), but I prefer the Dream Air for one key reason.

Binocular overlap. This is the portion of a frame that is displayed across both screens in a VR headset. It's noted as a percentage: the higher this percentage, the more of a frame is shared by both screens, and the easier it is for your brain to blend the two images into one. After all, humans have stereo vision, and the brain is constantly trying to match up two slightly differing views of the world into one complete image. It's also very important in how comfortable and convincing a virtual reality experience is.

It varies person to person, but generally, a higher binocular overlap is best. It's a big deal for me, anyways, which is why I'm more than happy with the Dream Air. It has an excellent binocular overlap of 86%, far in excess of something like the Quest 3, which only comes in at 69%. That headset has a notably low binocular overlap, which I personally find leads to more eye strain and me reaching for my ever-so-slightly corrective glasses.

I can't wear my glasses with the Dream Air, as it doesn't offer much wiggle room for the frames, but I needn't worry. I've not found any need for them, even over longer periods of play, and I chalk that up to its high binocular overlap.

Here are the figures from my most recent round of testing in 'What is my Field of View?', or as it's more commonly known, WimFov.

• Dream Air - 86%
• Dream Air (Wide FOV mode) - 77%
• Crystal Super QLED (50 PPD) - 77%
• Crystal Super Micro-OLED - 86%
• Quest 3 - 69%

At a resolution of 7680 x 3552 (each eye at 3840 x 3552), the twin Micro-OLED displays are razor sharp. Using the Pimax Play software, these can be configured to run at either 90 Hz or 72 Hz, with the latter being a benefit if you're lacking suitably powerful silicon. This headset is very demanding and will require a high-end graphics card at its native resolution.

There's also eye tracking built into the Dream Air. This can also be configured in the Pimax Play application. It feels snappy and responsive in that tool, and though the uses can be a little limited, depending on what games you play, it is also a must-have for some titles; games like DSC, for instance, which support Quad Views rendering for the best performance and visuals with eye tracking. Similarly, it's pretty useful if you can figure out Pimax's own in-house center rendering tool, which runs when it's selected as the OpenXR runtime. That can be a bit tricky to sort game-to-game, in my opinion, but it is an option if you're willing to tinker.

The Dream Air tracks your movements through either inside-out or Lighthouse tracking, depending on which version you buy. I have the inside-out version here for review, what Pimax boisterously calls the SLAM version, which includes four cameras; each one covering a quadrant of the area in front, below, and above the headset. This version also reportedly supports hand tracking, though I'm yet to figure out how to turn it on.

Two controllers are included in the box. These are one and the same with the controllers included with the Crystal Super, and as such are pretty mediocre. They're comfortable enough, though they use a design that's more common among older VR headsets with a halo around the hand. They're rechargeable using USB Type-C, at least, which saves on buying AA batteries like the rest of them.

There are two speakers nestled into either side of the strap, in a fashion similar to the Quest lineup. They're pretty decent, which is a relief, as they're all you're gonna get without running another cable from your PC—there's no 3.5 mm jack on the headset. Speaking of cables, the device has one tethered to both sides of the headset, for better balancing, that combines into a roughly four-metre long flexible and not-too-chunky cable into a breakout box. The breakout box requires a USB 3.0 and DisplayPort connection from your PC, and power from a supplied adapter.

Pimax Dream Air - Optics

The Dream Air has the best optics of any headset I've used. It's truly next level. A potent combination of contrast, colour, and clarity that only Micro-OLED can so far deliver.

Every object is rendered in absurdly crisp detail within the Dream Air. Even an instructional pop-up looks good. They're very readable, too, as text rendering is greatly improved between this and older, cheaper headsets. I've been replaying Half-Life: Alyx—still the best game you can play with a VR headset—and the difference between the Dream Air and a Quest 3 is startling. Namely in how vibrant and immersive the former feels.

The Quest 3 appears washed out, lacking clarity, and jittery. The Dream Air feels like you're experiencing the game as the developers intended; like seeing the game world in full detail, rather than a facsimile. I personally feel a lot closer to the action when the quality has been improved by so much. In darker environments, the individually-lit pixels of the Micro-OLED produce incredibly atmospheric contrast. It's really creepy when you're hunting for headcrabs under shelves and around corners.

There's a pretty extreme difference in price between the Dream Air and Quest 3, so how about something more its own speed? The Pimax Crystal Super with a couple of QLED displays certainly comes closer to the Dream Air due to its equally high resolution and impressive optics. Yet it's the depth of colour and contrast that places the Micro-OLED on a rung above.

I generally find pancake lenses have a little more visible glare compared to more traditional aspheric lenses, and that's certainly true of the Dream Air. It's noticeable in the TestHMD test environment; less so while actually playing games, but it is definitely present either way. Though it's not quite as bad as the Quest 3 in this regard.

There's no visible aliasing due to the sheer number of pixels on the screen, nor does the screen door effect raise its ugly head. The teeny tiny pixels on the teeny tiny 1.3-inch Micro-OLED displays see to that. They are, after all, manufactured directly onto silicon substrates, achieving pixel density often in the thousands, where traditional screens are only in the hundreds. The Sony ECX344A used here has a pixel-per-inch (PPI) of 3,389. A standard 27-inch 4K monitor has one of just 163.

That also translates into a high pixel per degree (PPD) of over 50. With a field of view within the same sort of range as other high-end VR headsets, at around 110 degrees, it's not alone at the top of the pile; however, it is an excellent rating. Much higher than a Quest 3 or the upcoming Steam Frame.

The FOV, at around 110 degrees, isn't breaking any records. That's pretty standard for a VR headset today, and I measured the effective FOV with the provided facemask and IPD at 64 to be more like 90 degrees horizontal (88 vertical). There is a wide FOV mode in the Pimax Play advance settings, which extends that to around 98 degrees, closer to the given rating; however, it drops binocular overlap from an excellent 86% to 77%. It's also not anywhere close to the Crystal Super QLED Ultrawide at 140 HFOV, but that's pretty wild.

The biggest downside to all of this? The hardware required to run it all. With over 27 million pixels to deal with, you'd better have a very high-end and modern graphics card in your gaming PC. Even an RTX 5080 can struggle in my experience, and I've had to roll out render scaling in the Pimax Play application, sharpening, and even upscaling to try to ease the performance hit with some demanding titles. So, if you think the VR headset is already too expensive, think again; the PC required to run it is much, much more.

Pimax Dream Air - Controllers and tracking

A reality check for any potential buyer: The controllers included with the Dream Air aren't great, with consistently inconsistent tracking. Or perhaps it's the SLAM tracking. Either way, the interplay between the controllers and headset is a little clunky.

There are two controllers included with the Dream Air. They're identical to what's included with the Crystal Super, and include a halo around the top, four buttons, one trigger, one grip button, and a thumbstick on either side. They're rechargeable via a USB Type-C on the underside, and come with fairly standard wrist straps with an adjustable size. Due to the halo around the top, I have smacked the two controllers together a few times, as is tradition with this sort of design, but that's not a huge issue. What does wear thin after a while, however, is the tracking.

Between these controllers and the four tracking cameras on the headset, the tracking is inconsistent. It's not game-breaking but it does remind me of much older VR headsets in terms of accuracy and dexterity.

The issue is present most of all at the extremes of human movement, ie, trying to raise my hands above my head or down at my waist. Climbing a cliff in Blade and Sorcery turned into an exercise in mental resilience, as my hands would often get stuck or feel unresponsive, jittering or wobbling to and fro, as I tried to make my ascent and slipping back down the hill like Bennett Foddy. It's quite realistic, in a way, as my own vertigo would cause me similar jitters in real life, but as a VR experience, it's quite frustrating.

Reaching toward holsters located at your waist in other VR titles also proves a tricky scenario for the Dream Air. Any action that requires the controllers moving close to your body seems to put the tracking at a disadvantage. As it stands, I prefer the Quest 3 for games that require any level of dexterity in controls.

Case in point, I've been on a mission to defeat a cat in the game Eleven Table Tennis. My AI opponent, a cat who stares blankly at me as it serves and returns with laser-guided precision, is only set to the second difficult level, but I'm yet to defeat it. Though this hasn't been helped by the Dream Air. I can barely even serve with the Dream Air, due to both an inability to toss the ball into the air to begin my serve with any accuracy, or return the ball with a controlled speed. The Dream Air's controllers seem unable to judge the speed and inertia to a required accuracy. Meanwhile, I can serve and genuinely compete with (but not beat) the smug cat while wearing the Quest 3.

Room-scale boundaries also need to be set-up pretty much every time you put down and pick up the Dream Air. It tends to 'lose' its place in the real world once it's down on the ground, and while the process to make a new one is fairly slick, it's a real frustration when you have to do it over and over again during play.

Ideally, you'd use the Pimax Dream Air with a sim rig, which would cut a lot of the hassle out of using its insufficient tracking. Though I've been attempting to play a few sim racing games in VR over the past week, and I've been reminded just how convoluted and messy trying to get my sim racing wheel, pedals, and shifter working in a game alongside VR. That's not on Pimax; it's just an issue seemingly shared by many racing games over the years. Sim racers may prefer a headset with a wider FOV, anyways.

Pimax Dream Air - Ergonomics

The Dream Air has a dual-adjustable headband, but lacks any over-the-head strap for added support. Usually, I'd say that's a big miss, but when you get down to this sort of weight class for a VR headset, it doesn't make a difference. This thing is hella comfy.

The Dream Air weighs just 280 grams. That's on my own scales, with the cable still connected, but not taking the weight of the entire 4-metre cable as well. Pimax has it listed as sub-170 grams without the cable connected. Comparing its weight to others on my scales and it's clear nothing else comes close:

• Dream Air: 280 g
• Quest 3: 437 g
• Quest 3S: 454 g
• Crystal OLED: 848 g
• Crystal 50 PPD: 837 g
• Sony PS VR2: 499 g

Some of these VR headsets have their own system-on-chip and play games without a PC, but even compared to Pimax's own Crystal Super Micro-OLED, using the same optics as the Dream Air, the weight savings are astounding.

I can wear the Dream Air for hours and not feel the strain. It moves around the least on my face of all the headsets I've tested over the past week, including the Quest 3/3S and other Pimax units. It gets a little hot along the top edge of the headset—right where the exhaust vents are for the two fans inside, so that checks out—however, I don't feel like it warms up enough to make it uncomfortable, even after hours of testing. Combined with the stellar optics and binocular overlap, it's the one VR headset I feel I can wear without glasses for hours on end.

Though, speaking of which, you cannot wear glasses in this compact headset. It does come with frames should you wish to buy prescription lens inserts.

The cable is well balanced, too. Ultimately, any VR headset with a cable is going to be less convenient than one without, but I do find not worrying about battery life to be a boon most of the time. In this instance, at least, the Dream Air's twin-cable approach helps prevent the cable from tugging one side of the headset. It's a simple solution to a problem many VR headsets have had over the years—a sign of some quality of life improvements for the previously slightly clumsy company.

My one small complaint is that the strap has a rather sharp edge to it, on both sides, where it terminates at the speaker housing. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be an issue, as you can position the headset and straps in such a way to avoid the sharp edge resting on your ears or head, but it does slightly limit the comfortable range of the headset a little. Other than that, the Dream Air is very comfortable. Top marks.

Pimax Dream Air - Software

Pimax Play is the one-stop shop for features and settings with the Dream Air. It's a Spartan application, with a plain interface and minimal bloat, and it's easy to use.

You'll find the usual suspects in the settings menu within Pimax Play: IPD adjustment, firmware updates, and ways to pair controllers and trackers. But there is also more than meets the eye here. Pimax has a pretty complete feature set tucked away under device and advanced settings, which are key for unlocking the Dream Air's full potential.

