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.

First look of the Steam Frame Welcome Tour from r/SteamFrame

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.

linux_gaming from r/linux_gaming/comments/1snjr0r/valve_kinda_released_arm64_proton_lol_works_on_my

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."

Luke Ross Removes Access to All Mods from r/virtualreality

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.

Comment from r/virtualreality

"'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.

Even in the year 2025 where it’s relatively commonplace, VR still feels like a futuristic progression for gaming. VR headsets are becoming fairly popular, but the dream of putting on a headset and seamlessly teleporting to an immerse new world, while my lounge room fades away, is yet to be realised. While modern headsets have come a long way, they either lack the visual fidelity to fool the eyes, the comfort to convince the body, or more likely a bit of both. The Pimax Crystal Super is an example of a headset that does a lot to solve one of these problems, while kinda forgetting about the other.

The Pimax Crystal Super boasts some pretty impressive specs, but as such needs a mighty PC to run. Pimax recommends you have at least an RTX 2070 to run the thing, but realistically, if you’re running anything less than a 4080 then you’re not going to scratch the surface of this impressive display. There’s simply no reason to drop the $2,000 on this headset without a high-end PC to power it. You’re far better off grabbing a lower specced VR set-up and upgrading later.

You’re also beholden to Pimax’s software, which acts as a driver hub and is required to be configured to play some games like MSFS. I found the app quite easy to navigate and haven’t had problems, but it is an extra step to consider.

Unboxing the Pimax, the first thing I noticed was the heft. This is one of the largest modern headsets I’ve tried, and lifting it out of the box really drove that home. It became even clearer when I added the speaker module, upping the weight of the headset once more. With thick cables, and sturdy black plastic chassis the construction feels very solid, but also undeniably heavy.

Despite the weight, I’ve been surprised by how generally comfortable the fit is. It can be adjusted via a Velcro top head strap combined with a dial tightened back strap, similar to the one on PS VR, and I found it really easy to get a good fit. The plush face rests are also very comfortable. It’s just when there’s over 1 kg of gear on your head, it’s impossible not to notice.

This is worse in fast moving games like Beat Saber, and gets heavy really quickly. Even a few songs had my neck complaining from the weight. Games where I could sit and play, like racing sims and MSFS 2025 fared the best. I’ve managed about an hour in the headset without noticing the weight too much when significantly distracted by the game.

This is where the Pimax Crystal Super shines. The high-res display combined with a-wider-than-usual 140° field of view makes this one of the most immersive headsets I’ve used. The 90 Hz refresh rate is great too. It’s easy to be distracted when soaring over the clouds as I stick my head out of my little Cessna and almost believe I’m looking at the horizon line. Or while zooming in fast paced racing action, I can almost pretend it’s the weight of a racing helmet.

When the scene is particularly bright I can just make out some screen-dooring, and there’s also some occasional chromatic aberration. It also highlights the sort of goggling effect of the round screens. These weren’t things I tended to notice while actually playing a game, more during a title screen or similar. Something that did bother me a little during gameplay was the lack of true blacks making it never really feel quite dark enough inside the headset.

While they make the headset even heavier, the speaker modules really do help add to this sensation. I loaded up some Half Life: Alyx and was truly taken by how real the world felt with this combination of sight and sound. When looking out a dirty city window at a passing drone I went to push my hand against the glass, and was a little surprised when it wasn’t there. I haven’t had VR do that to me before.

It also comes down to how few problems I’ve had while using the Pimax Crystal Super. It can be a bit to get everything set up, but once it is this headset has been easy to use consistently. I had one issue where controller tracking stopped working, and it was fixed with a simple restart. It’s yet to bother me with any issues while I’m actually in a game, and it’s always my neck and head that times out before anything else.

The Pimax Crystal Super is a hefty unit in more ways than one, and comes with a price tag to match. The field of view, and high-pixeled display allows this headset to trick my brain in ways VR hasn’t managed before, but the weight means I can’t keep it up for anywhere near as long as I’d like. $3,000 Australian doolery doos is an awful lot of money to drop on something you have to limit your use of. If you’ve got the cash, the kit, and the neck to run it, the Pimax Crystal Super offers a breathtaking VR experience.

Looks like we won't be getting our hands on a Horizon OS-powered VR headset made by Asus, Lenovo, or any other manufacturer for that matter. Meta has killed, for the time being, the program that was to see it all happen.

"We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market", a Meta spokesperson said to Road To VR.

"We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves."

In April, 2024, Meta said it was allowing third-party manufacturers to take advantage of the operating system used on its Quest headsets, called Horizon OS. This would allow these companies to take advantage of the storefront, software, and support in use across the Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

Altogether, it was largely seen at the time to be a good move. More options, more flexibility, and almost certainly a more powerful VR headset for gaming. In fact, Asus had already signed on as an early adopter and was said to be working on an ROG-branded headset that would be focused on gaming performance. Asus co-CEO, S.Y Hsu, said at the time that it would build "the gaming headset of the next generation."

Lenovo was also said to be signed up to the program with a far less exciting productivity-first design. As I said at the time, "yuck", but each to their own.

However, it's not to be. At least not right now. From what Meta mentioned to Road to VR, it is keen to keep its VR division solely under its own control. Its reasoning is more or less 'because that's in the interests of VR', but I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Maybe Meta is cautious of handing over the keys to Horizon OS while Google's Android XR is on the prowl. Or perhaps Meta is scared of the Steam Frame and pumping money into third-party headsets that could end up running SteamOS in future.

It's a shame that the program won't go ahead, though. I was keen to get my hands on a high-end ROG Quest-a-like. Jam Horizon OS, and all the games and apps that go with it, onto a headset powered by the latest Snapdragon chip and a gorgeous screen, like a micro-OLED, and you have a pretty attractive combination. Alas, it wasn't to be.

Ah well, the Steam Frame is nearly here—and I've used it—I'll pin all my hopes and dreams on that instead.

Meta has reportedly pushed back the release of its mixed reality (MR) glasses, codenamed "Phoenix", to 2027. That's despite having already spent billions of dollars on projects for digitally enhancing our everyday world. On the plus side, we have received more information on the next Quest headset.

Allegedly stated in two internal memos seen by Business Insider, Meta is reportedly pushing back the glasses to "get the details right". These memos are said to state that Meta needs "breathing room" in order to put out a "fully polished" device. It was originally suggested to launch in the latter half of 2026.

Reports suggest Meta's MR glasses are a bit closer to goggles and even come with a power puck, like the Apple Vision Pro. If true, this would tether the device somewhat but could also allow for a more lightweight feel in the headset itself.

With the current state of AI, and worries around privacy that come from someone being able to capture or stream any moment for any reason, I don't think I'm particularly excited for a world with more smart glasses in it. This is before mentioning that data taken with smart glasses will be used to train AI (unless you specifically opt out).

Meta is reportedly working on getting at least one device out in 2026: the wearable "Malibu 2". We know very little about this device, but we do know that Meta recently acquired AI startup Limitless, which recently put out a wearable AI pendant. It is suggested that the Malibu 2 is attempting to do something similar.

Finally, a memo between Meta and Meta-owned studio Reality Labs says that work is underway on its next virtual reality (VR) headset. UploadVR claims this will likely be called the Quest 4. The new Quest is said to be a "large upgrade" over previous Quest devices and will "significantly improve unit economics".

Interestingly, there's no mention of Orion, which is the codename for Meta's augmented reality (AR) glasses. The aforementioned Phoenix itself is counted as MR. Though one might argue that mixed and augmented reality are very similar, Meta has previously gone to great lengths to signify the difference.

As explained by Meta, "AR overlays don't interact with the real world, though you may be able to interact with them depending on the software in use. MR is another matter. It overlays the real world with digital elements and the physical and digital objects co-exist and react to each other in real time."

Though it's unclear what has happened to project Orion, it does reportedly also have a compute puck, so there's a chance it's part of the same project with a different name.

One thing is clear, though: Meta is committed to smart glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are now onto their second generation, and earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said anyone without AI glasses will "be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage". It seems like you have until 2027 to brush up on your brain training, then.

Believe me, I've tried to get into VR games. However, my introduction to this arena was PlayStation's expensive niche-within-a-niche PS VR headsets, making for hardly the best first impression. Still, I'm hopeful the wire-free Steam Frame can rehabilitate virtual reality's image and make VR games just a bit more accessible. Offering the Android app version alongside your Steam games may be an interesting step in the right direction.

Eagle eyed X user Brad Lynch spotted what may be "the first 'official' Android app on Steam" while poring over the changelist of, drum roll please…Walkabout Mini Golf. Apparently changelist entry #32325165 adds the game's Android .apk to the App Config, plus OpenXR support.

Lynch claims the Android version will be available as an alternate branch of the Steam game's app ID, hence the two-for-one, no need for a separate purchase theory. He also theorises, "If you own this game on Steam already, you will have access to the Android version on Steam Frame day one."

This would be a very good thing for the upcoming Steam Frame. Valve's new VR headset can play games a number of ways: 1) playing a PC VR game streamed from a gaming PC; 2) playing a PC VR game emulated on its own Arm-chip in the headset, using a translation layer called FEX; or 3) playing a native Arm game in the form of an .apk file.

With this suggestion from Lynch, it would appear that if you bought the game for your gaming PC, say to play on the Valve Index, you could also potentially be offered the .apk version of the game for free under that purchase, meaning you don't have to pay again to use the version that runs natively on the Steam Frame. The native version should run better on the Arm chip in the Steam Frame, as FEX will have some sort of performance hit from the emulation process.

Though, just to be clear, it's not yet been confirmed by either Valve or developer Mighty Coconut that you'll definitely get an .apk to play on the Steam Frame, alongside the standard Steam version of your VR games. Though a changelist entry like this seems fairly clear cut, game builds can include all sorts of odd files for various reasons.

For instance, data miners have found the entire original version of Oblivion in the Remaster's files, almost perfectly preserved like a set of dinosaur bones. Starfield dataminers also found an interesting, much earlier build of the game in the release versions files. My point is, a Matryoshka-esque nesting of game files is not that unusual and may even include builds that are not always intended to be accessed by the player.

Still, the addition of OpenXR support is promising. This bit of software attempts to consolidate a whole bunch of AR and VR APIs into one package, meaning it's easier to get virtual reality games working on a variety of devices. That could make it a smidge easier to port, say, Meta Quest games…or indeed the Android app version of a game you already own.

While there's no guarantee Mighty Coconut's approach represents any kind of standard for the Steam Frame going forward, you know what they say: first, Walkabout Mini Golf, and then the world! Okay, I totally just made that up—but time will tell.