One important setting is render scale, which Pimax recommends adjusting down to lessen the load on the hardware. Combined with a sharpening filter, it's easy enough to finely balance performance and fidelity. If performance is still an issue, there's even upscaling support with FSR and NIS (Nvidia Image Scaling) to boost frame rates; though in doing so, hurting the overall clarity that you are paying a lot of money for in the first place.

Dynamic Foveated Rendering (DFR) is one way to increase performance that is supported through Pimax Play and the Dream Air's eye tracking functionality. There's also Quad Views support, which needs to be supported on a per-game basis to have an effect (namely in DCS). Finally, there's Center Rendering, which has three modes: Quality, Balanced, Performance. In Pimax's own words, this "Reduces rendering quality at the edges of the field of view while keeping the center in high resolution to save performance."

I admittedly didn't notice this was even functioning until opening up testHMD and noticing a distinct circle at the center of my vision, outside of which, lines and text were a little less defined.

With an RTX 5080 under the hood, I was able to combine a lower render scale, a touch of sharpening, and Center Rendering for a smooth 72 Hz—and in many cases, 90 Hz—experience in all of the games I played with this headset. There's lots of flexibility here, which helps with performance on a range of PCs, though you're going to need a PC that is resolutely high-end for a good experience across the board.

Though Pimax could maybe do a better job of signposting how these settings work and what they are dependent on in the application. VR still feels clunky at times, especially with per-game support for eye tracking, and it takes longer to get au fait with all the settings and what they do than I'd like.

Pimax Dream Air - Value

The Dream Air costs $2,299 ($1,999). A price tag like that sets very high expectations for the headset.

The Dream Air offers the best visual experience I've had in VR. It's only matched by the Crystal Super Micro-OLED with the very same optics, but the Dream Air absolutely wins out on overall comfort and fit. The bulking behemoth of the Crystal Super compacted down into a headset the size of some ski goggles—the Dream Air is both impressive and selling at a similar price point.

The headset is genuinely pushing what's possible in VR, and I have to say, I'm here for it. Virtual reality can feel a bit stagnant at times, stuck with the same games and tech for years, but the richness of detail, colour, and tone from the Dream Air does a lot to dispel that feeling. This is seriously impressive tech at an unattainably high price—it is, ultimately, a price I could not afford myself.

Then onto the tracking. This is one aspect of the Dream Air that doesn't feel remotely high-end or worth $2,299. It's clunky, old-fashioned, and a detriment to the experience. A pretty big one, too, in my opinion. I shouldn't really be reaching for the $599 Quest 3 in order to play a game with more accuracy than the $2,299 headset currently on my head, nor having to reset my play area every single time I remove the headset. That is a big deal for me—I expect better at this price point.

Folks who pick up Valve's soon to be released VR headset, the Steam Frame, may get a free Half-Life game with their purchase. Unfortunately, I'm not talking about a brand new release. Plus, it may well be a game virtual reality gamers already have—Half-Life: Alyx.

Dataminer Brad Lynch unearthed this tidbit, sharing a screenshot of code strings that refer to a 'Frame Alyx Promo'. He also observed on X that Valve did a similar thing in the past, offering the game for free with purchases of the Index VR headset after the game launched. That all occurred, of course, quite a few years ago now.

Lynch also noted in an earlier post that internal branches of Alyx had been regularly updated since early last year, though "the public app is only just now starting to get those many months of staged updates." The implication is that these are optimisation tweaks specifically for the Steam Frame, though that's not been confirmed.

Lynch is fairly reliable as a leaker regarding all things VR, having previously spotted that a number of SteamVR code components had been renamed 'Frames' shortly before the Steam Frame was fully revealed.

More recently, he spotted "the first 'official' Android app on Steam," which would make the most of all of Valve's work on its custom Android compatibility container for Linux, Lepton. Lynch also suggested back in June that the entire VR sphere may enjoy much better displays in the next few years, like Micro-OLEDs from Samsung.

So, no, it doesn't seem that Half-Life 3 is on the horizon, but I won't turn down a free copy of one of the best virtual reality games to come out in years. Mind you, the fact Alyx itself is already six years old probably says a lot about the state of VR these days.

While the Steam Frame is designed to play your entire non-VR library as well, given the lack of big releases in the niche, I personally won't be rushing out to buy a fresh virtual reality headset any time soon.

Our Jacob got his hands on a Steam Frame back in November of last year, and came away raving about the wireless VR headset's capabilities. Since then, we've reported on numerous signals that the Frame is on its way—but some new leaked videos give the rest of us a closer look at the hardware itself.

The videos were apparently leaked as part of an Arm Steam Client update, and have since pulled by Valve (via SteamDeckHQ). However, X account Steam Hardware Updates has reposted them, and what they reveal looks to be a very cushy, premium-looking design.

In one, a model demonstrates the process of putting on the Frame and adjusting the headband, including swapping out the internal faceplate to accommodate a pair of glasses. The large, cushioned rear-plate looks very comfortable, and the overall design is remarkably less... nerdy, for want of a better word, than I expected.

This particular video ends with a sequence of models wearing the VR headset in several, completely wrong ways, including as a shoulder bag. Even I smiled. There's also another video showing how to link the Steam Frame with the Steam mobile app for sign-in authentication purposes.

The focus adjustment wheel is demonstrated in another clip, while a full unboxing video shows exactly what you get in the packaging. There's the headset itself, of course, two wireless controllers, a large USB dongle, a cable, and an instruction manual/warranty card that's immediately thrown out of shot.

The video also shows the pairing process for the controllers, while even more clips posted in a separate comment go through what appears to be a short Steam Machine linking tutorial.

Ordinarily I'd advise a pinch of salt regarding leaks like this, but these are so well-done, I'd say we're probably looking at the final product. Valve is unlikely to be pleased—but I have to say, as someone not particularly interested in VR, the videos have made me want to try one for myself.

As for when the Steam Frame might be released? There's no official date as of yet, but the timing of these leaks suggests it won't be too long. We were told the second half of 2026, and here we are towards the end of August with plenty to go on. I wasn't that fussed before, but now the hype is beginning to build? Yep, even this VR cynic is kind of curious.

Nightdive's System Shock remake is great. PC Gamer immsim guy Joshua Wolens gave it an 80% review score, and we later chose it as the Best Remake of 2023 in our annual Game of the Year awards. Three years down the road, Nightdive is following it up with System Shock VR, a VR game being developed by Flat2VR Studios.

This is, going by the Steam description, a straight VR translation of the original game rather than a Half-Life: Alyx-style spinoff: You were caught hacking into TriOp, Edward Diego offered you a deal, you took it, and six months later that whole Citadel Station thing has kicked off.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go play System Shock. It's on sale for $15 on GOG and the Humble Store, if you insist on a Steam key.)

That's fine, there's no need to mess with success, and the Shodan origin story is a classic. But I'm a bit baffled about who this is actually for. VR adoption remains relatively minuscule: The percentage of Steam users with VR headsets, as reported by the Steam Hardware and Software Survey (which doesn't reflect the whole of the Steam user base, but nonetheless "is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer") remains well below 2%, and while the Meta Quest and PSVR2 headsets will also be supported, even with them in the mix it represents a tiny slice of the overall gaming audience.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is an apt example: It looked pretty good (for a VR game, anyway), it's based on a classic, beloved property, it was well received by players and critics alike—and it peaked at 233 concurrent players on Steam. Publisher Vertigo Games closed one of its studios in June, just six months after Legacy of Shadow launched, saying "the VR market remains a challenging space."

It's possible that converting System Shock from a conventional FPS to a VR game isn't a big deal, and that the resources required are relatively minimal, but I'm not inclined to think so. I do think System Shock could be quite good (for a VR game, anyway), but whether that's enough to make it a success is a different question entirely.

System Shock VR is up for wishlisting now on Steam. A release date hasn't been announced.

Another week, another hint that the Steam Frame might be close to launch, though this time the hint comes not from leaks and rumours but directly from Valve. According to recent official update notes, SteamOS Beta and Preview channels are to receive "preliminary support for the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter."

The Steam Frame is Valve's upcoming standalone VR headset, and based on what we've seen of it—my colleague Jacob Ridley having tried it last year at Valve HQ—it's definitely worth looking out for if you've a penchant for VR. Though the global memory shortage is of course a looming threat for the LPDDR5-laden device.

We'd previously seen a bunch of things that indicate an approaching launch date. Valve itself had previously indicated a launch of summer 2026, and over the past couple of months we've seen signs of Steam Frame imports, a 'Great on Frame' Steam classification, and the public availability of Frame-relevant software on Steam.

All this has had prospective Frame owners chomping at the proverbial bit for a bite of the upcoming VR headset. So much so that the Steam Frame subreddit recently seemed to lose its collective mind in anticipation, even sharing hopeful potatoes of luck (yes, you read that right).

Despite this hopeful anticipation, initial responses to the new SteamOS update note were somewhat pessimistic, given support for the Frame's wireless adapter is only just now being added—"preliminary" support, at that—and not even in the main SteamOS branch but the beta one.

However, one Redditor points out that the change in question simply adds "support for the dongle to wake Steam Machines from sleep", not support for the adapter in general. The implication being that such general support was already there.

Debates, of course, ensue. Primarily over whether Valve is waiting perhaps for an updated Half-Life Alyx (with foveated rendering) to be finished before the Frame launches.

Wherever you stand on the topic—whether you think the lucky potatoes have worked their magic or not—the Frame is no doubt that little bit closer to being ready for launch (or at least a more bug-free and feature-full launch) than it was before. Your guess is as good as mine for when that will actually be, though.

Valve's wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, doesn't yet have a nailed down release date beyond the vague window of 'later this year'. I've got a hunch it'll drop soon though—and not because I put any stock in the Steam Frame subreddit's wild release date rituals. No, I'm instead feeling optimistic because both Lepton and FEX are now publicly available via Steam.

Both of these pieces of software are key for the Steam Frame and required for its operation. Lepton can be thought of as a 'container' for gaming on Linux that lets it run Android games inside of it. FEX is a similarly important tool for the Snapdragon-powered device, but a smidge more complicated.

At the risk of oversimplifying, FEX takes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 games and translates them so they can be understood by Arm-based systems. The Steam Frame uses an Arm-based Snapdragon SoC, hence why FEX is required. Without it, it wouldn't be able to play most of the VR games available on Steam.

To be clear, neither Lepton nor FEX have an easily accessible Steam store page. This 'public release' is mostly good news for developers. For instance, Android devs can easily create an Android depot containing an apk for their game on Steam (the first Android game to be purchasable on Steam popped up back in November, in the form of an apk file for Walkabout Mini Golf).

From there, devs can set the apk as the launch executable for players using the Steam client. Steam Cloud will even support save data stored in the external Android data directory—that's some thought out integration.

FEX could be handy for any Arm system. Besides Valve saying it's 'definitely' already investigating an Arm-based gaming future, Nvidia's recently unveiled RTX Spark 'superchip' pairs an Nvidia GPU core with a MediaTek Arm chiplet.

Though I personally doubt an RTX Spark laptop or notebook will be the most affordable option, the SoC seems set to be a disruptive presence in the space no matter what. Our Dave has already played a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on an RTX Spark laptop, but that still leaves plenty of games that will benefit from Valve's work on the FEX translation layer in the future.

Meta's second quarter earnings are in, reporting revenue of $60.80 billion. That's another record-breaking year-on-year increase of about 28%, though shares are reportedly down by about 10%. Funny, that. Now, time to take a look at how the company's famous money-hole, its VR and AR division, Reality Labs, is doing while I take a big sip of my coffee…

A $4.6 billion income loss due to Reality Labs alone this quarter? Well, there goes my keyboard. That's compared to the division bringing in $431 million in revenue. I may have only got a passing grade in Math, but even I can see those numbers don't add up.

To be fair to this segment of the business, that $431 million represents a 16% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue. In Meta's latest earnings call, CFO Susan Li attributed these revenue gains to "strong growth in AI glasses revenue, partially offset by lower Quest headset sales." Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also keen to highlight the success of Meta's glasses, describing it as "one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics of all time."

Zuckerberg added that early sales of the frames the company designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner "have been strong, exceeding our expectations" (As you may expect, the Meta execs had nothing to say about those They Live-inspired guerilla bus stop ads that recently popped up in London).

But, as the numbers show, that demand doesn't make up the shortfall. On the subject of wearables, spending on Orion, Meta's still unreleased AR glasses with an EMG wristband and a 'Compute Puck', likely also make up a decent chunk of the change spent on Reality Labs (despite Meta struggling to come up with 'killer use case' for the device). Last year, the company was also reportedly hard at work on developing the Meta Quest 4 VR headset, but has pushed back another Mixed Reality project, Phoenix, until 2027. All of these hardware projects would require considerable spend.

So continues a multi-quarter trend for this segment of the business. Meta lost $19.1 billion on its VR and AR division alone last year, then the company closed three VR studios and laid off roughly 10% of Reality Labs. This is far from just recent bad luck either, with Meta reporting significant VR and AR-related losses in 2024, 2023, and 2022.

It's not hard to understand considering that, for most gamers, AR and VR represent an expensive niche within an increasingly pricey niche. But will next quarter grant something of a sea change? Personally, I doubt it.

Over on the Steam Frame subreddit, the top post at the time of writing is one declaring "this sub has lost its mind". It follows this up by acknowledging that, with Valve not releasing Steam Frame preorders on July 27th as the subreddit previously thought, "Now most of the new posts are just brainrot, and I'm here for it."

To take a step back a bit, users have suspected the Steam Frame, Valve's upcoming VR headset, is 'coming soon' for a good while now. Valve confirmed it will release this summer at some point, and with summer in full swing, it's likely to come out sooner rather than later. As well as this, we recently saw a new "Great on Frame" category on the Steam store, and tens of thousands of kilograms of VR headsets arrived in the US last month.

Some sleuths have noted that Valve tends to announce on Mondays or Thursdays and also noted that it would make sense to launch Steam Frame preorders in between Steam Fests so it isn't fighting for banner space on the Steam home page. That left them with the conclusion that Valve would announce preorders on July 9th or July 27th. Naturally, when it wasn't announced on July 9th, July 27th became the last hope for a July release. But the Steam Sale launch theory doesn't make much sense, as the Steam Controller was announced and released during a Steam Fest.

There was, however, one more anticipated release date in between. Last week, one X user reported on an unverified screenshot claiming that the Steam Frame rollout would begin on July 24. The Steam Frame subreddit was pretty sceptical of this claim, but it still became a point of conversation and hope for some.

Over the entirety of July, users have been posting prayers, pleas, and potatoes of luck (don't ask), in the hope that Valve would randomly announce the release date with little fanfare. As you might be able to guess, that hasn't happened. However, the months of anticipation have gotten to the subreddit, and now users are using that as a chance to post just whatever they feel like, including gibberish and a whole pile of memes.

The tomfoolery of the Steam Frame subreddit has made its way over to the main Steam subreddit, where one post asks, "What’s currently going on in r/steamframe." Yeah, I don't really know either, but it's fun to watch.

One comment says, "We've all collectively lost our minds. I sold my damn Quest 3 months ago for this thing, I'm jonesin' for some VR."

But there's a deeper meaning behind some of this anticipation. The Steam Machine launched at a very high price point, so high in fact that Valve told us it wished it could sell the Machine for less. And Qualcomm has said it is planning to raise the price of its chips on September 1 (The Frame uses a Qualcomm chip), so some are worried that the Frame will be prohibitively expensive, and that's before mentioning the 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM in it.

If it launches right now, it would be launching before the Qualcomm price raise comes into effect. Naturally, one can assume that Valve has a stockpile of headsets ready to go for launch, and presumably contracts of supply in place, though that wouldn't stop it from raising the price further down the line should it need to.

Many of those preordering a Steam Frame are preparing for the pain of that price, so they might as well get it out of the way early. And, obviously, the sooner the preorder, the sooner users will actually have their hands on the device.

But hey, maybe Valve will actually announce it today. It has no reason to do so, but that's never stopped anyone from hoping.

Qualcomm, the company behind the Snapdragon chips you will find in many phones, Windows on Arm laptops, and VR headsets, is reportedly raising its prices starting September 1. Unfortunately, that could mean bad news for both WoA and future VR headsets.

This is according to a letter sent to customers on Friday, which was seen by Bloomberg. According to that document, the price increase will be a percentage in the double digits, and presumably, that rise will only worsen the price of the devices that use the company's chips.

One such device is Valve's Steam Frame, which rocks a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and is said to be launching soon. The Steam Frame is its new wireless VR headset, and one designed for game streaming. It uses a special dongle for foveated streaming, which delivers the parts you are looking at in higher quality, saving on bandwidth. Steam has said all three pieces of its hardware triumvirate (Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame) would launch by the end of Summer, which means we have around a month left before that self-imposed deadline.

Though Valve is unlikely to eat those extra costs, it does reportedly have tens of thousands of kilograms worth of headsets in the US, so it presumably has a stockpile to sell before those price jumps might impact the end sale price. The Steam Machine, its TV-friendly gaming PC, was hit hard by the memory crisis, causing prices to increase before it was even launched, with its cheapest model being $1,049. Valve noted to us that it really wanted to sell it for much cheaper than that.

And Valve isn't the only major brand that uses Qualcomm chips. Meta has traditionally worked with the company to provide the chips for its Quest VR headset, and Meta is even reportedly working on 'multiple next-generation headsets'. We will see more information on what Meta is working on at Meta Connect at the end of September this year.

Qualcomm claims that it exhausted other options before coming to the realisation it would have to raise prices, and it even reportedly made attempts to get alternative components from new sources to keep costs down. As of right now, we don't know what those alternative components are, whether those are different memory chips or other parts of its SoCs.

Qualcomm is a big customer of the Taiwanese-based TSMC (which has recently announced its own price hikes), but the memory shortage is making it difficult to get all kinds of hardware at reasonable prices and in reasonable quantities. Qualcomm has reportedly been struggling for a while with the memory crisis, as smartphone manufacturers have been unable to build the supply that they once did, prior to the crisis.

It's a particularly bad time to hit Qualcomm as it has recently made some impressive strides into the gaming sphere, with the likes of its X2 Elite chips coming packed with some serious gaming chops. Windows on Arm is finally starting to receive some love (even Nvidia is investing in it, with its RTX Spark chip), and it could take the fight to x86 in the future, but that's only if prices stay good enough for customers to actually buy. It seems like the memory crisis isn't finished taking the hardware out of your hands and feeding it straight to the AI machine. And even Valve sees no end in sight for it.

If you thought Meta was stepping away from the VR market after seemingly turning away from the Metaverse and closing 3 VR studios earlier this year, think again, buddy. It seems like the plan as of right now is to put out multiple headsets in the future, memory crisis be damned.

The news comes from the mouth of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who took to Instagram to answer questions (via UploadVR). When asked if Meta has given up on VR, he said, "No. We've talked about this a lot this year—kind of an odd comment. We've just updated the user interface profoundly for the first time in years. We've talked openly about the fact that we're building multiple next-generation headsets."

That's true. In the Q4 earnings call for 2025, which was announced in January 2026, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company is still building future headsets. Bosworth also said a potential Meta Quest 4 would be on the way shortly after this earnings call. However, the closing of studios doesn't exactly help her point. Bosworth addresses this point, saying, "We did get ourselves into a more sustainable shape, that's true. But no. We continue to invest quite a bit there."

Bosworth ends this answer by telling viewers to keep an eye on Meta Connect for more details. Meta Connect is Meta's yearly conference, where it communicates plans for the company going forward to the rest of the world. This year it will happen on September 23 and 24, so we should expect an announcement or tease of at least one of the headsets by then.

There is one major headset scheduled for release between now and then, though: the Steam Frame. We've seen a huge shipment of the Steam Frame going to the US recently, and the 'Great on Frame' tag has popped up on the Steam storefront. Valve said it is due to launch in the Summer, so we're expecting the headset very soon.

Both Valve's headset and whatever Meta is cooking up will have major question marks over their heads around the price, and that will be the biggest concern going forward. The Steam Frame has 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and the Meta Quest 3 uses 8 GB of LPDDR5 memory. There is, of course, a certain painful irony in Meta, a company going all-in on AI, potentially struggling because of the effects of AI expansion (ie, data centres slurping up all that hardware).

For Meta's next headset to truly be 'next-generation', it will need the hardware to back it up, and that hardware is likely to stay expensive for some time. This is all to say the next two years are a really bad time to put out hardware, and Meta will really want this one to land, especially given the downsizing it did earlier this year. September will be a big month for the Facebook owner, in more ways than one.

If you've spent any time on Steam from your Steam Deck, there's a good chance you recognise the 'Great on Deck' tag, signifying that games work, well, great on Deck. Well, Steam has just published its Great on Frame collection, and you get three guesses what that could be for.

As spotted by SadlyItsBradley on X, the new category is live now and comes with just four games. The games are Portal 2, Into Black, Aperture Hand Lab and The Lab. Into Black is the odd one out here, as it's the only title not published by Valve in the list, but that's a good sign too. It suggests there's some level of outreach from Valve to other companies.

The plan seems to be to add more games to this category over time, as the Upcoming section is currently entirely empty. Valve's Steam Frame is the only bit of new hardware from Valve that is not live yet. As Valve confirmed a Summer release window for it and the Steam Machine, all this points to an imminent launch.

As of last month, packages of the Steam Frame began arriving in the US. Those packages total 32,000 kg, so the likelihood is these aren't test builds or prototypes. All signs suggest that Valve is gearing up to actually put out the device in the near future.

The fact that the 'Great on Frame' collection is even live means Valve is either ready for the Steam Frame to launch very soon, or it was published by accident, and spotted by meddlesome analysts. The only problem with the Great on Frame collection is that the fact that games are appearing on it doesn't necessarily mean they actually work in VR. You can play flat games on the Steam Frame, so 'Great on Frame' could simply suggest it has been verified to work well in plain old 2D mode.

Still, even playing 2D games on the Steam Frame should serve to be plenty immersive. Valve has managed to entirely ditch the wires here, and it even has some neat built-in functions that help it stand out among its competition.

It has a special antenna for picking up a connection sent directly from a connector on your PC, which allows it to stream your games without any interference. And to top it all off, Valve has implemented foveated streaming, which means it focuses the bandwidth on exactly where your eyes are looking to get even better performance out of the headset.

The only question left, other than the exact release date, is the price point, and for that, I'm preparing for the worst. With all its little tricks and engineering feats, plus the Snapdragon chip and storage, I would have expected a hefty price even before the memory crisis. But now, its included 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory is sure to fetch a pretty penny, and Valve can't afford to eat the cost of production like console manufacturers can.

Either way, we're expecting to find out the answer to both questions in the coming weeks, assuming Valve sticks to its Summer promise.

There's part of me that feels like I've somewhat fallen for the sunk cost fallacy of VR. I've always liked VR headsets, but don't think I've quite got the same value out of them as I did with the very first one I owned in lockdown at the start of 2020. That is, until now.

After buying myself a Meta Quest 3, I thought, "This time, I'll recapture that feeling". I thought the years since really being a big VR would deliver me a trove of awesome games, and there are certainly some standout offerings like Asgard's Wrath and Batman: Arkham Shadow (both of which were helped by Meta, which has seemingly jumped ship from VR gaming), but nothing quite willed me to strap the headset on my face every single day.