The best PC gaming gear 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list The best PC gaming gear 2025

---

BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

Check Price

BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

Check Price

BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

Check Price

BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

Check Price

BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

Check Price

BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

Check Price

BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

Check Price

BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

Check Price

BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: The best PC gaming gear 2025

POWERED BY

I am very excited about the Valve Steam Frame. It's packed with a beefier processor, higher-capacity RAM, and a better Wi-Fi chip than Meta's top device, the Meta Quest 3, and this all makes me think Valve has the guts to step into the ring with the company previously known as Facebook.

This is before mentioning that Valve seems to have a bit of a hidden blade up its sleeve in the form of an included USB dongle that connects to a specially sectioned antenna in the headset for wireless streaming. This, combined with foveated streaming, means that the headset can pick up on where you're looking, focus all of the higher quality juice into that section, and render everything at a lower quality.

And that's not the only selling point for the Steam Frame. Valve's Lawrence Yang told us it "represents a fundamental shift in the way that we look at VR." For the first time, SteamOS is on an Arm chip in the Frame. It can wirelessly connect to your rig to play your VR games, but also play non-VR games through the same controllers. It's all hitting the right notes for me.

However, in my excitement for the new headset, I spotted a single note in the specs sheet that dampens it somewhat: Mono passthrough. This means that, where my Quest 3 has a relatively lifelike vision in technicolor when I'm wandering around or messing with its UI in my real space, the Frame may feel a bit stilted.

One of the most instantaneous upgrades I felt when swapping from the Quest 2 to the Quest 3 was the upgrade in passthrough capability, and it really does improve moment-to-moment use and set-up.

I've always found navigating my real-life environment a bit tough in previous headsets, but a quick tap on the side of the head to activate passthrough mode has made the Quest 3 a surprisingly viable headset to wear when untangling wires or otherwise interacting with my space. I can get myself a drink without a little bit of nausea (or taking an age), which was never true of Meta's previous iterations.

The Steam Frame has the same number of cameras as the Quest 3, though Meta employs two RGB passthrough cameras and four IR cameras, whereas Valve uses four monocular home computer vision tracking cameras and two interior eye tracking cameras.

So, it seems like part of the tradeoff here is eye tracking or better passthrough. The monochrome cameras and IR illuminators in the Steam Frame headset mean it can track in the dark, though.

The Frame, like the Index, has a modular component. The front of the headset has an expansion port, which one could technically use to mod their headset to get colour passthrough. It even supports two 2.5 Gbps camera feeds.

It is worth noting that, while the Index has an expansion slot, it wasn't really supported by Valve post-release. It was there to allow buyers the choice to mod, and that's about it. This is to say, while official colour passthrough support could come at some point, I'm not holding my breath.

When talking about this modular system, a Valve engineer told us, "There's just a lot of perspectives on that, and we agree, which is why we're not announcing anything today. But you could imagine that the same headset with this type of core module, you could have alternative versions of the head strap that could offer different features to different groups of people."

And better passthrough isn't just good for rehydrating in the middle of a Beat Saber session. The Quest 3 has an intuitive UI that allows you to drag and drop windows in your physical space that you can interact with. I have, on multiple occasions, popped on the headset, played a game via another screen, and been able to check in with my partner through passthrough without having to take it off.

I haven't really been convinced by mixed reality gaming thus far, but I certainly don't think a creative developer can't use the modest confines of my home to implement something good, too. But ultimately, I think worse passthrough is just an everyday downside. It wouldn't stop me from using, or even loving the Frame, but it's a convenience I've gotten used to, and would feel like a small step backwards.

As will be the case with almost all conversations around Valve's upcoming hardware, price is the most important factor in whether or not this change is justified. And XR is not the point of the Frame. It runs SteamOS and is designed for gaming first and foremost. However, if I'm paying close to $1,000 for that privilege, I'd find it hard to stomach such a downside for such a price premium.

Ultimately, compromises need to be made with all kinds of hardware: budget laptop manufacturers opting for 512 GB of storage instead of the 1 TB you've come to expect as the bare minimum; graphics card makers sticking with 8 GB of VRAM for their more value-oriented models.

The Steam Frame's mono passthrough is likely a choice made to allow more in other areas, and whether or not that downside will be worth it all depends on how much Gaben wants me to pay for it all.

Best gaming PC 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list Best gaming laptop 2025Best gaming PC 2025Best gaming rigs 2025Best handheld PC 2025Best mini PC 2025

---

BEST OVERALL

1. HP Omen 35L

Check Price

BEST BUDGET

2. Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8)

Check Price

BEST COMPACT

3. Velocity Micro Raptor ES40

Check Price

ALIENWARE

4. Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop

Check Price

BEST MINI PC

5. Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: Best gaming PC 2025

POWERED BY

I've developed what I can only describe as a begrudging respect for Meta's hardware output right now. I've bought almost every Meta headset to date, and unboxing the first one in the Summer of 2020 is definitely a highlight of my VR journey so far.

However, Meta's dominance in the market is soured somewhat by Meta itself. Meta AI remains the unwanted present that just keeps on giving, the "legendary misadventure" of the metaverse is a multibillion-dollar digital eyesore, and, of course, it has laid off tens of thousands of employees in the process.

And this all makes me feel that, frankly, Meta is too comfortable. The Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S are fantastic bits of hardware, but the closest device I've found to its dominance is the Pico 4 Ultra. Even then, Pico's hardware isn't available in the US and mostly just apes Meta, with very similar specs.

Even if the Pico 4 Ultra were to take off and steal back that oh-so coveted market share from Meta, Pico's parent company, Bytedance, is just as data hungry, making it perhaps not the competitor one would want.

Valve is a multibillion-dollar company too, but it stays in its lane more and seems content as a corporate entity to just sell games.

Valve is not trying to sell you an endless feed of AI-generated content, it's not trying to "get to know you", and it's not trying to use smart glasses to train its AI. Okay, I've done the 'rattle off bad things Meta has done' bit twice in five paragraphs, but that's a testament to how unlikable Zuckerberg's company is as an entity.

But, I'm not just rooting for Valve to take a spot in our best VR headset list because I want Meta to lose. I genuinely believe that Valve has the capabilities to make the Steam Frame excellent. Our Jacob recently flew out to its headquarters to test it out, and it seems like an impressive bit of tech.

While it more or less matches the Quest 3 in resolution, optics, and horizontal field of view, it has a better chip, more RAM, and stronger Wi-Fi support. On the flip side, the Quest 3's colour pass-through is a touch above Valve's mono one. On paper, it's what you'd expect from a standalone VR headset going into 2026.

It's the Frame's use case that really appeals to me. Valve told us "we think of this as a streaming first device", and it comes with a wireless adapter that you can plug into your gaming PC via a USB Type-A port. This then fires the signal over to your headset, which the Steam Frame picks up via a snazzy separate antenna.

Streaming from your PC naturally makes for higher-quality gaming but also saves on battery life. It also comes with foveated streaming, which gives you higher resolution images in the parts your eyes are looking at. Impressively, foveated streaming doesn't need to be programmed into a game; it will just work out of the box.

All of this comes together to make a device that is designed to communicate wirelessly and effortlessly with your gaming rig.

The Quest 3 just doesn't have the hardware for such neat streaming capabilities. Living in an apartment with spotty Wi-Fi has more or less left me constantly tethered to my rig while I game. When our Jacob tested the Steam Frame out, he said it has a "smooth frame rate, crystal clear image, and no noticeable lag between my movements and Alyx's in-game."

There is, unfortunately, an elephant in the room here, and that's pricing. Frankly, the $1000 launch price for the Valve Index (with controllers and base station) was far too ambitious a price point to compete with the accessibility of Meta's aggressive pricing.

Despite being around for over half a decade now, it's hard not to think that VR still feels like it's in its infancy (or at least in the teething years).

That's because Meta is the only one to offer a no-nonsense, intuitive ecosystem at a budget price point. If the Steam Frame matches that Index price point, I'm afraid the war could be lost before the first battle.

Wanting to knock Meta down a peg isn't just tech spite, either; I think it's genuinely good for us, the end users. The Quest 3S and Quest 3 sit at the top of the VR throne because they're good headsets, and that lead has allowed a level of comfort that has just let Meta away with all its metaverse shenanigans.

Just last year, it was reported that Meta is testing loaning its OS to other companies and is thinking of taking a step back from actually producing the hardware. And, part of this could be that hardware is expensive. It can be a big risk for companies, especially when considering the cost of research and development, plus all that marketing that will go in before launch.

Losing out on having the best headset could be the kick in the virtual rump that Meta needs to really focus on what makes VR work so well. I don't really want low-effort social spaces, especially when games like VR Chat do that so much better.

I want a device that's enjoyable to game in, comfortable to browse the web, and doesn't have a parent company that feels hellbent on making me feel like an apologist every time I slap it onto my forehead.

The best PC gaming gear 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list The best PC gaming gear 2025

---

BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

Check Price

BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

Check Price

BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

Check Price

BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

Check Price

BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

Check Price

BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

Check Price

BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

Check Price

BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

Check Price

BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: The best PC gaming gear 2025

POWERED BY

The Steam Frame has a heap of new features to dig into, but I want to focus on one here: foveated streaming. It sounds like a medical issue but I assure you, it's all about ensuring the Steam Frame's wireless connection is strong, stable, and appears high quality.

The Steam Frame offers a few ways to play games, both locally on its own Arm chip and streamed from a nearby gaming PC. As the name suggests, foveated streaming is used during the latter.

"So, a lot of people might have heard of foveated rendering," Jeremy Selan, an engineer at Valve working on the Steam Frame, says. "That's where you use the direction you're looking at to optimise what the device is doing. So it only has to do a lot of work in that area. We are doing something similar to that dedicated to the streaming process."

Foveated streaming requires the Steam Frame's new eye tracking feature. This uses two cameras embedded just above the wearer's eyes, through which Valve can very quickly monitor where a user is looking at any one time. The clearest patch of your vision, that's thanks to your fovea, hence the name.

Connecting to a PC via its own wireless adapter and a dedicated 6 GHz connection, the Steam Frame has a relatively high level of bandwidth available to it. But it also uses two 2160 x 2160 screens and can run up to 144 Hz (in an experimental mode), which combined with the audio stream, is a lot of data to beam across even a high-capacity wireless connection.

To get around these limitations, Valve is only sending the highest quality image to the area directly in front of where a user is looking.

"We can send a very, very high-fidelity representation of the source data for where you're looking, and then spend far fewer bits on the surrounding area," Selan says.

"So, you could imagine that if that foveated area, say, represents 10% of the full field of view, it would actually be a 10x multiplication factor in bandwidth, in latency, in robustness."

Rather than send two views (one for each eye), which is usually what's required for VR, Valve is sending four. Two views are sent in low resolution and represent the entire field of view. The other two are only a fragment of the complete picture, but sent in high resolution.

"We send a bunch more bits to that area than we do to the low-resolution imagery," Selan says.

It's like a magnifying glass, offering a better glimpse of whatever it hovers over, and following a user's vision.

"The trick is that the eye tracking is fast enough that it essentially beats where you're going. So, by the time you look to the right, we've already sent the bits at the very high resolution to where you're looking to the right. When we send if you look to the left, we beat your eyes looking there where we already have landed the bits at the full resolution."

I've used the Steam Frame and I never noticed any low-resolution areas in my vision. I had almost forgotten about the foveated streaming until it was mentioned to me. I tried darting my eyes from left to right to try and trick the eye tracking, but it totally kept up.

"We find that even for the most observant viewers, it's very, very hard to see what's happening," Selan says.

I take this as a bit of a challenge, but I still can't see any difference in quality anywhere on the screen. Even when Selan enabled a special mode in Half-Life Alyx that highlighted the high-quality area, where I'm looking, I still couldn't make out the low-quality areas. I don't know if you've ever tried to view something in your peripheral vision without looking at it, but it's actually quite tough. Moreover, that part of your vision isn't very detailed—your brain fills in a lot of the gaps. That's what foveated streaming is taking advantage of.

Foveated rendering, a feature you might be more familiar with, works in a similar way with eye tracking. What's known as quad view rendering is essentially the exact same system. The key difference here is that foveated streaming doesn't lower the performance requirements for the PC that's rendering the VR game to be sent to the Steam Frame—it's working overtime to deliver the full, crisp image.

That's a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, if your gaming PC is struggling to play VR games, foveated streaming won't help. On the other, foveated streaming doesn't require a developer to do anything. Though I wouldn't worry about picking between them: Valve has confirmed you will be able to use both at the same time in games that support foveated rendering.

"Most critically, the software developer, the partners who ship on Steam, don't have to do any work to take advantage of that," Selan says.

Having spent time without a cable to anchor me down, I can see why Valve is pushing to remove wires from the VR experience. It's far more convincing for a lack of it. So too does the streaming experience feel the most convincing part of the Steam Frame, even more so than its new onboard processing capabilities. Not the least bit because the battery life while streaming should be many more hours than playing games on the headset itself. That feels like an easy win, as does foveated streaming.

With the launch of the Steam Frame, Valve's new VR headset, SteamOS will be made available for Arm-based systems. This is required to support the new headset, which is using a Snapdragon processor to run games without requiring a tether to a gaming PC. However, it's also a sign that times are changing, as systems running on Arm are receiving much greater support from Valve.

Valve has been largely focused on x86 processors over the years. These chips from AMD and Intel are the dominant player in PC gaming, so it only makes sense as to why. But in recent months, Arm support is seeping into Steam in a variety of ways.

SteamOS will receive Arm support with the launch of the Steam Frame sometime next year. I don't suspect you'll be able to take that ISO file and load it onto any old Arm-based device right away, like a modern mobile phone, and have it just work. It's still not possible to stick SteamOS on any gaming PC and have it just work, but it is improving in that regard. The chip powering the Steam Frame isn't unique to the headset, however. It's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650), which is found within various flagship phones, such as the Asus ROG Phone 8.

"This is already fully open source, so you could download it and run SteamOS, now that we will be releasing SteamOS for Arm, you could have gaming on any Arm device," Jeremy Selan, an engineer at Valve, says.

"This is the first one. We're very excited about it."

Valve has been working on SteamOS for Arm for a while, as experimental support was spotted for Arm in the SteamOS runtime earlier this year.

That's not the only way that Arm is headed to Steam, however. Many of today's VR games are not developed for SteamVR first off, they're developed for something like Meta's Horizon OS, or to a lesser degree, Android XR. Both use the Arm-native Android operating system. The Steam Frame looks to capitalise on this widespread support with its own Arm chip, by running Android program files called APKs.

"So we're able to run arm APKs on this device as well," Valve engineer Jeff Leinbaugh says.

"So for partners and developers who have developed applications for other mobile VR, they'll just work on this headset," Selan follows up.

Moreover, I'm told that Valve will be allowing APKs to be listed on Steam's storefront from this time, opening the doors to VR developers that have been focusing on game support for standalone headsets, such as the Quest 3.

"Absolutely, that'll be a new thing that Steam will do," says Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve.

Though if a game isn't natively developed for Android/Arm, there's a chance it'll still run on the Steam Frame through a translation layer called FEX. In a similar way to what Proton does for Windows games, in order to run them on Linux, FEX takes x86 games and emulates them on Arm chips. There's a performance hit from this conversion, some games more so than others, and Valve tells me it will create something aking to a Frame Verified program similar to the Steam Deck's Deck Verified program to make game support as clear as possible for users.

Another way that Arm support is expanding on Steam is through the Steam client itself. Valve released a native Steam client application for Apple systems using Apple Silicon (Arm chips designed by Apple) back in June. Until this point, Macs had required effectively emulating Steam's x86 code to run on Arm, which has some extra overhead affecting performance.

Other Arm-based systems, such as laptops running Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, are still reliant on emulation, which offers mixed results. Valve hasn't confirmed anything about a native Windows on Arm version of Steam, though I'd bet on this being next for release. I've reached out to Valve for an answer on this one.

"We really want to try to welcome all developers to Steam, and if they're most comfortable creating their software for a certain type of development, like Arm APKs, we want to make sure that's compatible. If they'd rather do x86 and PC, we'll bring that to our system," Selan says.

To sum up everything in this article: SteamOS on Arm, games developed for Arm are coming to Steam, Steam is already on Apple Silicon (Arm), FEX runs x86 games on Arm, and Steam does not yet run natively on Windows on Arm. Got it?

The Valve Index is a popular headset by most measures, currently used by roughly 15% of players on Steam to play VR. So why is it Valve has killed the Index branding entirely with its latest arrival, a new VR headset called the Steam Frame? Turns out, it's exactly because Valve doesn't want that sense of continuity between the two.

"This is a new product. That's one of the reasons we changed the name from Valve index to Steam Frame, because we're trying to do something new with this," says Jeremy Selan, an engineer at Valve, during our visit to the company.

"We're really trying to blur the lines from your catalogue, where you just think about, you have your games, this is another device that lets you enjoy them. So I don't want to put too many sort of preconceived expectations on how people will use this."

The Valve Index is an accessory for a gaming PC. Valve sees the Steam Frame as both an accessory and a gaming PC. It's right to do so. The Steam Frame contains its own Arm-based processor and runs SteamOS to be able to play games without requiring a second PC. It's a great experience, too, as you can read in my Steam Frame hands-on.

"If you think about the Valve Index, awesome device, I worked on it myself, as did Jeff," says Selan, speaking of a fellow Valve engineer in the room, Jeff Leinbaugh.

"We're really proud of it, but it always was sort of a companion to the PC. This is not," Selan says, indicating to the Steam Frame. "This is a computer."

With the Valve Index, a user had to really want to play a VR game to go through the rigmarole of setting it up. The headset, the base stations, the planning applications with your city council. Scratch that last one, but it can feel that way with the outside-in tracking used by many VR headsets, requiring dedicated tracking sensors to be fitted around your vicinity—often ending up precariously balanced on doors and shelves in reach of power outlets in my experience.

The Steam Frame, on the other hand, is all about reducing the friction of getting into and playing a game in virtual reality. As Valve's engineers explain to me, a user can place the headset on their head and then decide what they want to play. This could be a VR game, a non-VR game, a game streamed from a Windows PC close by, or a game designed for Arm systems. The user doesn't need to know how these experiences are running on the hardware, just that they work.

"I think in the Valve Index era, I would have to think about, before I picked up the device, what I wanted to play," Selan says. "Do I just want to enjoy a non-VR game? And I would pick up my Steam Deck or go to the PC. Or do I want to play a VR session? And then I'd turn on the base stations, walk over to the room that had my Index and play that.

"I find myself now with this device much more so just throwing it on before I know what I want to play."

Though Valve Index users have been waiting a long time for a replacement for their headset—holding on to hopes that the much rumoured project at Valve known as Deckard would launch 'any day now'. It's taken a while, but Deckard is here, and from my own experience with it, it does offer Index fans a clear upgrade.

For starters, the Steam Frame's most convincing new feature is its streaming capability. Using a dedicated wireless adapter, it's able to beam a game played on a gaming PC nearby in glorious detail and a high frame rate (up to 144 Hz). Valve is using some clever tricks to allow this to happen, but gaming without a wire and what should amount to a decent multi-hour battery life feels like the way VR was always meant to be played.

The Steam Frame's resolution is greatly increased (2160 x 2160 per eye) versus the Index, and its use of pancake lenses greatly increase the clarity of the overall picture. What the Steam Frame lacks, however, are the Index's BMR speakers, arguably its best feature, and the novel approach to hand tracking—though the Steam Frame does still offer five-finger capacitive sensing for a similar effect.

"This is not us saying, 'Hey, we don't like the Index'. This is saying, like, hey, there's a whole set of people that, you know, I think, want to get into VR and want to play non VR games as well as VR games," Valve engineer Gabe Rowe says.

So, the Steam Frame is resolutely not the Valve Index 2. But will VR fans be let down by Valve's latest? I don't think so. It's still a "streaming first" headset, which means it's intended primarily for PCVR, not standalone play, and in that regard it's simply much more convenient than the Index could ever hope to be.

I'm stood facing a large window in a room overlooking Bellevue, Washington, though I'm not taking in the sights. I'm wandering around an abandoned building as headcrab zombies shuffle around me. The other people in the room understand this experience all too well—this is Valve HQ and I'm testing out the company's new VR headset for the first time.

I'm wearing the Steam Frame. The new standalone headset marking a "fundamental shift" in how Valve tackles virtual reality. It includes a system-on-chip and runs SteamOS natively, allowing players to run games without the need for a secondary PC. The Steam Frame is no longer an accessory for a gaming PC. It is the gaming PC.

For this demo, however, Half-Life: Alyx is running on a PC nearby. Each frame being rendered on the PC is being streamed over the Steam Frame's dedicated wireless connection.

"To remind you, this is wireless," Jeremy Selan, an engineer at Valve who works on the Steam Frame, tells me.