That was, until the start of 2026, when I thought I'd fully try committing to VR exercising as an experiment and commitment to my future health. One thing I can say right off the bat is that I became less adventurous after the first month. Where I tried a decent few apps and exercises in January, I basically stuck to my FitXR subscription and used that almost exclusively. Any other VR exercises I did were just a welcome consequence of playing VR normally.

Even now, I coudn't call FitXR the best way to VR exercise, simply because I haven't tried enough other ways to know. In the same way that I picked my local gym when I signed up and called it a day, with exercising, I'm looking for convenience. I'm looking for something to slot into my day, a quick fifteen minutes at lunch, or ten minutes to wake myself up.

And wake me up, it does. I find VR's immersiveness not only engaging, but I willingly pushed far beyond where I would in a normal exercise. I found myself panting and sweaty after half-hour sessions, and I would previously struggle much more to get there with simple callisthenics or walking. A gym is always an option, but I think the public, social element of it has always made me a touch too self-conscious to fully go for it. I don't mind an exercise so tough it leaves me on the floor, in the comfort of my own home. And that's before mentioning the trek home after the gym.

The convenience of VR is its biggest selling point to me. If I have a spare ten minutes, I can simply throw it on and go for a little while. More formal exercise requires a level of preplanning that ends up eating up more of my time than I often plan for.

It does have its defined downsides, though. Despite paying hundreds for my Meta Quest 3, I'm still paying around $10 a month for my subscription, and though it's cheaper than a gym, I don't get any of the equipment that a gym membership affords me. As well as this, there's nothing quite as distinctly uncomfortable as a sweaty faceplate.

I find a wipe-down and air out, and maybe a spare faceplate does the job, but it's still a bit messier than I would otherwise like. But I knew going in that I'd have to push through uncomfortability. And I've done a lot of that over the last half a year.

I've woken up with sore legs because I've decided to take on a course with a lot of jumping, or found my arms sore because I wanted to push it with a hard HIIT exercise. And I've managed to find some joy in that. I've found myself liking a little burn in my leg because it feels like a sign of how much exercise I've done.

I set myself a few rules before I went into this whole experiment, to make sure I had some consistency. My ground rules were pretty simple a few months ago. Apple has an exercise function, where you can make 'rings' and you fill those rings by doing a pre-structured amount of exercise. It has a red ring for movement, a green ring for exercise, and a blue ring for standing.

I tend to finish the red and blue ones naturally, but the green one, at 30 minutes a day, is something I consciously have to fill. And that is what VR is for. But if, somehow, I manage to fill that on a normal day, I promised myself I would still exercise. I simply couldn't let the headset get dusty because I happened to take a few flights of stairs at work, or felt like going for a hike. These ground rules have pretty much stayed the same ever since.

I have missed days. I have forgotten about it, found myself away from the headset for a few days, or simply been too lazy. But I've been holding myself accountable with my own health, and know that I'm a little too cheap to pay the subscription and let it go to waste.

Since the start of January, I've lost around 35 pounds, and though I think a part of that is the VR exercising, another big part is that I simply don't want all my effort to go to waste. I don't want to strap the headset on my head nearly every day and not feel healthier. So I started eating better this year. I started tracking my progress. And I've tried to be as honest with myself as possible when I'm making progress and why.

Recently, I haven't made as much progress. I took things pretty lax around my birthday, I found it harder to will myself to exercise in the British summer heat, and hay fever has sapped my energy, but most importantly, I just became a tad complacent with it. But in a sense, that's the joy here. I hold myself accountable, and the shame of returning to the gym after an absence doesn't really exist. I simply got back onto the VR horse without a second thought.

And this is all before mentioning that I have fun exercising now. I make a regular habit of activating the passthrough mode on my headset, popping something on the TV and doing some combat exercises while watching anime or listening to a podcast. Yes, I know it's dorky to watch a shounen battle scene whilst pretending to punch the air with a big screen slapped onto my eyeballs, but I can be as much of a nerd in my headset as I like, and I can feel better while doing so.

Effectively, the VR headset exercises almost every day have been a way to remind me of how conscious losing weight and getting healthier has to be for me. I have to stay aware of it, and need to keep pushing if I want to reach my goals. And my goals right now are simply to feel better. They are to be able to do long hikes, to go for a run, to exercise and feel like I'm putting in less effort than before. VR has given me a fun, stress-free avenue to improve my life little by little, and I'll continue doing it for as long as it stays that way.

Though I do wear glasses and I'm intrigued by the idea of techie wearables on paper, I'm far from all-in on AR glasses. Still, depending on how Qualcomm's fresh chip geared towards augmented and virtual reality headgear is implemented, I can see myself changing my mind.

Qualcomm has just revealed the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a SoC it pitches as enabling "longer-lasting, sleeker, and cooler devices." The Reality Elite will debut in the Xreal Project Aura, offering "better optical see-through, improved power efficiency, and better hand and head tracking" on the Android-based XR wearable.

But Qualcomm doesn't just have its eye on smart glasses with this chip, citing a number of performance boosts for VR headsets specifically. Compared to its XR2 Gen 2 chip that you'll find inside the Meta Quest 3, the Reality Elite purportedly enjoys "up to 60% higher GPU performance, up to 30% increase in CPU performance, and up to 160% higher NPU performance, giving developers greater flexibility to push immersive XR experiences further."

A Reality Elite-based VR headset could offer gaming at "up to 4.4K per eye at 90 frames per second," while a more straightforward XR wearable will enjoy "enhancements to video see‑through (VST) [that] reduce latency and improve image quality, helping digital content blend more naturally with the physical world." Valve's VR headset, the Steam Frame, might feel just a little bit underpowered in comparison.

Now, this wouldn't be a tech announcement in 2026 without an AI angle. The Snapdragon Reality Elite doesn't buck that trend, instead touting "up to 48 TOPS" (that's 'trillions of operations per second,' and Qualcomm further breaks it down as a measurement of AI performance here).

In the press release, Qualcomm says the beefed-up performance will "enable everything from photorealistic avatars with Gaussian Splatting and LLM‑based agents to real‑time large vision model (LVM)–driven object generation that brings dynamic digital content into the user’s environment," allowing an XR experience to supposedly respond to a user in real-time.

Besides maxed out machine-learning, the Snapdragon Reality Elite also takes aim at more practical aspects of XR wearables. For one thing, the chip aims to deliver "up to 20% longer battery life," while also being an "up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler chipset under load." In theory, that should allow for thinner, lighter, and cooler smartglasses frames. Snap's just announced Specs uses two unnamed Snapdragon chips, though perhaps those bulky frames should've been left to cook just a little bit longer.

Forthcoming Steam Frame aside, It's been a while since we had anything actually shake up the VR space with any kind of scale. But if "insider reports" that the usually reliable VR leaker SadlyItsBradley (Brad Lynch) relays are anything to go by, we could have some greatly improved VR headsets in the pipeline thanks to industry movements towards more Micro-OLED tech.

That pipeline isn't too short, unfortunately, as Lynch explains that mass production won't be here for a couple of years:

"Insider Reports are indicating that Samsung Display has initiated talks with equipment suppliers to build a fab that can produce these ultra-high brightness Micro-OLED displays. SDC will order the equipment this year, install it in 2027, with mass production starting in 2028."

Our Jacob Ridley got to try out Micro-OLED tech earlier this year in a Pimax VR headset. And the long and short is that he found it really impressive, preferring it to traditional QLED optics. That one was using a Sony panel with a lower vertical resolution but still-high pixel-per-degree clarity of 53 thanks to reduced FoV.

While he noticed a little more glare than usual, it wasn't too distracting and has the benefit not only of the usual vibrancy of OLED, but also of being crystal clear and having no discernable screen door-ing at all. The only real downside is the extra few-hundred dollars slapped on top.

Micro-OLED's quality mostly comes down to the sheer pixel density that is possible because the light-emitting diodes are put into silicon rather than glass as would usually happen with an OLED. Manufacturing on silicon wafer substrates can be much more precise, so the number of pixels per inch can be orders of magnitude higher with a Micro-OLED than with a standard high-density PC monitor.

It's a process that's still very much in its infancy, even if it has been used in some places, such as for the Apple Vision Pro and the aforementioned Pimax headset. Sony has been the big player in this space until now, but it seems Samsung is pushing to get things up and running too.

With displays being one healthy bastion during a global memory and storage crisis, it's good to hear news like this, even if any big projected industry shifts are still a couple of years out.

With the Steam Frame set to launch at some point in the summer, according to Valve, we don't have that long until we're expected to see the VR headset on sale. If its recent shipping manifest is anything to go by, we could see it in just a couple of weeks.

As shared by SadlyItsBradley on X, the first Steam Frame imports appear to be arriving in Valve's warehouse in the US. The listing notes five different shipments of VR headsets from Quanta Computing. Given Quanta didn't work on the Valve Index, there's pretty much only one thing this could be referring to: the Steam Frame. It appears to be five different shipments of around 6400 kg each, so 32,000 kg total.

As noted by Bradley, when the Steam Controller was shipped out to the American warehouse, it launched around a month later. Given the huge package size, it seems very likely these are intended to be shipped straight to buyers when the release day arrives, ruling out the possibility of them being testing headsets.

We don't know the weight of the Steam Frame box, but the Frame itself seems to sit just under 450 g. Assuming each Steam Frame box is around 800 g, that would mean this shipment has around 40,000 units.

At the very bottom of the document listing is a note about a "Game Console". This is slightly more ambiguous than the Frame mention, which means it's open to interpretation. The game console here could be the Steam Machine, or it could be a resupply of Steam Decks. The game console package weighs 12,647 kg, which might suggest the Steam Machine, but the Deck did manage to sell out in North America after the price hike.

Either way, it seems like, despite me not quite believing it until now, Valve is sticking to its summer time frame for its new devices. The memory crisis has cast a big shadow over almost all hardware drops, and with both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame needing plenty of memory, their price and release date have remained a bit of a mystery.

The one unfortunate thing here is that even if we get either device in the coming weeks, I'm not expecting the best pricing. The memory crisis has seemingly forced price hikes from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and all manner of custom PC builders, so Valve pretty much has to follow suit to avoid losing a lot of money.

I'm certainly excited to give them a try, but AI sure has taken the wind out of Valve's sails here.

Though the Steam Controller broke Valve's storefront, and the Steam Machine otherwise stealing the show, I'm most looking forward to Valve's VR headset, the Steam Frame. Until its release date is announced, however, the brief look at the headset's Welcome Tour software, allegedly leaked to Reddit, will have to tide you over.

Over on the Steam Frame Subreddit, someone has shared what appears to be the first few seconds of the headset's first boot (via Notebook Check).

It says, "Welcome to Steam Frame", and gives a brief overview of the controllers, how to hide and show the UI, and how to pair the device with your PC. The Reddit user credits LabeVR, but doesn't cite where exactly the information came from.

Notably, it's captured via the Valve Index and not the Steam Frame itself, hence the coloured pass-through. The Steam Frame only offers black and white passthrough, which makes its AR use a little lacking in comparison to the Meta Quest 3 or Pico 4 Ultra. Naturally, it's a gaming VR headset, and designed for that purpose, first and foremost.

Once booted up, the Steam Welcome Tour shows an overlay of the user's Steam Library, displaying VR games first. It's all fairly efficient and smooth. Just turn the headset on, connect it to the PC, and start playing games.

That is the major selling point of the Steam Frame. It has an included USB Type-A dongle that then wirelessly tethers the device to your PC, and this all gets transmitted to a dedicated antenna in the headset.

The video feed sent to the headset is naturally very demanding, but Valve has implemented foveated streaming to ease some of the processing. Effectively, with built-in eye tracking, it can pump up the quality of whatever you are directly looking at, whilst toning down whatever falls into your peripheral vision.

This software being tested is a good sign that we are nearing the device's eventual launch, especially as Valve just last week affirmed the Steam Machine and Steam Frame will be shipping this summer.

How many units it will ship, what price they will be, and the specific date have not yet been announced. That said, summer is set to end in just a few short months, so we're likely not far away from the official reveal.

VR development studio Vertigo Games, whose games include Arizona Sunshine VR, The 7th Guest VR, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow, and Metro Awakening is closing its studio in Amsterdam.

"The VR market remains a challenging space, and after careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to close Vertigo Studios Amsterdam," CEO Richard Stitselaar said in a message posted on LinkedIn (via GamesIndustry). "This is not a decision we have taken lightly, and I want to acknowledge the impact it has on everyone at Vertigo Studios Amsterdam."

The number of people being put out of work by the shutdown was not disclosed.

Vertigo Games was acquired by the Embracer Group in 2020, but for once this bad outcome can't be blamed on Embracer. Stitselaar said when the acquisition was announced that "the VR gaming market seems to be on the edge of really taking off," but in fact it has not. The Steam Hardware and Software Survey continues to point to extremely low rates of VR adoption, and the rising cost of hardware is not likely to improve that situation.

There's also no overlooking the fact that Vertigo is hardly alone in its struggles: Facebook parent company Meta closed three VR studios and laid off 10% of its Reality Labs workforce in January, and then two months later announced the end of the VR version of Meta Horizon Worlds.

And while hardware is improving, interest in VR gaming does not seem to be moving with it. When the Vertigo-published Thief VR game was announced in 2025, for instance, PC Gamer's Fraser Brown—not a man to pull punches—called it "a huge slap in the face and kick in the teeth for everyone who has been waiting for more than a decade to return to the City," because it took a foundational PC game series and locked it behind "a gimmick."

(Thief VR was developed by Maze Theory, but published by Vertigo.)

That's harsh, but I don't disagree, and in fact I had similar feelings (although perhaps not quite as outraged) over Metro Awakening when it was announced in 2024: I love the Metro series, and seeing resources poured into a new game that only a tiny portion of the potential audience could actually play (and to be clear, I'm not part of it) irked me—although at least in that case, the blow was softened by the knowledge that 4A Games was simultaneously working on the next mainline Metro game, recently revealed as Metro 2039.

It's possible that Vertigo has made the same connection: The studio's most recent release, The 7th Guest Remake, is basically a flatscreen do-over of the VR version that launched in 2023, and during the Future Games Show this past weekend it revealed that a non-VR version of Arizona Sunshine is also on the way.

Remember the metaverse? I do, occasionally, when circumstances conspire to remind me. It will never not amuse me that there were two schools of thought during those heady days: Self-proclaimed super-genius Mark Zuckerberg renamed his whole damn multi-billion-dollar company after it, and PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon called bullshit. Guess who was right? (Hint: Not Zuck.)

Like a heart continuing to beat after the brain has gone silent, the multiverse of metaverses has quietly persisted, but bit by bit, those organs are starting to shut down too. Meta said in March that the VR version of Meta Horizon Worlds is closing in June, and now vtuber agency Hololive has announced that its metaverse project Holoearth is going away too.

"Since launching Holoearth we continued operations with the support of many users, but after careful consideration regarding the ability to provide service into the future we arrived at this decision," the Holoearth team said in the shutdown announcement (via Delisted Games). "We offer our sincerest apologies for being unable to meet the expectations of everyone who supported us, and we deeply appreciate everyone who found enjoyment through Holoearth.

"It is our hope that the myriad of experiences in Holoearth, the bonds formed among users, and the time spent in this world will remain with everyone as cherished memories. While the time remaining until the end of service is short, we hope you can continue to enjoy the world of Holoearth until the final moment."

The concept of Holoearth as a more immersive way for fans to interact with vtubers sounded interesting, and the popularity of Hololive—one of the biggest vtuber agencies in the world—gave it at least the potential to be a viable moneymaker, which was of course the real point of the whole thing. But it was somewhat limited, too: As we noted in 2025, for instance. Holoearth split vtuber audiences, which regularly number in the thousands, into instanced rooms of 50, which would commonly fill up quickly. Such relatively small groups might have also diminished the feeling of being in the midst of a big community of fans, one of the big attractions of Holoearth in the first place.

"Holoearth was created with the theme of 'another world,' and has strived to be a place where talents, creators, and users can connect and make new experiences that transcend the boundaries of the virtual dimension," Holoearth project lead Ikko Fukuda said. "The time you spent there, along with each encounter and memory, are precious to us, and will remain with everything involved in this project. Furthermore, the technologies and learnings cultivated through Holoearth will live on in Hololive Production's future efforts, helping pave the way to new experiences.

"There may have been some shortcomings on our part along the way—but even so, we are grateful that everyone continued to visit, enjoy, and support the world of Holoearth."

Well, that's certainly nicer than what we got from the Meta Horizon Worlds shutdown.

The "final moment" for Holoearth will arrive on June 28, when the service will be shuttered outright. Sales of the premium HoloCoin currency have already been halted, while the sale of "Holoearth premium items" and user-made items will end on June 3. Non-premium items will remain up for grabs until the service shuts down. Any Holocoin or Creator Points that are unused when Holoearth goes offline will be refunded.

If this report is true it's not exactly surprising, but it's still kind of shocking. Apple has reportedly "given up" on its Vision Pro VR headset.

According to Mac Rumours, the latest M5-powered revision of the Vision Pro has been a "flop". As a consequence, "Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple."

Mac Rumours claims that Apple plans to pivot to smart glasses, the first iteration of which will be similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and lack any kind of display. Apple eventually hopes to integrate some kind augmented reality display into its smart glasses, but reportedly the technology just isn't there to do that with sufficient power efficiency.

This is still just a rumour and, to be clear, the Vision Pro can still be bought from the Apple website. Notably, in late 2024, the Vision Pro was said to be out of production, only for an updated headset with the M5 chip to be released in October last year. But sales of the $3,500 headset are widely reported to have been slow. Anecdotally, how many people do you know that have a Vision Pro? Quite.

As for what all this means for VR generally, it's hard to say beyond the fairly obvious. What with Meta more or less throwing the towel in on the Metaverse, suffice to say that the broader VR landscape, at least in terms of really major investment from the major tech entities, doesn't exactly look vibrant, does it?

Put another way, if Apple can't make mainstream punters switch on to VR, who can? In terms of that mainstream adoption, the sticking point is surely the bulk, general poor ergonomics and questionable aesthetics involved with current technology. Who really wants to walk around wearing a massive headset with marginal battery life?

For purely gaming, of course, there's both much more immediate appeal and more going on, with a mini industry of gaming headsets and, most recently, Valve's new Steam Frame headset. But it's still a totally different ergonomic and use-case proposition to a conventional display and surely less versatile.

If you upgrade your gaming monitor, in other words, likely it will be an upgrade for your general computing, too. But a VR headset bought for gaming is more likely to be restricted to that use case, maybe with some video consumption thrown in.

Personally, while I love the idea of VR, I've never been sufficiently blown away by available VR headset solutions and experiences to actually spend my own money. I'd want something that's somehow lighter, cheaper and higher resolution. Admittedly, I haven't tried the Steam Frame, but it seems more incremental than revolutionary to me, so I can't see it getting my money—if Valve ever prices the thing up.

Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. Wise words and, dare I say, highly relevant in the context of the pursuit of ever more realistic VR experiences. To wit, would you really want to include accurate odours?

Hold that thought, because we haven't addressed the "can you" bit. It turns out a group of researchers think they can, courtesy of a new approach that involves using ultrasound to stimulate the scent-processing part of the brain. Indeed, they claim the technology can be used not just for smell but also as a highly efficient method for inputting data into the brain. Yes, really.

"We pointed an ultrasound probe at the scent-processing region of the brain to obtain different sensations. Different focal spots corresponded to different smells, which we’ve replicated first-try on two people and validated with a blind trial," the researchers say via this blogpost.

The mere suggestion of such a technology has been enough, inevitably, to have some observers recoil. One commenter on X suggested a possible consequent scenario of, "walking into a VR chat lobby and immediately projectile vomiting as your headset psychically projects the scent of yeast-infected rotting fish from the pregnant fox OC on the other side of the room while it tanks your framerate." Charming.

Specifically, this technology claims to work by stimulating the olfactory bulb. The location of the olfactory bulb makes stimulation with ultrasound particularly tricky, the team says, but not impossible.

"We found that you can place the transducer on the forehead and aim the ultrasound downward towards the olfactory bulb. While this isn’t a perfect solution because the frontal sinuses can weaken the signal, careful device positioning above the sinuses still allows us to reach our general target region."

Fine tuning included using an MRI scan of the subject's skull to optimise the positioning of the ultrasound pad, and then various parameters addressing the actual ultrasound being directed at the olfactory bulb.

That includes the frequency, focal depth and using pulsed output. Thus far, replicated smells include "fresh air, with a lot of oxygen," "the smell of garbage, like few-day-old fruit peels," and "a campfire smell of burning wood."

Anywho, it seems that areas of olfactory bulb are associated with particular smells and are quite densely packed. "The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm," the researchers say.

Exactly how serious all this is remains hard to gauge. There's clearly an element of whimsy in the diagrams created by the team, for instance. Moreover, I'm not sure what to make of the claim that this simulated smell technology can be used as an interface for injecting data into the brain.

Maybe I should let the research team explain this bit:

"The nose has 400 distinct receptor types, and we can distinguish subtle combinations of their activations, so they could serve as a channel of writing directly into the brain, as a means of non-invasive neuromodulation.

"The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector.

"If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space. A bit of ultrasound, a breath in - and you understood a paragraph.

"People are able to develop synesthesia - being able to hear colors and see smells, and it might be possible to extend that to semantics. However, at this stage it is speculative."

To all this you can also add other questionable pursuits of VR fidelity, including an electronic tongue that can simulate, among other things, fish soup, and another device that zaps your neck and can induce feelings of motion. I'll let you decide whether any of this is a good idea.

It's been seven and a half years since Valve first released Proton, a software compatibility layer that allows games developed for Windows to run on Linux-based operating systems, such as SteamOS. Since that time, Proton has been regularly updated, and the latest v11.0 beta release packs a whole host of fixes for games. However, Valve has also quietly dropped another version, exclusively for PCs with an Arm64 processor.

One sharp-eyed Redditor spotted this and gave it a go, with mixed success, but if you head over to SteamDB, you can see the update for yourself. It's worth noting that this is very much a test build, and it's reportedly quite wonky donkey, but with a label of Proton 11.0 (ARM64), it's blatantly obvious what device this version is for.

No, not Apple MacBooks or laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, though at least one of these can run this new Proton, as the Redditor discovered. This Arm-flavoured piece of software exists because Valve itself is using a chip with such an architecture, and it's the one that powers the Steam Frame.

The eagerly anticipated VR headset uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) processor, which houses a total of eight little Arm Cortex CPU cores. If you're using your gaming PC to run games through the headset, then Proton isn't required, but for anything directly hosted on the Frame itself, the compatibility layer will kick in if the game is Windows-based.

It's worth noting that Proton itself is for the operating system side of things. To get x86 code working on Arm hardware, a translation layer called FEX is used, and as things currently stand, there's a fair-sized performance hit involved.

Since this is a beta update of Proton, and coupled with the fact that Valve hasn't officially announced the Arm version, it suggests that the retail release of Steam Frame isn't quite ready yet. But it's surely not far off, and out of the trio of new products Valve has announced (Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller), this is the one that I'm most interested in.