I realise I have to remind myself of that as I'm playing. I've tried wireless VR before to mixed success. Sometimes it works pretty flawlessly, other times not so much. The worst experience I had with it was sitting inside a makeshift Faraday cage trying to block out network interference on the busy CES showfloor. This experience at Valve is much more convincing: smooth frame rate, crystal clear image, and no noticeable lag between my movements and Alyx's in-game.

Extending little more than 2–3 inches from my face, the Steam Frame is remarkably well-balanced. It weighs 435 grams, but only around a half of that is located in the front of the headset, the rest is to the rear of the strap, including the battery. A strap is only required just above my ears and yet I don't have to pull it tight to get a good fit.

The picture quality is excellent. I had, only a few days prior to travelling to Valve, played a few games on my Quest 3 to keep that comparative experience fresh in my mind. As I'm testing the Steam Frame, it feels familiar. Owing to a shared use of pancake optics and LCD screens of a similar resolution, and if my memory serves me well, both the Steam Frame and Quest 3 offer similar clarity. The Steam Frame is absolutely crisp, with only a slight aliasing effect to some clear lines in much the same way I recall the Quest 3 doing.

When I had first put the headset on, I was told I'd be in God mode, unable to be injured and with infinite ammo. As such, I'm confidently wading into rooms full of headcrab zombies with a bravado I would not usually have while playing the game.

"God Mode makes me feel really brave, just like a fun arcade shooter," I announce as I practically jog face-first into rooms haunted by the moans of nearly deceased hosts to headcrabs.

We later find out that God mode has not been enabled, or at some point it is turned off. A clever placebo by Valve's engineers, I think, though I'm assured this was an accident and not some sort of Aperture Labs-style personality test.

"It is nice that you're not having to step over your cable or detangle," Lawrence Yang, designer at Valve, says.

At the time, I remark this might be my favourite thing about the Steam Frame. More than a week on from that demo, I'm sure it is. I'm moving around freely, spinning around to look behind me without a worry, and altogether not considering much in the room around me. This sort of freedom might be a detriment to my personal health—there's a small table and floor-to-ceiling glass windows within easy bumping distance—but it's incredibly immersive.

I'm used to playing PCVR with a cable draped over my shoulder. This grounds me in the real-world, and makes me conscious of how I'm traversing in virtual reality and to make sure to, sort of, reverse my motions to untangle any kinks that might now be in my cable. The Steam Frame doesn't have a cable, there's nothing to untangle, and I find it much easier to slip into the world of Half-Life: Alyx without much thought for the real world.

A wireless adapter is included in the box with the Steam Frame. It connects to a gaming PC via USB, and it projects a dedicated 6 GHz connection to the Steam Frame. The headset has a dedicated antenna solely for this connection to ensure stability. With two LCD screens running at a little over the total pixel count of 4K, the feed being sent to the Steam Frame is very demanding. To circumvent this, Valve is using a technique that it calls foveated streaming.

Foveated streaming requires eye tracking, using cameras located within the headset and keeping close watch of my retina. Using this information to know where I'm looking as I play Half-Life: Alyx, the Steam Frame adjusts the quality of the world around me. The area directly in front of my fovea, the centre of my eye, is where I can see with the greatest amount of clarity, so this area is the highest quality. The surrounding area, my peripheral vision, is streamed at a lower quality.

Foveated streaming is a lot like foveated rendering, except it's adjusting the quality of the image being streamed to the Steam Frame, rather than selectively rendering parts of the scene. The gaming PC that's running Half-Life: Alyx is simply playing the game as normal. Foveated streaming is on a need-to-know basis, and it doesn't need to know.

"We send two views which represent the entire field of view and are always sent, and then we have two basically zoomed in areas that show the area where you're looking at very high resolution and we send a bunch more bits to that area than we do to the low resolution imagery," Selan says, referencing what sounds a lot like a rendering technique that is commonly referred to as quad views, except for streaming.

The eye tracking happens very quickly. Selan enables a mode that illuminates the area streamed in high quality, and darkens the peripheral area. If you imagine an in-game flashlight that's controlled by your gaze, you wouldn't be far off.

No one can see my eyes under the headset, so I try to very quickly move them left to right, left to right, left to right in order to trick the eye tracking into messing up. I fail, and then I remember everyone else can view my movements via an external monitor, so I make light of my attempts to immediately break the system.

"The trick is that the eye tracking is fast enough that it essentially beats where you're going," Selan says.

"So by the time you look to the right, we've already sent the bits at the very high resolution to where you're looking to the right. When you look to the left, we beat your eyes looking there."

Moreover, the idea behind foveated streaming is incredibly smart. The problem with foveated rendering is that it needs to happen as the game is being rendered, which requires developers to go out of their way to support it. Or at the very least enable it in engines that support it. That almost never happens with PCVR, for reasons often argued about online, and it has no benefit in games that don't support it.

Foveated streaming, on the other hand, is developer-agnostic. It works all the time, on any game, because it's applied to the stream, not the game itself. Though it's true that foveated streaming doesn't solve the same issue that foveated rendering does—it doesn't make a VR game any easier to run—that's less of a concern for PCVR as it is for console VR with limited performance, like Sony's PS VR2. Also, speaking to Valve, foveated rendering and foveated streaming can be complementary technologies on Steam Frame—you can use them at the same time in games that support the former.

The two technologies in combination might be a useful addition when playing games on the Steam Frame's Snapdragon processor, which is a powerful mobile chip, but notably weaker than a gaming PC with a high-end graphics card.

Standalone mode is next up in my demo session. I sit on the sofa to play a game of Hades 2, which is not a VR title, but that's sort of the point. I select the game from the menu, which is practically a match for the Steam Deck or Big Picture UI but floating in space, and the game pops up in front of me. It's as if I'm sat in a private cinema, which isn't a new experience for anyone familiar with VR, but the game is running locally on the Steam Frame here.

I'm playing Hades 2 with the new Steam Frame Controllers. Each controller is half of a traditional gamepad, which combined offer all the buttons required to play a non-VR game with gamepad support. The idea being that you can put the Steam Frame on and then decide whether you want to play a VR game or non-VR game. Whichever you go for, you don't need to grab another controller, reducing some of the friction for playing in VR.

The game screen can be resized or moved, so I shift it above my head and lay down with my shoes off the sofa. The Valve employees tell me it's fine, so up they go, and I settle in for a few hours.

I wish. I lay there for a few minutes, but I could've remained there longer. My arms gently resting by my sides, still able to play with the full gamut of controls required of the game, and with the battery pack cushion cradling my head. The bulky battery attached to the rear of the headset may end up being the thorn in its side for longer sessions lying down, but I didn't use it for long enough to say.

Just before I head out for some lunch, I'm offered a chance to play Ghost Town, from Fireproof Games. I'm a huge fan of The Room series, a collection of mobile games I used to play years ago, so I'm actually pretty excited to try it out. Valve is too, as this game highlights something pretty special about the Steam Frame.

Ghost Town is a game available on a variety of VR platforms, including Meta's Horizon OS. The Steam version I'm playing, however, has been developed for Windows and x86 processors. Yet when I boot it up on the Steam Frame, it's running on Linux and an Arm processor. That's made possible due to two compatibility layers: Proton and FEX.

Proton ensures that the game will run on Linux, and FEX that it will run on Arm. To my surprise, the game runs smoothly. It's tough to say how well the Steam Frame, Proton, and FEX will work together for the expansive library of x86/Windows titles on Steam—there is a performance hit from using the tool, albeit one that can be reduced depending on many factors, including the game engine (Vulkan actually works great on Arm chips).

That it works at all impresses me. Though right away I'm thinking about battery life, performance, and compatibility—all questions that still hang over the Steam Frame's standalone mode. Personally, I'm much more convinced by what's possible through streaming. And I say this as someone who plays most of their VR games on a standalone headset these days. That's sort of the point.

Convenience is king. Standalone headsets are easy. Charge one up and put it on your head and you're usually good to go. The Steam Frame feels equally frictionless. Moreover, the PCVR experience feels frictionless. There's minimal hassle to set it up, to play VR or non-VR games, and blending the best bits of standalone and PCVR into one very convenient VR headset.

I hope it's as seamless as it appears throughout my demo. Valve engineers keep telling me it is, for what it's worth. Right now, however, it's time to eat some lunch. And, good news, I don't feel a slight bit nauseous from my time with the Steam Frame, either.

The best PC gaming gear 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list The best PC gaming gear 2025

---

BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

Check Price

BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

Check Price

BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

Check Price

BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

Check Price

BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

Check Price

BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

Check Price

BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

Check Price

BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

Check Price

BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: The best PC gaming gear 2025

POWERED BY

Valve has announced a brand new VR headset. It's called the Steam Frame, and it's set to launch next year. While pricing is not yet confirmed, I've been to Valve HQ to try it out and get all the details. This isn't the Valve Index 2, it's something quite different, but it should still appeal to hardcore VR users and new users alike.

The Steam Frame is a standalone VR headset. It doesn't require a PC in order to play games or watch videos in VR. It doesn't need base stations or a cable, either. It's powered by SteamOS, Valve's own Linux distro used on the Steam Deck, and an Arm chip. So, what makes this a PCVR headset again?

"We see Steam Frame as a streaming first headset," Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, tells me.

Streaming in this context does not refer to cloud streaming or showcasing your skills on Twitch. Rather streaming means playing a game on a gaming PC and streaming it over to the Steam Frame via a wireless connection. So, you're streaming the game from one PC to another PC on your head, without using any cables.

The Steam Frame includes a wireless adapter that plugs in via USB to a host PC, which can be any PC capable of running Steam and playing VR games. This wireless adapter beams the game over a dedicated 6 GHz connection to the Steam Frame. Essentially, Valve intends for players to use the Steam Frame in the traditional sense of tethering to a gaming PC—just without the physical tether.

• I've tried Valve's new VR headset: here's my Steam Frame hands-on.

The Arm processor in the headset unlocks new capabilities, however. The Steam Frame is perfectly capable of running games all on its own. It uses clever software to play games developed for Windows and x86 on its Linux and Arm stack. It also natively supports games programmed for Arm, which many VR titles are designed for these days.

So, it supports a bit of everything: standalone, PCVR, Linux, Windows, Arm, x86… though a user shouldn't have to be conscious of many, if any, of these technical divisions. You put the Steam Frame on, choose a game from your Steam library, VR or no, and play. The software takes care of the translation from one operating system or architecture to another—I'll explain those later.

With new hardware, software, and much expanded capabilities, Valve is keen to point out that this is not the Valve Index 2. Hence the name change.

"So Steam Frame, I would say, represents a fundamental shift in the way that we look at VR," says Yang.