I currently use a Meta Quest 3S for VR gaming on my main PC, and the one thing I don't like about the whole experience is the fact that I need to use a hefty optical fibre USB cable to get the best experience. Over Wi-Fi, it's just not the same, as the increased latency and reduced bandwidth are quite noticeable.

The Steam Frame uses a dedicated 6 GHz wireless dongle to basically stream games from your PC to the headset, and our Jacob came away very impressed by the Frame's wireless nature when he tried it himself. No cables, no lag: just pure, untethered VR gaming.

If I do eventually swap my Quest 3S for a Steam Frame, I probably won't be leaning on Proton very much, but I'm mightily impressed that Valve is at least giving me the option to enjoy a bit of Windows-based gaming, without the need to fire up my big ol' PC. And if the future of PC gaming is going to shift away from being almost entirely x86-focused, then it looks like Valve is already prepped for it.

Meta is increasing the price of the Quest 3 and Quest 3S VR headsets. It says this is down to the high costs of components, namely memory, and the change will affect refurbished units, too.

"We’re making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly," Meta says in a blog post. "The global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR. To keep delivering the quality of hardware, software, and support you expect from the Quest platform, we need to adjust our pricing."

Here are the new prices, which will be set on April 19, 2026:

That's a $100 price increase for the Quest 3 in the US. It's a $50 increase for both Quest 3S models. In the UK, the Quest 3 is on sale for around £469 today, which will see around an £81 increase.

Memory chips are in high demand right now, due to the explosion in AI infrastructure and product demand. DRAM prices have soared in recent months as a result, with market research firm TrendForce expecting another 45-50% increase in Q2 2026 due to limited supply. Even older RAM chips, such as DDR4 and DDR3 are being affected.

The Quest 3 and Quest 3S use 8 GB of LPDDR5, which isn't a lot, but DDR5 has been hit first and foremost by price hikes.

Meta is one of the big spenders in AI infrastructure. It plans to ramp up spending on datacentre infrastructure related to AI by $135 billion in 2026. That's nearly double what it spent last year. It is also investing more as the year goes on. So, a part of that increased demand for memory chips is in part from Meta itself, though it's joined by other major tech firms and AI companies spending similarly gargantuan amounts of cash.

The Quest 3 512 GB remains cheaper than its launch MSRP. When it launched in late 2023, it was priced at $650. At that time, a cheaper 128 GB model was available for $500. However, one year later, the 128 GB model was removed from sale and the 512 GB model took its place and price—a sign of how affordable storage was at the time.

There's no positive spin for the Quest 3S, however, as it will cost $50 more than it did at launch in a couple of days' time.

The wider context here is that Reality Labs, the Meta division that works on the Quest lineup, has been losing billions of dollars every quarter for years. More recently, Meta appears to be pulling back from the metaverse—its long-term goal for VR—and shifting to a focus on AI. Meta Horizon Worlds disappeared from the Quest store on March 31. Though the company still suggests it's "doubling down" on VR, despite the industry not growing "as much or as quickly as we'd hoped."

In the blog post on the price increase, Meta says: "Meta remains committed to investing in VR and leading the category because we believe this is the future of computing. We have a long-term roadmap full of new hardware and experiences, and this adjustment helps us stay on track to deliver that future."

Starbreeze has something new cooking on the Payday front and, well, it's a VR game—Payday: Aces High, a co-op heist game like the others in the series, but "built specifically for virtual reality, bringing the planning, teamwork and signature chaos of a Payday heist to a fully immersive format."

Payday: Aces High does look very much like a Payday game: Four supposedly elite bank robbers put on suits and clown masks, and then Gong Show their way through jobs that invariably end in extreme violence and huge body counts. Not exactly the height of professionalism there, fellas!

This one, however, is being developed by Fast Travel Games, a VR studio whose previous releases include Cities: VR, Vampire: The Masquerade: Justice, the confusion-causing Apex Construct, and the Stellaris VR spinoff Ghost Signal. Up to four people can partake in co-op multiplayer action and, possibly because finding four people with VR headsets can be a challenge unto itself, singleplayer is also supported.

"Bringing the iconic Payday universe to VR has been more than a milestone for our studio—it's been a genuine privilege," Fast Travel CEO Oskar Burman said. "Working with an IP cherished by millions has been fantastic, and watching our team capture that magic in a fully fledged VR experience has been truly inspiring."

This won't be Starbreeze's first foray into the world of VR. A VR version of Payday 2 dropped in 2018 and it's apparently pretty alright, but even before that the studio had high hopes for the field. In 2015 it announced its own VR headset called StarVR, and even launched a VR arcade to support it, although development of the headset was put on hold in 2018. Starbreeze said this latest move is part of its strategy to "expand Payday through selected licensing partnerships and new entertainment formats."

"Fast Travel Games is a globally respected VR studio with over a decade of VR experience," Starbreeze CEO Adolf Kristjansson said. "Under their leadership, Aces High is not just an adaptation. It is a true Payday game built from the ground up for this medium."

Maybe so—it looks the part, as I said—but all of this is happening under a very dark cloud hanging over Starbreeze. Payday 3 remains a mess and at this point, well over two years after release, it's hard to imagine any sort of meaningful turnaround happening, especially while the much older Payday 2 is still reliably chugging along. Starbreeze itself, meanwhile, has imposed two rounds of layoffs over the past six months and cancelled an anticipated co-op D&D game it had announced in 2023.

And even if Payday: Aces High is "good" by whatever slippery metric you use to define the term, how much impact it will have on the fates of the franchise and the studio is a big question. The Assassin's Creed VR game Nexus, for instance, is well regarded by players but didn't sell as well as publisher Ubisoft had hoped—in fact, it convinced Ubisoft to back off on VR development. Meta also recently closed three VR studios as part of its big metaversal walkback, an amusing but also in some ways alarming move from a company that literally renamed itself after the thing it's now slowly backing away from. (Maybe things will work out better with AI.)

Anyway, we'll see how it all shakes out not too long from now. Payday: Aces High is currently slated to arrive in Q3 of 2026—so, sometime between July 1 and September 30—and will be available exclusively for Meta Quest and SteamVR headsets. It's up for wishlisting now on Steam and the Meta Store.

Do you want to play Resident Evil Requiem in VR? If so, seek help. Your fear gland may be broken and next you'll be jamming a fork into the toaster just to feel something. In the meantime though, go ahead and download a mod that lets you be Grace Ashcroft, an FBI desk jockey so out of her depth when she gets back she'll have the bends, in senses-shattering virtual reality.

I enjoyed Resident Evil Requiem a lot, sticking to the default viewpoint options of first-person for Grace and third-person for Leon. (I have to point out you can change these in the menu because if I don't some chucklefuck will be along to explain it as if we don't know already.) Seeing things through Grace's eyes that way was scary enough, especially when she was seeing the shadowy outline of something far too large slithering out of a hole in the ceiling at the end of the hallway I needed to get through.

After a bit of that, bouncing back into jolly third-person to watch Leon S. Kennedy's bulging biceps (the S is for the size of his shirts) as he hatchet-murders a dozen zombies then says a quip is an ecstatic relief. It's a perfect formula for a series that's often struggled to reconcile its survival horror roots with its shift to action-movie dopiness, making one the dessert you enjoy after the meat-and-potatoes of the other.

Anyway, if you're made of sterner stuff than me and played Alien Isolation in VR while chewing gum and generally not giving a shit, then go ahead and download RE9VR as well as its requirements ViGEmBus and REFramework. You will apparently need to pop your headset off and play flatscreen to solve puzzles at computers, but otherwise you should mostly be able to experience Resident Evil Requiem as if it's really happening to you. You maniac.

A social platform for some, an annoying bit of bloat on a VR headset for others, Meta is closing down the VR version of Horizon Worlds on June 15, this year. As of March 31, it will disappear from the Quest store, so you have a few short weeks to download it, if you want to give it a go before the big day.

Users of Meta Horizon Worlds on VR were sent an email from Meta clarifying the closure, and stating that the mobile app will stick around. Meta then made an announcement on the community forum and pasted that same announcement into the "Meta Quest and Horizon community" Discord server.

"We are separating the two platforms [VR and Horizon] so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app," Meta says.

Though you will get a few months with the app in VR before it goes offline, official Meta areas like Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay will not be available after March 31.

Notably, those with Meta's subscription plan, Meta Horizon Plus, will no longer receive Horizon Worlds benefits like Meta Credits, Digital Clothing, and avatars. However, Meta hasn't announced a plan to give away anything more with the subscription in return. It's like if Fortnite Crew removed the Rocket League season pass, without adding more V-bucks or digital extras.

Meta points to its article "Our Renewed Focus in 2026" as a reason for this change. It notes that Meta is shifting focus and 'doubling down on VR', announcing plans to support third-party developers. This article points out the $150 million it invested in VR developers in 2025, but it feels shallow given it closed three VR studios and laid off around 10% of Reality Labs a month prior, and the whole 'shutting down VR Horizon Worlds' thing.

In fairness, Meta did say that it would put a new focus on mobile worlds, so the announcement is somewhat in character, and it clarifies that, after June 14, users will be able to "jump into all your favourite mobile-optimised worlds on the Meta Horizon mobile app."

So, if you like the idea of Meta Horizon Worlds but simply didn't want to put your headset on to actually go in there, boy, does Meta have you covered. If the only reason you actually ever played it is because you didn't have many games on your VR headset and felt kinda bored that one time (guilty), then you're out of luck.

Elite Dangerous players are something else, I swear. Case in point, one player sold his very snazzy model of the time-travelling Delorean from Back to the Future, and used the proceeds to build an immersive, space faring rig. I guess they don't need roads where he's going.

The rig in question is called the SimStarr, and the man behind the project goes by the handle CMDR Wacko. The rig is also only one half of the project, with immersive space-faring streams via Twitch and YouTube being the other. CMDR Wacko has previously explained how the project got its start but, as someone who loves builds that are more than a little extra, I knew I had to find out more.

When I reach out to the SimStarr's pilot, he reveals that a love of the Robert Zemeckis-directed film series pervades the entire project.

"I’ve been chasing the dream of a dedicated simulator since I was quite young, ever since I rode Back to the Future: The Ride in the winter of 1991," CMDR Wacko tells me. "When I got home, I recreated the ride out of pizza boxes and have been trying to get something 'good' ever since.

"I’ve gone down a lot of paths, especially VR, until I landed here with motor-driven telemetry and a curved screen."

The SimStarr in its current form is in part salvaged from two different VR roller coaster rides. Covid burst that particular entertainment bubble, leaving the remnants to be sold for scrap. CMDR Wacko tells me he then found much of what he needed for his own custom, 6DOF motion rig from Facebook marketplace trades and Amazon liquidation stores for as little as two dollars an item.

However, the entire project did cost more than just a few bucks total. When I ask how much more, CMDR Wacko begins, "That’s a tricky question, and I often get pushback for not having the kind of answer people are looking for."

He explains that he and his pals have enjoyed "a long history of refurbishing and repurposing old equipment, and this project is kind of the apex of that attitude." Given this experience of buying and repurposing scrap, it's hard to cleanly put a total dollar amount on the project.

"So the honest answer is: I don’t really know how to buy this with money," He explains.

"That said, I’ve seen the base motion platform sell anywhere from literally free to around $3,000. Once you have that, you can mount almost any configuration above it. Simrig frames alone can run anywhere from about $100 to $10,000 depending on whether you’re buying aftermarket or new."

Though that's not what CMDR Wacko paid for his rig, with these figures in mind, I found myself asking an obvious question: 'What's your day job?' The commander is candid in his response, saying, "I do gig work delivering food. I don’t usually name the app because they don’t pay me enough to advertise for them haha."