"Rather than being a PC VR accessory to play your PCVR games, we see it just as a new way to play your entire Steam library, whether it's VR or non-VR titles."

I realise some people have been waiting for years for this announcement, pawing over every scrap of information in some patent filing or trademark. Those that did may recognise parts of the confirmed Steam Frame from the leaks before its announcement. Yet there's a lot of new stuff to dig into and plenty of new and unexpected features. So let's get into the juicier details.

Steam Frame: specs

Valve hasn't confirmed pricing for the Steam Frame, nor the exact release date. What we do know is the headset will launch sometime in 2026, alongside the Steam Machine and Steam Controller.

The two storage options offer some flexibility on price. The 256 GB model appears very much geared towards streaming and PCVR use and should be notably cheaper than the 1 TB model, which looks set for standalone use.

Steam Frame: optics

The Steam Frame uses a brand new optics system and higher resolution LCD screens than the Valve Index. Following in the footsteps of other modern VR headsets, Valve is using pancake lenses to dramatically reduce the size of the optics and increase edge-to-edge sharpness. Though I'm told it really came about the other way round.

"So you get a lot more what we call aberration correction. You can get really nice, sharp imagery," Joshua Hudman, a hardware engineer at Valve, says.

"And then it turns out that, because it's in what we call double pass, it means you can squish the optical system even more. So it really is a nice solution for VR."

The headset offers a clear, undistorted image from the centre to the furthest edges. These improvements to the eye box (the area of view that's comfortable and clear for a user) make a big difference to visual fidelity and clarity. If memory serves me well (I loaded up my Quest 3 again just before heading out to Valve HQ), it looks similar to Meta's top consumer headset in this regard.

Part of that is the screens Valve is using with the Steam Frame: two LCD panels, 2160 x 2160 per eye. That's pretty similar to the Quest 3 and a huge improvement over the Valve Index at a mere 1440 x 1600 per eye. As far as I'm aware, the Steam Frame uses the same RGB subpixel layout, too, in lieu of an OLED or Micro-OLED panel.

The interpupillary distance (IPD), to account for the distance between a user's pupils, can be adjusted via a scrolling wheel on the top of the headset. I didn't catch the exact minimum and maximum IPD distance available during my time with the headset but it offers a decent range.

Steam Frame: design

The Steam Frame is a diminutive device, much slimmer than the Valve Index. On the right-hand side of the headset there's a power button, which supports fast suspend and resume for quickly jumping back into your games, and an auxiliary button that controls the cameras or selecting options in the menu without the use of controllers. On the left-hand side sits the volume controls.

Glasses wearers can breathe a sigh of relief as there's a spacer to extend the space behind the lenses to accommodate for glasses included in the box. Valve also tells me it's investigating prescription inserts for those who prefer to have their headset ready to go without wearing anything else.

Valve intends for the Steam Frame to be modular. In this vein, it's included a few neat ways to accommodate mods, accessories, and updates.

The core module, as Valve calls it, houses the processor, optics, cameras, and necessary cooling. This can be removed from the strap—it simply pops out. It's surprisingly lightweight in hand, weighing only 190 grams. It's also very slim. Even with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) system-on-chip sitting between the pancake lenses and face plate, and cooling, and cameras, it extends, at a guess, 2–3 inches from the face.

You'll notice a transparent core module in some of my pictures here. That's just a prototype intended to show off the internals on the Steam Frame. It is not going to be available to purchase. I'm sorta into it, though.

The strap contains the battery, speaker system, microSD card slot, and a USB 2.0 Type-C connector, which lets you charge the device via an outlet or power bank as you play.

By placing the battery on the rear of the device, it counteracts the weight of the core module and keeps the headset nicely balanced on your head. I didn't feel much pressure on the front of my face wearing it, though I didn't wear the Steam Frame for long enough to truly test the ergonomics of it.

"We put an enormous amount of effort into making that as lightweight as possible. And then furthermore, the rear is balanced as well. So because we've split the weight between the front and the rear, and because this sits so close to your face, it's one of the most comfortable VR headsets we've ever used, and we're very proud of that," Jeremy Selan, an engineer at Valve, says.

The Steam Frame stayed rather cool on my face during my time with it, which I'm told is part of the reason for opting for the Snapdragon chip used here. It demands very little cooling, reducing weight and allowing for easier heat dissipation, and it supports plenty of inputs (required for the six cameras included on the headset).

The strap connects to the core module via a proprietary connector to keep it powered on, playing audio, and loaded with games via any onboard microSD storage.

Though the idea of having two parts being you can replace the strap easily, perhaps for one with a larger battery or simply because it's broken, without throwing away the entire unit. If you only need to replace the padding, those come away from the strap separately.

The strap that ships with the headset only includes two adjustable lengths to circumvent your head on either side. There's no top support as standard. This is bundled as an optional extra alongside extra straps for the controllers. The repackaging of seemingly affordable extras as an optional package gives me hope that Valve is going for affordability here by cutting out unnecessary costs and reducing the price. Though I could be wrong.

Back to the modularity a moment, there's also an unused connector on the front of the core module, above the cutout for your nose. This is a PCIe 4.0 interface, which can also be used for 2.5 Gbps camera feeds, opening it up for use by a variety of things. While Valve is not announcing any accessories to go with this right now or any alternate straps, it is happy to talk about the potential this modular approach offers in general.

"The interesting thing about the modular architecture is we know there's a lot of strong opinions and diversity about where people want the battery, for example, what type of audio they want, and there's just a lot of perspectives on that," Selan says.

"And we agree, which is why we're not announcing anything today, but you could imagine that the same headset with this type of core module, you could have alternative versions of the head strap that could offer different features to different groups of people."

Steam Frame: processor

The Steam Frame contains a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) processor. This is an eight-core chip consisting of:

• 1 Prime core (up to 3.4 GHz)
• 5 Performance cores (up to 3.2 GHz)
• 2 Efficiency cores (up to 2.3 GHz)

To put this chip's performance into perspective: it's a 4 nm processor that was first launched in 2023, but was the go-to for flagship phones through 2024, such as the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro. It's not quite at the cutting edge for mobile chips. That'd be the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Neither is it the chip intended solely for handheld gaming, the Snapdragon G3 Gen 3. Though it is pretty up-to-date.

It works to Valve's benefit in a few ways, anyways. It supports a large number of inputs, which is beneficial for a VR headset requiring lots of cameras, and includes good connectivity options, including Wi-Fi 7. It also has low demands for cooling, which is beneficial for a chip that's sitting quite so close to your forehead at all times.

Steam Frame: battery

The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that's how much it'll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.

If you're only streaming on the device—that is, running a game on your PC and beaming it to the Steam Frame using the supplied wireless adapter—the Snapdragon processor requires very little power for this purpose. Potentially as little as five or six watts, I'm told, which even if you're conservative about battery life, massively increases the available playtime to multiple hours.

It's possible to improve battery life with an external power bank connected via the USB 2.0 port on the rear of the strap.

"A lot of us have extra power bricks we just slide in our pocket, and it gives us lots of hours to play at extremely high power values, and it just plugs in and goes right into your pocket," Clem Gallois says.

And the good news is that Valve has kept repairability in mind with the battery. I'm told that somebody certified to work with batteries could open the unit up and replace the cells if they knew what they were doing. Read: that's not Valve telling you to open the battery up and try it yourself. Don't do that.

Steam Frame: tracking

The Steam Frame's inside-out tracking, so named for using sensors on the headset to track a user's environment, is taken care of by four cameras on the exterior that are designed for computer vision tracking.

Outside-in tracking is not supported by the Steam Frame at this time. That means there is no support for the lighthouse tracking system used by the Valve Index. It's a win for the average gamer, though, as inside-out tracking is exponentially easier to set-up in a short period of time and a tight space.

Tracking in the dark won't be an issue for the Steam Frame. Selan tells me the four cameras on the device are good in low light conditions, but moreover, there are IR illuminators behind the face plate that allow for tracking in the dark.

"You can even use the passthrough in complete darkness and you sort of get a night vision view," Selan says.

But through using the Steam Frame's modular construction—that small port exposed on the front of the face plate—it could be possible to plug in an accessory that allows, for example, full-colour passthrough or another form of tracking support in future.

"We have an expansion port that allows for high speed camera information as well as for data, right? So you can imagine lots of interesting things you can do by plugging accessories into it," Selan says, adding that Valve is not announcing any accessories at this time.

Steam Frame: speakers

One of the best features of the Valve Index are its speakers, the so-called BMR (Balance Mode Radiator) were a novel approach to audio among VR headsets. These off-ear speaker units have not made a return for the Steam Frame, I'm afraid, though the integrated speakers on either side of the Frame's strap are a little unusual still.

There are two drivers per speaker unit on the Steam Frame, embedded into the strap. The reason for the dual drivers is due to the headset's tracking systems, and avoiding interference.

"I would say these are excellent speakers. There's actually dual drivers per side because of vibration cancelation," Selan says.

"We have four cameras on the exterior to do the computer vision tracking, but there's also an IMU that detects the motion, and when you do essentially loud, high fidelity audio that includes bass, for example, it can cause certain vibrations. And so this is a new speaker system, where there's two drivers per side that move in opposite directions, and that allows us to have audio we're very proud of that's sort of seamlessly integrated, but at the same time, doesn't compromise the tracking in any way."

I have no complaints with the speaker system from my time with the Steam Frame. Half-Life: Alyx comes through clear with an airy and open soundscape. I guess that's the benefit of speakers a distance away from your ears rather than in-ear buds.

Steam Frame: controllers

The Steam Frame comes with two brand new and aptly-named Steam Frame Controllers. Gone are the curvy controllers from the Valve Index, replaced by a design much more in line with other popular VR controllers, such as the Quest Touch.

The idea behind the controllers is to offer a way to interact with both VR games and non-VR games.

"This looks like a traditional game pad design split in two," Valve engineer Jeff Leinbaugh says.

The controllers have all the buttons required to play as if you're using a standard controller, including rear triggers and shoulder buttons. These maintain the same six degrees of freedom expected of any good VR controller, with a comfortable if quite minimal design.

"They do a lot of things but we think that all comes together quite nicely to make this something that will play all your games."

The controllers are tracked via the four cameras in the headset, and have 18 infrared LEDs located across the top and handle. They also contain an IMU, or inertial measurement unit, which Leinbaugh says is "critical for good tracking."

Only a single AA battery is required per controller, offering up 40 hours of battery life. Haptic feedback is included along with capacitive finger sensing on the buttons, grips, triggers, handle, and thumbsticks. This means it can track individual fingers to some degree, though it's notably less pronounced than the Index implementation.

The analogue sticks are using tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sticks, which are similar to Hall effect in their use of magnetic force to measure stick movement with higher levels of accuracy and reliability than potentiometer sticks used almost exclusively until quite recently. TMR reduces the risk of stick drift to near zero and allows for a lower deadzone out of the box. Altogether, a good move, as TMR or Hall effect sticks were a notable omission from the Steam Deck (though easily modded in).

There's an optional ergonomic accessories kit for the Steam Frame that adds an extra strap for your head and a pair of straps, one for each controller. These added controller straps are reminiscent of those found on the Index and seem like a reasonable investment, if the price is right.

Steam Frame: storage

Valve is offering two options for storage: 256 GB and 1 TB.

The 256 GB model seems best for a user that primarily aims to stream games from their PC to the Steam Frame or wants to save some cash (how much to be determined). The 1 TB model appears best for users that wish to use the Steam Frame as a PC, or run games locally on the Arm chip inside.

There is also a microSD card slot for further expansion, which should be a fairly affordable way to bulk up the internal storage. Valve has confirmed that games should run just fine from a reasonably speedy microSD card, too. The Steam Frame will support microSD cards up to 2 TB using the SDXC format, same as the Steam Deck.

It's also possible to switch microSD cards between the Steam Deck, Steam Frame, and Steam Machine, carrying your pre-installed games across devices.

"There's a SD card slot. So you can take your catalog from your Steam Deck or from your Steam Machine, and they're fully interoperable, so you can plug it in here and just bring it along with you," Selan says.

Steam Frame: streaming with a PC

Using the Steam Frame alongside a gaming PC is the most likely use case for the new VR headset. Valve designed the headset with this intention, and for PCVR users, it's the same sort of experience as you're likely used to, only without any wires.

"We think of this as a streaming first device. So by that we mean we would expect most customers to have a PC or laptop, and then to stream that content from that to the Steam Frame," Selan says.

The content available for streaming is any game or software available on Steam, including VR games and non-VR games. Valve makes a point of pushing the Steam Frame as a new way to enjoy games whether intended for VR or not, via a cinema-like viewing experience for 2D titles.

"You just browse your games, and sometimes you feel like a VR game. Sometimes you don't." Selan says.

Each Steam Frame includes a wireless adapter in the box. This is key to the wireless streaming experience. A USB 3.0 device that attaches to your gaming PC or laptop, it provides a dedicated 6 GHz connection direct to the Steam Frame that transfers the game visuals, audio, and data required to play.

This happens via a separate antenna on the Steam Frame to the one providing the headset's Wi-Fi 7 capability. This way, there's no need to balance bandwidth between game downloads, multiplayer traffic or streaming—the dedicated streaming antenna ensures the stream remains uninterrupted by whatever else the headset is doing. It's also a good way to bypass strict requirements on routers and network cards for users to get the full experience.

"What this means is that we have a very high speed, dedicated link that doesn't have to bounce around directly between your PC and the headset. And that's one of the tricks we have that allows the streaming experience to be really good," Selan says.

The connection has to offer low latency, or risk causing nausea, while still delivering the bandwidth required to run the Steam Frame's display. Valve has another trick to help with that, however.

Foveated streaming helps lower the bandwidth requirements by streaming only parts of the image in high resolution. Requiring the two eye tracking cameras within the device, foveated streaming dynamically adjusts the patch of high-quality streamed content based on where you're looking. Think of it like two magnifying glasses over the top of a low-resolution image. Your eyes move the magnifying glasses.

Essentially, the entire environment is rendered in you're actively looking at (directly in front of your fovea) will be streamed at maximum quality. Everything in your peripheral vision, or thereabouts, will be streamed at a lower quality. From what I can tell, this matches with a technique used on other VR headsets with eye tracking called quad views rendering, and Valve's approach sounds like practically the same thing, except for streaming.

The two eye tracking cameras have to adjust quickly to keep up with every glance and look, but I tried Half-Life: Alyx with a developer setting enabled that shows the eye tracking in action, and no matter how quickly I moved my eyeballs around, the tracking kept up.

"We find that even the most observant viewers, it's very, very hard to see what's happening and to tell that it is, in fact, not uncompressed," Selan says.

"So you could imagine that if that foveated area, say, represents 10% of the full field of view, it would actually be a 10x multiplication factor in bandwidth, in latency, in robustness... this is happening continuously behind the scenes. And most critically, the software developer, the partners who ship on Steam, don't have to do any work to take advantage of that."

That's the important bit: a game needn't be programmed to take advantage of foveated streaming, meaning there's no requirement for per-game support. Foveated rendering, however, does require per-game support, and there's only a little of that around today. Though, speaking to Valve, it sounds like both foveated rendering and foveated streaming can be employed at the same time in games that support the former.

With streaming requiring much lower power demands than rendering locally on the Steam Frame's Arm chip (Valve explains it's around 5–6 W to 20 W), battery life is extended significantly. That's hours playing games in virtual reality without a cable to drag you down, which honestly felt pretty great during my time with it. Night and day to the heavy, cumbersome cables-cum-trip hazards of older generation VR headsets.

Steam Frame: standalone

The Steam Frame is a standalone VR headset, which means it's a computer all of its own. Specifically, a computer powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) SoC, powered by an Arm architecture and Valve's own Linux-based operating system, SteamOS. This inevitably requires the release of SteamOS for Arm alongside the Steam Frame.

"This has 16 gigabytes of RAM, so if that itself can be an indicator for the types of games you'd expect to be able to run on this device," Selan says.

On the one hand, game support should be dramatically increased by Valve's adoption of an Arm processor. It opens the door to booting apk format files, which are used on Android devices powered by Arm chips.

This is especially important when you consider that VR game and app development has shifted focus largely to Android-based systems, including Meta's Horizon OS and Google's newly-released Android XR, and away from Windows-based PCs. It should be a fairly simply task for developers that have prioritised Meta's popular VR headsets to bring their games and applications to the Steam Frame, either via an apk sideloaded on the device or an actual listing on Steam.

"So for partners and developers who have developed applications for other mobile VR, they'll just work on this headset," Selan says. "We're trying to minimize the amount of friction. If you've ever heard of a Tilt Brush that was one of the classic, original VR apps, they have an application open brush. When they open sourced it, you can download today, the open, the tilt, brush apk from their website, side load it, which we're happy to let you do, and just double click it, and it runs."

When asked whether Steam would start to include games and applications for Arm devices in its library, Lawrence Yang's response was, "Absolutely, that'll be a new thing that Steam will do."

On the other hand, attempting to play VR games already available on Steam, largely programmed for x86 processors and Windows, on the Steam Frame's Arm processor and Linux-based operating system comes with its own challenges.

Valve has the Windows to Linux translation down pretty well these days with Proton. This being the secret sauce for the Steam Deck's success. However, Valve has had to introduce something new to convert the x86 code to Arm. For this task, it's using FEX.

FEX is an open source emulator for Arm systems. A translation layer, taking the scrambled code of x86 and turning it into legible code for Arm systems.

"One of the superpowers of SteamOS is that it decouples the games you're playing from the hardware you're running it on. And so we've introduced a new technology with this device called FEX, and it's now part of the Proton umbrella. And what FEX allows you to do is continue to run your x86 PC catalog on Arm," Selan says.

"So without that technology, Arm would have been much less of an interesting choice, because we very much want you to bring your catalog with you to this device. But now that we have FEX, you don't really have to think about that."

One of the special features of FEX is it enables Valve to forward API calls to the Steam Frame's Arm processor for supported APIs, such as Vulkan. This means games that use the Vulkan API don't require as much emulation as those that don't, which helps improve performance and compatibility.

Though compatibility is a consideration for FEX. Valve didn't want to put a number on the titles that will run via FEX, though it says it already exceeded its original targets for game support.

"We're actually already at the point now where we're trying games and just seeing if they run, and a lot of times they run, and it's very pleasantly surprising how well it's going already," Yang says.

There's also going to be a performance hit from using FEX, though how much so depends on the game and how much of it requires emulation. In some cases, such as when a game is running Vulkan, there might be a 10–20% performance hit, limited to CPU emulation. The GPU performance is more or less native. Though that's only Vulkan, which natively supports Arm. Other APIs won't be so lucky.

Nevertheless, Selan tells me the performance hit from using FEX is "way less than you'd expect."

I'm able to play a VR game running through both Proton and FEX at Valve HQ. A haunting puzzler from Fireproof Games called Ghost Town. It's a smooth experience, for what it's worth considering the sample size of one, with zero frame rate issues or any noticeable latency dips despite the multi-layered translation going on under the hood.

"This is a PC game made for x86 running on SteamOS on an Arm chip, and the average customer wouldn't have to worry about all that. We're just excited because this is a huge amount of the tech tree that gets unlocked from Proton and SteamOS now supporting these capabilities," Yang says.

The downside of the Steam Frame's standalone mode is increased power draw. You're using the full capabilities of the Snapdragon chip, likely requiring maximum power draw, which I'm told is around 20 W.

Steam Frame: software

Powered by SteamOS, Valve's own Linux-based operating system, the Steam Frame will look and feel a lot like the Steam Deck, which shares the same OS.

Moreover, SteamVR has been updated throughout 2025 to bring it more in line with the Steam Deck UI, which is also shared by Steam's Big Picture Mode. So really anywhere you look on the Steam Frame, whether local or streamed, will look mostly the same.

That said, the version used on the Steam Frame will differ from the one used on the Steam Deck due to the use of an Arm-based processor on the VR headset, which requires a specially tailored version of SteamOS for Arm. This launches alongside the new VR headset.

Steam Frame: games

"It's capable of playing the entire Steam catalog," Pierre-Loup Griffais says of the Steam Frame.

So long as you have a PC capable of playing it, it can be streamed to the Steam Frame over the included wireless adapter, which includes both VR and non-VR games and applications.

However, there's also the ability to play locally, on the Steam Frame's Arm processor. This may require the use of Proton, which translates code from Windows to Linux; and FEX, which translates code from x86 to Arm. These tools will have some compatibility and performance considerations, and Valve has said it will be rolling out a Frame Verified programme—similar to the Deck Verified programme already in use—within Steam at a later date to help clear things up.

Though there are also native Arm games and applications, including side-loaded apks, which can be played natively on the Steam Frame's processor. Valve will also be opening up the Steam storefront to Arm software, too.