Suffice it to say, the SimStarr is CMDR Wacko's true passion. "I consider the SimStarr device only half of the project; the other half is the livestream content it creates," He tells me, "I like that its unusually long actuators make it performative for an audience, so it’s not just fun for me, but for anyone tuning in.

"They don’t just see me in a chair going 'weee!' They see the whole rig move the way they’d expect in science fiction. I consider that its own feature, and it makes me happy to be entertaining in that way."

The SimStarr is compatible with a wealth of racing and flight simulator games that offer telemetry support, though CMDR Wacko admits, "I love space so much that I hardly ever try them."

That said, the sim racing side of gaming has still offered flashes of inspiration. CMDR Wacko highlights the 'hyperspace lever' on the SimStarr's dashboard. "It’s a modified 3D print of an e-brake from the sim racing side of the hobby," he explains. "It’s cheap, easy to build, takes up little space, and is fun to use. It’s the one thing I recommend everyone add to their setup at home."

Unfortunately, as Star Citizen does not offer the same telemetry support, you're unlikely to see it on a future SimStarr stream. Instead, CMDR Wacko says MechWarrior 5 and Star Wars: Squadrons are currently top of his list to try on stream next. He also has plans to play "the original Crazy Taxi and the ever-elusive Back to the Future: The Ride" with each of these being "full projects in themselves."

The commander is undeterred, saying "I’m determined to make those dreams happen!"

Were I to go full grump-mode, I might say that virtual reality has yet to fully deliver on its sci-fi potential. But then I remember just how petrified I was playing the Resident Evil 4 Remake in VR, and now that I've seen the level of horror that can be experienced with a full-body VR setup, I might just be sold.

Virtuix Omni, purveyor of virtual reality peripherals, have taken the experience several terrifying steps further. The company recently shared a demo of a VR mod for the Resident Evil 2 Remake being played using its omni-directional VR treadmill interface called the Omni One.

I'm not sure about you, but I'm already sweating bullets thinking about how a chest harness would add to the game's overall sense of claustrophobia—'Immersive' doesn't really cover it.

Virtuix Omni did not create the Resident Evil 2 Remake VR mod seen in the demo. The credit for that instead goes to PrayDog, and you can investigate venturing into Raccoon City in virtual reality for yourself by taking a gander at their REFramework project on GitHub. Better yet, this project is designed to work with multiple RE Engine games, so you're not necessarily limited to games set near the Arklay Mountains.

As neat as this all looks, it also highlights some aspects about VR that remain less than ideal. While the Meta Quest 3S is one of the best VR headsets for good reason—namely the fact that it combines the best of the Quest 2 and 3 for only 300 bucks—virtual reality is hardly the most accessible gaming space to jump into.

For one thing, immersion-enhancing peripherals come at a steep cost; the complete Omni One VR package will set you back more than three grand, while the separately sold ProTubeVR ProVolver Elite recoil accessory, also featured in the demo video, costs nearly $300 all on its own.

Virtual reality is an already pretty pricey niche within the niche of high-powered hardware, and a tough sell to anyone without the deepest of pockets. Then, there's the logistical nightmare of finding the space to set it all up.

Provided you do get over that initial, often pricey hardware hurdle and have ample room to use it, there's still the chance virtual reality makes you feel too motion sick to play. That said, Meta's new frame timing technique, FrameSync, could help make VR a little less nauseating for some folks.

Even so, it's clear virtual reality still has a ways to go to fully realise its potential on PC—but community crafted VR mods like PrayDog's REFramework go some ways to crossing that distance. I just hope someone adapts the project for Resident Evil Requiem before too long so I can one day run a hand through Leon S. Kennedy's floppy boyband member fringe for myself.

Meta is rolling out a new frame timing technique for Horizon OS called FrameSync. It's billed as helping to reduce stale frames and increasing responsiveness in VR, all in the name of a smoother visual experience.

There are three main benefits to FrameSync versus the existing method, PhaseSync, according to Meta:

• More consistent smoothness (and often higher fps): FrameSync helps stabilize frame pacing, which typically shows up as less judder and fewer visible hitches during motion.
• Fewer stale frames, especially long streaks: Consecutive stale frames can be especially noticeable (and uncomfortable). FrameSync reduces both the frequency of stale frames and the longer runs that can disrupt an experience.
• Lower motion-to-photon latency: Better prediction can reduce the delay between a person’s movement and the corresponding visual update to help interactions feel even more immediate and responsive.

All of which would be welcome improvements. A delay between a user's movement and obviously stuttering or judder are all contributory to a feeling of unease in VR, especially if you already suffer from motion sickness. The feeling that your vision isn't quite matching your movements, even if only by a fractional delay, can be tough to stomach—literally for some.

If you've ever played a VR game over a wireless connection, or a tethered connection to a PC with weak silicon, you know what I'm talking about.

FrameSync is rolling out as the default option for all apps on the Horizon Store with v203. Developers have some time before then to experiment with v201 to make sure everything works as intended. If not, there is an opt-out available to stick with PhaseSync.

PhaseSync delays rendering a frame until the compositor needs it, essentially making it so there's less latency between when the GPU presents a frame to composite. It's a technique that's been around for a long time now, being introduced in the Rift SDK and working alongside features like Asynchronous Timewarp. Though it runs into difficulty when an app gets much more demanding, especially if this demand is spiky, and when frame rates are lower. This can cause more stale frames if the headset can't keep up with demand.

Hence the need for a new frame timing technique, FrameSync, which reportedly allows for VR apps that are more demanding without sacrificing on user comfort.

"... as VR apps become more ambitious, richer scenes and dynamic content mean performance becomes trickier to hold steady. Small inconsistencies in frame pacing can show up quickly as hitching or discomfort and hurt the user experience," Meta says.

The downside of FrameSync is potential to increase CPU/GPU utilization, which have the knock-on effect of hurting battery life and thermals. Though Meta suggests these are only minor, we don't yet know what this will correlate to in terms of actual battery drain.

"FrameSync can increase the amount of fresh content your app delivers, which may result in a small increase in CPU/GPU utilization. Depending on your workload and session length, that can mean minor impacts to battery life and thermal behavior (including throttling)."

If you haven't updated your Quest headset in a while, you might've missed Meta Horizon OS 2, the latest update for the interface on Quest headsets. It makes everything a bit more serious; less metaverse, more Apple.

Here's a challenge. Get rid of the screen door effect from VR headsets without resorting to uber high-res display panels. Solution? Use CRTs. Yes, really. At least, that's one of the main benefits an enterprising YouTuber, dooglehead, discovered when he cooked up a homebrew VR headset using actual CRTs.

Now, at this stage you're probably imagining something utterly comical, perhaps a couple of small TVs somehow attached precariously to someone's head. And as dooglehead himself says, back in the 1980s, there were indeed VR headsets made from TV-style CRTs and suspended from the ceiling on cables.

He says he would have liked to take that hardware for a spin, but it all ran off custom workstations. So even if he could find the "headsets", driving them with modern games would be basically impossible. So, yup, you guessed it, he's going to have to build something himself.

At this point, I was thinking Sony Watchman. If you've seen Oliver Stone's Wall Street or you're simply old enough, you'll know what a Watchman is. Actually, you may have seen similar tech in intercom systems.

With these kinds of CRTs, instead of firing an electron gun directly at the rear of a phosphor screen and viewing it from the front, the screen is placed at a very shallow angle to the gun and you view the phosphor screen directly, effectively at a perpendicular angle to the gun. That allows the whole construction to be relatively slim. Perfect for a "pocket TV" in the 1980s.

It turns out this type of CRT is still being made, but their 4-inch screen sizes are a little too big to be ideal for this application. So, sure enough, dooglehead bagged a couple of 1990s spec Sony Watchman units with 2.7-inch CRTs.

Each CRT is 640 by 480 resolution, interlaced, and black and white rather than colour. As a stepping off point, dooglehead used an open source VR headset project from Github. These are usually based on small LCDs that can be directly connected to a PC.

So, he had to use an FPGA to convert the digital video output to analogue for the CRTs. Next up was an essentially off-the-shelf infrared laser lighthouse head-tracking system.

Dooglehead then designed a custom PCB integrating the FPGA, head-tracking input, power supply for the CRT (which is just one USB output, such is the low draw of the CRTs), and then the HDMI input.

The whole shebang is housed in a makeshift cardboard chassis. Remarkably, it weighs just 544 g, similar to existing commercial VR headsets. But what is the actual gaming experience like with this contraption?

Dooglehead tried a wide variety of titles, from driving sims to first person shooters and puzzle games. One immediate impression is that the image quality is more blurry than expected, even for CRT tech.

The extreme angle at which the electron gun is firing at the phosphor screen is probably partly to blame for that, he says, along with limitations of the CRT's focusing hardware. On the other hand, CRTs don't have sharply defined pixels like LCDs or OLEDs, so despite the low resolution, the image is perfectly smooth, with absolutely no screen door effect.

There are other limitations, most obviously the lack of colour or contrast and effective 60 Hz refresh. "So, am I going to replace my VR headset with this?" dooglehead ponders. "No, I don't think so. I'm glad I got to experience it, it really has a unique look that I don't think you can replicate with modern displays, but I miss being able to see things in colour."

In the end, this is a curiosity, not something you'd want to actually game with, long term. But it's certainly an excellent example of the impressive tech that homebrew engineers can create these days using off-the-shelf hardware and not a little ingenuity. In short, I like. A lot.

When I got my hands on the Steam Frame last year, I was filled with excitement. The new Valve VR headset promised a fresh take on home VR with a focus on convenience and ease-of-use—in large part led by a technology called foveated streaming. We're yet to see the Steam Frame due to ongoing launch and pricing issues, but foveated streaming is clearly a good idea. Now even Apple wants in.

Foveated streaming works by limiting the bitrate of streamed data based on where a user is looking. The fovea being the part of your eye with the clearest vision—a device requires eye tracking for this to work. It's useful for devices that wirelessly receive data from another source, as wireless connections are more limited than wired in terms of bandwidth and reliability.

It works on a similar principle to foveated rendering, or more generally, variable rate shading. These technologies lower demands on hardware by rendering different parts of the screen at varying rates of detail. Sony's PS VR2 uses foveated rendering.

A good spot by 9to5mac here, Apple's developer documentation now contains an entry for foveated streaming in the visionOS 26.4+ beta for Apple Vision Pro.

It says:

"The Foveated Streaming framework provides a session-based API for establishing connections from Apple Vision Pro to local and cloud streaming endpoints. The endpoint host streams high quality content only where necessary based on information about the approximate region where the person is looking, ensuring performance."

That sounds about the same. A varying level of detail for streamed content based on a user's vision. In Apple's case, either content from a local PC or streamed from the cloud.

Apple makes mention of one peculiar but interesting use case here. The Vision Pro overlays windows on top of the real or virtual worlds, and using both streaming and rendering together could lower demands for the headset.

Here's Apple's example:

"A flight simulator app can render a cockpit using RealityKit, and stream a processor-intensive landscape from a remote computer to the device."

Essentially, using it to stream background content while freeing up the Vision Pro's processor for any windows that are a user's main focus. Another good way to utilise this clever technology, by the sounds of it, and unfortunately, we may see Apple's uber-expensive headset reap the benefits of it before we do.

The Steam Frame is caught up in the memory crisis. Valve has said it is unable to announce the release date or price tag for any of its upcoming products, including the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. It's also recently added a note to the Steam Deck store page that the plucky handheld may be unavailable in some regions due to shortage in memory and storage supply.

On the first day of January, I was both cold and had a cold: a terrible start to my new year's resolution of, well, actually getting enough exercise. Luckily, the Meta Quest 3 I'd been neglecting for the last six months offered a welcoming solution to my problems. I could exercise in the warmth, without having to be sick and generally unpleasant around sweaty strangers.