Steam Frame: availability

The Steam Frame will be available in all the same regions where the Steam Deck is currently available, including those where Komodo is the official distributor. That means it's set to launch in the following countries:

• USA
• Canada
• UK
• Germany
• France
• Australia*
• Japan**
• South Korea**
• Taiwan**
• Hong Kong**

*Valve began shipping direct to Australia later than other countries
**Distributed by Komodo

The best PC gaming gear 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list The best PC gaming gear 2025

---

BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

Check Price

BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

Check Price

BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

Check Price

BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

Check Price

BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

Check Price

BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

Check Price

BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

Check Price

BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

Check Price

BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: The best PC gaming gear 2025

POWERED BY

Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We've tried each of them and here's what you need to know about each one.

"From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we're a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail," Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. "How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly."

For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:

• Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headset
• Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
• Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse

Steam Frame: Valve's new VR headset

Key specs

• Optics: Pancake
• Resolution: 2160 x 2160
• Tracking: Inside-out
• FOV: Up to 110 degrees
• SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650)
• RAM: 16 GB
• Storage: 256 GB / 1 TB
• Controllers: 2x Steam Frame Controller
• OS: SteamOS
• Weight: 435 grams
• Release window: 2026
• Price: TBC

The Steam Frame is a new VR headset. It's wireless and no longer requires a gaming PC in order to play a game. That's thanks to its onboard Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and operating system, Valve's very own SteamOS. Though you can still connect it to a gaming PC using a dedicated 6 GHz dongle for high-fidelity PCVR—that's the bit I'm most excited about after trying the Steam Frame myself.

With an expanded resolution and new pancake lenses, the Steam Frame offers increased clarity and a more compact design compared to the Valve Index. It's also pretty slim and lightweight by more modern VR standards, extending only a few inches from the face and weighing just 435 grams.

• I've tried Valve's new VR headset: here's my Steam Frame hands-on.

The Steam Frame is significantly lighter than its predecessor. Similarly, it's lighter than the Quest 3 or Quest 3S, which I've weighed previously myself at 465 and 464 grams even without the straps.

Valve has been keen to point out that this is not called the Valve Index 2 for good reason. It's no longer just a PC accessory and gone is the clunky set-up process of the past. Valve has opted solely for inside-out tracking here. Four cameras on the outside of the Steam Frame track your surroundings and it can track you in the dark. It also offers eye tracking for both foveated rendering, use in social games, and a new feature called foveated streaming that Valve uses to lower bandwidth requirements over the Steam Frame's wireless connection.

The Steam Frame has a modular construction: the strap containing the battery, speaker system, and microSD card slot disconnects from the core module containing the processor, optics, and everything else.

There's also an expansion slot on the front of the headset for future mods or upgrades. This could be used for full-colour passthrough, which is missing from the Steam Frame and prematurely ends any hope of XR support with it, though nothing is being announced by Valve just yet.

Designed for both VR and non-VR games, the Steam Frame has new controllers that are essentially a standard gamepad split down the middle. They look similar to the Quest 3's controllers, only with more buttons. They're capacitive, allowing for some degree of finger sensing, and powered by a single AA battery in each controller.

Much like everything else being announced by Valve today, the Steam Frame has no exact release date or price tag. All we know is it will launch sometime next year.

Steam Machine: Valve's new living room box

Key specs

• CPU: AMD Zen 4 (6-core)
• RAM: 16 GB
• GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 (28 CU)
• VRAM: 8 GB
• Storage: 512 GB, 2 TB
• OS: SteamOS
• Release window: 2026
• Price: TBC

The Steam Machine is a natural follow-up to the Steam Deck. The low-power handheld proved that SteamOS works for PC gaming, and the Steam Machine is more of the same, only more powerful and less portable.

It has been designed to blend in and fit into a standard-sized shelving unit. It's a black cube, smaller than it looks in the pictures, and crams in a six-core AMD CPU and dedicated Radeon GPU. It uses a space-saving combination of single 120 mm fan and one sizeable heatsink. There's a slim selection of ports on the front and back, including USB Type-C, HDMI 2.0, and DisplayPort, and a microSD card slot to quickly move games between a Steam Machine, Deck, and Frame.

The six-core CPU and 28 CU GPU offer around six times more performance than a Steam Deck, according to Valve. The GPU is semi-custom, meaning it has no exact match in AMD's existing line-up, but it's roughly comparable to an RX 7400 in terms of shader cores, or an RX 7600M for both shader cores and clock speeds.

Through SteamOS, Valve is offering fast suspend and resume features to quickly load into where you left off from the comfort of your sofa. It's also designed to work with the new and improved Steam Controller—a dedicated antenna on the Steam Machine can connect up to four Steam Controllers.

Once again, we've no price or release date. Only a rough launch window sometime in the new year.

Steam Controller: Valve's controller to replace your mouse

Key specs

• Thumbsticks: 2x TMR sticks
• Connectivity: 2.4 GHz (puck included), Bluetooth, wired
• Battery: 35+ hours
• Extra features: 2x trackpads, gyro controls
• Release window: 2026
• Price: TBC

The Steam Controller is designed to replace the need for a mouse when you're sat on a sofa or lounging in your gaming chair. This is Valve's second attempt at a Steam Controller, the first did not take off, but the company has learned its lessons.

There are two thumbsticks on the Steam Controller—yes, two. That's one more than last time, and importantly means that the Steam Controller is as much a 'standard' controller as any other. These thumbsticks use stick-drift resistant Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) technology, too, which is an easy way into my good books.

Two trackpads sit beneath each of the thumbsticks. They're slightly angled for a more ergonomic design, but otherwise they're very similar to those included on the Steam Deck. That's really where Valve got its inspiration here, and I'm fine with that—the Steam Deck's control scheme is very good for gaming and navigating the desktop, and the same should be true of the Steam Controller.

What's more, the Steam Controller includes gyro controls. Using sensors that can tell when you're holding the controller, gyro controls let you move the controller around to move your mouse cursor. I've tried it out, and it's surprisingly easy to get to grips with.

The Steam Controller supports Bluetooth and a dedicated 2.4 GHz connection. The latter is provided via a 'puck' included in the box, able to connect up to four controllers simultaneously, and providing a low-latency connection. This puck also doubles as a charger for the controller, though you can plug in over the USB Type-C connection on the back if you prefer a tether.

Finally, and no surprises here, the Steam Controller has a rough release window of sometime in 2026 and no confirmed price as of yet.

Availability

All three of Valve's new products will be available in the same regions as the Steam Deck at launch, and that includes any countries currently covered by Valve's official distributor Komodo.

That means, once available in the new year, we should see availability in the following countries:

• USA
• Canada
• UK
• Germany
• France
• Australia*
• Japan**
• South Korea**
• Taiwan**
• Hong Kong**

*Valve began shipping direct to Australia later than other countries
**Distributed by Komodo

The best PC gaming gear 2025

All our current recommendations

Pick a category Best overallCore ComponentsChairs & DesksSystems & LaptopsScreensPeripheralsCases, Cooling & Storage

Choose a list The best PC gaming gear 2025

---

BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

Check Price

BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

Check Price

BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

Check Price

BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

Check Price

BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

Check Price

BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

Check Price

BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

Check Price

BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

Check Price

BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

Check Price

---

Read the full guide: The best PC gaming gear 2025

POWERED BY

For many, virtual reality hardware is still an expensive niche to get into. Even our top budget pick in our best VR headset guide, the Meta Quest 3S, can still set you back nearly $300. Well, a YouTuber has rocked up with a homemade headset project using 3D printed parts and bobbins bought off AliExpress that costs half the price of the Meta Quest 3S.

Creator CNCDan's homemade VR headset runs at a 2880 x 1440p resolution, and even allows the wearer to manually adjust the position of its two 2.9-inch LCD screens (via Techspot). These tiny displays, alongside the headset's Fresnel lenses, IMU board, and Arduino Pro microcontroller, were all bought from AliExpress. It is, in essence, an inexpensive techie upgrade on the 'phone in a box' style headset.

In all, the project cost a little over $150, not counting all of the very spenny personal 3D printing equipment the rest of the build requires. CNCDan has made all of this project's 3D printing model files open source via his GitHub, alongside a full bill of materials if you fancy trying to build this affordable VR headset yourself.

The creator is big into sim racing, spending much of his free time building parts for his own rig that are far more affordable than even our budget pick for the best PC racing wheels. Wanting a more immersive experience on a budget is in part what inspired this homebrew VR headset project.

Seeing AliExpress full of dinky, dual-display setups also piqued CNCDan's curiosity. He says in the build video, "I kept seeing them and wondering if anyone was actually using them for their intended purpose."

However, this secondary source of inspiration is also one of the project's major drawbacks; while the LCD screens are capable of a 90 Hz refresh rate, they get throttled to 60 Hz when running at full resolution via SteamVR. CNCDan comments that this can feel pretty choppy in-game.

The creator also shares on his GitHub that he's reached out to the company selling these screens to "see if this is just an issue with my unit or if the other 120 Hz version they sell can actually provide the refresh rate that they claim."

Though this homemade headset lacks swisher features like sophisticated eye tracking, it's no less impressive. The fact that it's now an open source project for techie DIYers to tinker with also leaves me feeling just a little bit hopeful for VR's slightly more affordable future.

According to a Chinese analyst group called the XR Research Institute, Upload VR reports, Valve Deckard is set to ship at the end of this year during the holiday season. Mass production has apparently begun, and 400,000–600,000 units are expected per year.

Deckard, for those unaware, is Valve's long-, long-, long-anticipated VR headset that's expected to be a standalone device not requiring PC power, unlike the Valve Index. We first caught wind of it back in June 2022, thanks to a December 2021 patent application.

Since then, we've had rumour after rumour, including that 'Roy' controllers for Deckard were being tooled last year, that Valve was importing VR manufacturing equipment into the US earlier this year, and that some influencers recently travelled to Seattle and were a little cryptic about it.

It's one of those things that has been on the cards for such a long time that it has somehow seemed to be imminently approaching, and yet also a little like a fable we'll never see the real sight of.

Thankfully, if this latest report out of China is to be believed, we might be seeing sight of, and potentially even getting hands on, Valve Deckard headsets before the year is out. Some believe it might be called the Steam Frame rather than Deckard, when all is said and done, thanks to Valve applying for a 'Steam Frame' trademark and SteamVR code recently renaming certain things to "Frames."

The naming doesn't matter, really. What matters is that we might be getting a new VR headset from Valve. And just in case I need to spell out why that's so important, here are two points worth noting.

First, the Index was absolutely fantastic when it launched, but it's a little old now. Second, Valve has had plenty of practice perfecting budget hardware with the Steam Deck. Deckard could end up being a budget VR headset to compete with the Meta Quest 3S, for instance.