My rubric is simple. I didn't want to overcomplicate the act of just doing some exercise, so I set myself an exercise goal via my smart watch, without signalling to my watch when I was exercising. Instead, I would just let it tally up exercise based on physical exertion. So, if I slacked, I wouldn't finish.

To establish some ground rules, I decided this would not be a replacement for traditional exercise, and traditional exercise would not be a replacement for it. I would try to do a minimum of 25 minutes of VR workouts every day, regardless of any other kind of movement I had achieved. Luckily, I have a bit of a bad habit of leaving my watch on charge during the day, so oftentimes, I could just intentionally forget it and have a fresh exercise ring to finish.

The exercise ring is how my Apple Watch tracks movement. There's a standing ring (which measures the amount you stand), a movement ring (which measures general movement) and an exercise ring (I think you can guess what that is).

Secondly, whatever way I filled that exercise ring was always fair game. After a while, I realised it was easier to tackle boredom and more efficient to finish my exercise quicker by just kind of dancing while I played Beat Saber. I don't think either you nor I particularly want footage of that here, but imagine it as sort of like an overweight fighting game character stance, and you're 70% there.

On the first day, I reached my 25-minute line, crossed it, and called it a day. I had initially forgotten to put my watch on, and my controller batteries were dead. Great start. These are the kinds of setbacks that might send you straight back home if you were trekking out to a gym. But Beat Saber is just so instantly engaging that I didn't mind.

A quick game of $100 bills on Expert+ woke me right up, and only partly because I'm just barely good enough to finish it. I felt somewhat tired by the end of my exercise, but mostly just in my legs, which I attribute partly to the aforementioned dancing, and partly to the cold. The second day was easier. I had a slight twinge in my shoulder, but nothing else. I felt a little less motivated, but that's to be expected.

It's on the third day that I started to form an actual habit, and that's because of an app called FitXR. Essentially, it focusses on boxing, combat exercise and HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training). It teaches you the form for punches, where you place your legs, and a handful of other moves, then throws them at you Beat Saber style.

Though simple in concept, I found FitXR raising my heart rate and making me sweat, even if the app's uncanny trainers conjured Bladerunner hologram vibes.

I think, traditionally, it's not a strict lack of motivation that has stopped me exercising, but a mixture of that, boredom, and the opportunity cost of all that time. So, when I didn't want to go for a round in FitXR, I settled on a rotation of Beat Saber, Synth Riders, and Pistol Whip to get me moving. I tried a few other VR games, but I found none to be as consistent for exercise as this trio.

The biggest downside of exercising in VR is the fact that you need to slap a piece of equipment to your face. I would occasionally have to pause and wipe sweat or readjust the headband. Sweat on the fabric of the headset certainly feels a tad gross, but I got used to it in little time.

I soon started to feel more and more confident, exercising in harder, more strenuous ways. I hit a real moment on day nine where I felt challenged. Day nine was my first time doing a HIIT exercise. Effectively, HIIT exercises push you hard but for a small amount of time. There's a lot of squats, hits, and movement back and forth, and I felt myself double over to recover my breath and stabilise my heart rate. Though this moment signified how far I would need to go to feel in shape, I also felt oddly proud of pushing myself.

I'm glad I tried the HIIT exercise on day nine because, by the time day ten had rolled around, I had already decided I would keep my trucking with my selection of apps. Ironically, I actually skipped Day 10 entirely as I left the house early and got back after midnight. If you’re my mum or my VR headset, ignore that last line.

One thing I haven't yet mentioned is diet. That's partly because there isn't a good way of eating in VR (yet), but also because my focus is on my exercise here, and is instead on my capacity to move.

However, I did notice myself naturally eating better and thinking more about my diet as I exercised, and that's because I didn't want my effort to go to waste. I ate protein, and snacked less. Alas, you can't outrun the fork, that so-and-so knows where I live.

One of the biggest hurdles for me while VR exercising is having to do it around my partner. My flat is small enough that using the VR headset will take up most of a room, and though my first few days were done alone, I couldn't continue hogging up so much space. But, like most issues with being perceived by others, I realised I cared way more about whether I looked silly.

After just two weeks, I made a habit of turning on MR modes where possible and watching TV idly between rounds through my peripheral vision. This made it so much easier to fit VR into my everyday life.

Now, thirty days later, I can say that popping the headset on and working up a light sweat is very natural to me. The half an hour to an hour I exercise for no longer feels like wasted time, and I've found tougher exercises easier and easier to do. And that leaves me with a question. Even after my positive experience, will I continue to exercise in VR?

I am vulnerable to boredom, and elements of that did creep in here. When you put on the headset, it takes all of your attention, and that can make it hard to do in the background. In fact, part of the reason I continued with it is that I had the writing of this piece to hold myself accountable. So, with the training wheels off, can I hold myself accountable when a potential reader can't?

Ultimately, I think the answer to that question relies on how much of an improvement I've felt since starting. This can be a little hard to quantify (outside of the six or seven pounds of weight I've lost), but I have seen the effects in everyday life. I live on a very large hill, and that climb upwards to my apartment near the top can be daunting after work on a particularly long day.

That hill is so daunting, in fact, that I've gotten the bus to avoid it. However, since I've started VR exercising, not only is that hill much easier, but it's become a small challenge I've found myself wanting to conquer. In this process, I've gained a new subscription, cancelled my Uber Eats, and found myself craving exercise more. Meta's own machinations may be putting me more and more off the Quest, but if I want to head back to the gym, I finally feel like I can tackle that hill when I get to it.

Last week, creator of the popular paid-access Cyberpunk 2077 R.E.A.L. VR mod Luke Ross found himself at the center of a growing controversy after receiving a DMCA notice from Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt, which claimed the modder was profiting from its IP. The studio had earlier requested that Ross make the mod free to download, but rather than submit to what he called "iron-clad corpo logic," Ross instead made the VR mod unavailable.

Now, after receiving a second DMCA notice from publisher 505 Games over his VR conversion mod for Ghostrunner, Ross has opted for the nuclear option and removed access to all 40+ of his VR mods from his Patreon rather than distribute them for free.

"Due to DMCA notices received from CD Projekt S.A. and 505 Games, I am forced to temporarily pause the Patreon page," says a disclaimer on the About page of Ross's Patreon. "You can still subscribe if you want to support me, but be advised that for the moment there will be no benefits available. No access to the 40+ mods or detailed information about my VR conversions, until the legal situation clears out."

On Reddit, users have shared an email that was supposedly sent out yesterday to Ross's Patreon subscribers. To give you an idea of the tone, the alleged email summarizes the last week of the Cyberpunk mod controversy as "the haters of VR, and defenders of some God-given right to free mods for commercial games found me guilty and sentenced us to be punished by taking away what we had worked for." So, you know. That's cool.

The email explains that receiving a second DMCA takedown from 505 Games triggered a warning from Patreon, who informed Ross that it "will terminate accounts that are the subject of repeated, compliant notifications of copyright infringement" and that he must "avoid posting material that will subject your account to further claims of copyright infringement."

Ross doesn't blame Patreon for complying with the Ghostrunner DMCA, the email says, because "DMCA law is carefully worded to give infinite power to big companies, who only need to write on a slip of paper that they 'believe' their copyright has been infringed." Which, to its credit, isn't exactly disproven by the itchy DMCA trigger fingers that major companies have brandished over the years.

Many of those companies—CDPR included—have shown a willingness to leave modders unheckled as long as they aren't directly receiving payments for modding the company's software. But rather than following the typical protocol of making his mods available for free while directing grateful users to his Patreon as a form of donational support, the email says that Ross was "forced to take immediate action" of a different kind.

"I'm making unavailable all versions of the mods and also all the posts related to the wonderful work we have done here together for years, so that there will be no ground for further claims," the email says. In its generosity, it also informs recipients that they "don't need to unsubscribe" if they don't want to.

"Hopefully we'll find a way together, in the next few weeks," the email concludes. "But if we can't, we'll always have the memories of the wonderful times we spent in those beautiful virtual worlds."

In the hours since the email was sent, Ross has tweeted a quoted section from CD Projekt's Wikipedia page, which describes how founder Marcin Iwiński had previously sold cracked videogame copies in high school. If we're meant to be keeping score, I'm not sure that wins anyone a point.

The maker of the popular R.E.A.L. VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077 has accused CD Projekt of "iron-clad corpo logic" after the studio issued a DMCA demanding the mod's removal.

"Many of you have noticed that two of my recent posts disappeared about a week ago," mod maker Luke Ross wrote over the weekend on his Patreon. "I apologize that I could not comment personally about the fact, because there was an ongoing legal exchange.

"Now that the dust has settled, I'm even more sorry to announce that we are leaving behind an adventure that so many of you deeply loved and enjoyed. CD Projekt SA decided that they would follow in Take-Two Interactive Software's steps and issued a DMCA notice against me for the removal of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod."

Ross is the maker of R.E.A.L. VR, which is essentially a mod framework that brings VR support numerous games, including Elden Ring, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Far Cry 4-6, Marvel's Spider-Man, Star Wars Outlaws, and others. All very cool: The problem is that if you want the mod, you have to subscribe to his Patreon, and charging money for mods is something that most big publishers—including CD Projekt—take issue with. The Take-Two comparison in Ross' message arises from that company's DMCA claims against the R.E.A.L. VR mod for Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the Mafia trilogy in 2022.

"In the end it amounted to the same iron-clad corpo logic: every little action that a company takes is in the name of money, but everything that modders do must be absolutely for free," Ross wrote.

"As usual they stretch the concept of 'derivative work' until it's paper-thin, as though a system that allows visualizing 40+ games in fully immersive 3D VR was somehow built making use of their intellectual property. And as usual they give absolutely zero f***s about how playing their game in VR made people happy, and they cannot just be grateful about the extra copies of the title they sold because of that—without ever having to pour money into producing an official conversion (no, they're not planning to release their own VR port, in case you were wondering)."

For the record, the R.E.A.L. VR mod is popular and apparently very lucrative: A 2022 report by The Verge said Ross (not his real name) was earning more than $20,000 per month from the mod.

Some of the responses to Ross' post on his Patreon page are critical of CD Projekt, and urge followers to write the company and ask that the takedown request be lifted. Others point out that he could simply release the Cyberpunk 2077 mod standalone, for free, with an optional button for donations.

There appears to be even stronger pushback on the Virtualreality subreddit. "This is not the first mod the modder had taken down because he tried to make a live service out of it," Frraksurred wrote. "He knew he was outside the ToS and just chose to get away with it as long as he could. Now he's trying to play the victim."

Redditor ottermoment also made a not-flattering comparison between the Cyberpunk 2077 takedown and the disappearance of those VR mods for Rockstar games.

"'By the corpos' who created everything and they clearly say that paid mods aren't allowed," redditor MotherFunker1734 added. "Mods aren't a profit machine. Not everything has to be made for profit. No, he doesn't have to get paid 100,000 times for something he wrote once using someone else's code."

Taking the donation route would almost certainly be fine. CD Projekt has historically been supportive of modding, but the first "golden rule" of its fan content guidelines is "no commercial usage," and describes almost exactly what Ross is doing with the R.E.A.L. VR mod: "We’re happy for you to accept reasonable donations in connection with your fan content, but you’re not allowed to make people pay for it or have it behind any sort of paywall (e.g. don’t make content only available to paid subscribers)."

Even so, Ross admitted to being "bitter" about the takedown, "especially when they never even knew or cared during all this time that the VR conversion was there, and are only knee-jerk reacting now because somebody reported to them that it existed and it was not free."

Despite that obvious anger, Ross said he wanted to end his message on a positive note, which he did by announcing that R.E.A.L. VR now supports Baldur's Gate 3. I guess we'll see how Hasbro feels about this sort of thing soon enough.