However, Upload VR points out that the 400,000–600,000 unit per-year figure aligns more closely to an Apple Vision Pro device than a cheaper one. That might put Deckard in line with how the Index was priced at launch, i.e. bloody expensive. But it was also bloody well-built and a step above the competition at the time, so it's swings and roundabouts, really. Whatever the case, we might not have long to wait to find out.

Are you sick of hearing about the metaverse? Well, it seems like we aren't done yet, as Meta has been drip-feeding details about its upcoming Horizon Engine, a Meta-specific game engine built to create experiences in Meta Horizon. This was partially unveiled just a few weeks ago, but we've now got a few bold claims on the pipeline of creation in the engine, plus a link to sign up for the beta.

In a blog post titled "Meta Horizon Engine at a glance", Meta says the new engine focuses on a few major points: The first is 'Scalability from cloud to mobile', which is effectively the ability to run worlds on the cloud, and then on mobile devices. It mentions the idea of "running on mobile phones", which suggests you will be able to play worlds natively, which you couldn't do prior.

The second is "speed and performance". Meta claims worlds "load and run quickly" with its new engine.

The third is "familiar tools", and it says Horizon Engine will work with templates and formats that are designed to be familiar to developers. Given that Horizon Worlds are user-made, this could speed up production and lower the skill ceiling.

The last element is "platform evolution". Effectively, Meta argues that the building of this engine is an attempt to make a 'technical foundation', which will continue to grow alongside users. Projects that run for a long time rack up technical debt, so a fresh start allows a change of focus. Part of that change is Meta's attempt to design the platform "from the ground up with user safety in mind."

The Horizon Engine boasts support for tools like FMOD for sound, Noesis for UI, and PhysX for physics (that's a throwback). It supports Meta's own Avatars software and has bespoke rendering models. Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg claimed, in the Meta Connect 2025, that the new engine can support five times as many people and that it's four times faster than before. This same announcement promised "infinite connected spaces, more realistic physics, and higher player counts."

I've spent some time in the current version of Meta Horizon Worlds and was not very impressed. In my time with it, it felt slow, hard to navigate, loaded with poorly made content, and otherwise bored me very quickly.

I have concerns around platforms like Fortnite, Meta, and Roblox using so much content that can be created by children, but the idea of them having access to creative tools that can be easily learned is potentially neat. The metaverse still has to deal with, well, the fact that it's the metaverse, though.

If you want to sign up for the Horizon Studio Beta, you can do so right now, but there's no word on when acceptance is likely to happen, other than at some point later this year. Meta Horizon Worlds are part of the broader Meta Horizon ecosystem, much like maps in Fortnite.

It is still the metaverse, though, and that will be just as big a hurdle for many as the engine it runs on.

If you've played many first person games, you know the incomparable joy that is looking down and seeing your character's body represented as a 3D model in the world. It's not a necessary feature—most games omit it—but just like when I'm enjoying a good glass of wine, I'm having more fun when I've got legs.

Reach, which just got a new trailer at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, touts its fully modeled and animated "body awareness" as a headlining feature, which makes a lot of sense when you realize it's a VR game. Even visual showstoppers like Half-Life Alyx embrace Rayman-style floating hands as an elegant solution for first person interactions in VR, but Reach is itching to tear down any barrier to immersion.

It looks to be an action adventure taking after the likes of Uncharted and Square Enix's Tomb Raider games, just paired with all the trappings of virtual reality: a very intimate view, motion controls, and a shock when your cat brushes past your leg.

The trailer struts all sorts of wild sequences, like the player hanging onto a rotating platform with one arm as they dangle over an abyss or another bit spent firing arrows at enemies below while soaring through the air—all very impressive feats to pull off well in VR.

The idea of playing through such perilous platforming segments with the screen strapped to my eyes sounds both thrilling and a little terrifying, so I have to applaud Reach's ambitions. A press release for the game throws out terms like "intuitive, gesture-driven traversal," so I'm keen to hear from VR buffs how it compares to the platform standard.

If Reach's trailer reached something inside you, you won't have to wait long to play it. It releases on October 16 and is available to pre-order on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Valve sure seems to be on the verge of announcing a new piece of gaming hardware, but don't get your hopes up for a Steam Deck 2. Based on the company's recent trademark of the term "Steam Frame" and a number of influencer types making cryptic social media posts about traveling to Seattle this week, it appears we're mere days or hours away from seeing a follow-up of sorts to the 2020 Valve Index.

Redditors have been compiling the evidence pointing towards a VR hardware reveal from Valve on Wednesday, including multiple VR-focused YouTubers traveling to the Pacific Northwest. Competitor Meta is actually hosting its annual Connect event on September 17th and 18th, but multiple influencers have confirmed they won't be at the event (which is in Silicon Valley, not Valve's native Bellevue, Washington). Notably, Valve timed its last big VR reveal of the Index to coincide with a Facebook developer event in 2019.

It sure seems like it's pulling the same strategy again for the Steam Frame, and if I had to guess its pitch will be much more focused on gaming and high-end VR tech while Zuckerberg uses Meta Connect as an excuse to hock some new AI stuff that'll make all of our lives a little more miserable.

So what is the Steam Frame? The solid speculation is that it's the final name for the Valve Deckard, a long-in-development head-mounted display alongside a pair of new controllers given the codename "Roy."

Even more evidence, via Valve dataminer Brad Lynch: components of SteamVR have recently been renamed "Frames" within the code. Other bits of info point to the headset likely being wireless, rather than tethered to a PC via USB.

Though I'm more curious to see what Valve does next with the Steam Deck, or if it makes another push into console territory with fresh Steam Machines now that SteamOS is far better for gaming, any new hardware from Valve is exciting nonetheless.

European pro golfers are wearing virtual reality headsets as part of their training programme. Not to improve their swing, but to help them learn to block out the hollers and chants of what's expected to be a pretty fiery crowd at the next Ryder Cup in the US.

Next week, pro golfers from across Europe and the United States will duke it out for the Ryder Cup. The international golfing tournament has been won by the Europe team in seven out of the previous 10 times, though the Europeans have failed to win on US soil since 2012. The next Ryder Cup will take place at the Bethpage Black Course in Farmingdale, New York. So, the pressure is on.

Home team advantage is at play here, and a part of that is the intensity of the crowds. As someone with only a mild interest in swinging a club at my local club's driving range, I can only imagine how much more I'd whiff it if there were hundreds, if not thousands, of angry fans calling me a sweaty, lanky ****head every time I swung.

According to top golfer Rory McIlroy, he was asked how far he wanted the virtual reality headset experience to go, to which he replied: "Go as far as you want."

"It is just to simulate the sights and sounds and noise. That’s the stuff that we are going to have to deal with," he continued (via The Guardian).

I'd love to get my hands on that program. Is it a light, family-friendly riffing in the far-off background, the likes of that guy calling Happy Gilmore a jackass, or is it more explicit? Golf can appear pretty stuffy from the outside, but the Ryder Cup has a bit of a reputation for getting rowdy. Not like, football-rowdy, like your Dad after a few too many pints rowdy.

When pressed on the insults were programmed into the headset, McIlroy said: "You don’t want to know. Not for publication."

"But nothing can really prepare you until you’re actually in that," McIlroy explains. "You can wear all the VR headsets you want and do all the different things we’ve been trying to do to get ourselves ready but once the first tee comes on Friday it’s real and we just have to deal with whatever’s given."

So, next time you don your virtual reality headset, maybe think about jumping into VR Chat to request a bunch of strangers to roast you. The mental fortitude you'll gain could be the key to historic success, or see you sat in a corner with tears streaming down from under your headset.

In the world of cutting-edge technology, we rarely get to see the behind-the-scenes research and development that goes on at the biggest companies. But every now and then, some details get dropped that remind you just how much better our current gear and gadgets can potentially be. Meta's VR division has showcased two such examples, codenamed Tiramisu and Boba 3, and if these represent the future of virtual reality gaming, then prepare for your minds to get blown away. And your wallet, sadly.

Meta's Reality Labs Research blog post—titled 'Windows on the Future'—is a little odd, if I'm to be honest. It's written as if a tech journalist was invited to the research facility, to get the skinny on the latest developments, by it's actually from someone who works at Meta. Anyway, that oddness aside, the meat of the post is genuinely great stuff.

First up is Tiramisu: an experimental "hyperrealistic VR" headset. You might think that such a description is nothing but marketing fluff, but the specs tell a different story altogether. It uses micro-OLED display panels and "specially designed refractive viewing optics" to achieve a contrast ratio three times greater than that of the Meta Quest 3.

Brightness is claimed to be 1,400 nits—14 times higher than the Quest 3—which sounds high enough to sear the retinas clean off your eyeballs. But the really impressive spec is the average pixel density. Documents for VR headsets state this as pixels per degree, and for the Quest 3, that's around 26 on average. Tiramisu reaches an almost unbelievable 90.

That's equivalent to the micro-OLED panels having a horizontal resolution of over 7,000 pixels, which is a ludicrous number of pixels for any GPU to process. So much so that Reality Labs says that real-time performance is only possible "thanks to NVIDIA’s DLSS 3." And I'll bet good money on the small print also saying 'and at least one RTX 5090.'

There is no small print, of course, but it's obvious that the Qualcomm processors Meta normally uses for its VR headsets are nowhere near capable of dealing with this kind of resolution. Tiramisu is a very much a prototype device, but it probably only runs on the most powerful of desktop PCs.

Something else that's a bit of a sticking point is the field of view (FOV): it's just 33 x 33 degrees. Reality Labs admits that this is "quite limited" (understatement of the century), but the whole thing is the closest it's got to passing the 'visual Turing test'. This is about having a virtual reality that's indistinguishable from…well…real reality, and this requires super high levels of pixels, brightness, and contrast.

It also requires the FOV to match that of human vision—around 200 degrees or so—and Tiramisu is well short of that. Fortunately, Meta's also working on another prototype that gets very close to this.

Now in its third iteration, Boba is a VR headset that boasts a horizontal FOV of 180 degrees and a vertical FOV of 120 degrees (the Quest 3 is 110 and 96, respectively), and it's a considerably sleeker and nicer-looking device than Tiramisu, tipping the scales at 690 grams. And it doesn't exactly skimp on the pixels either, with 4K x 4K panels for each eye.

If that's got all you super excited for nabbing yourself the ultimate VR headset, I'm afraid you'll need to hold your (virtual) horses: "It’s something that we wanted to send out into the world as soon as possible, but it’s not for everyone,” said Yang Zhao, an optical scientist at Reality Lab's sister team Display Systems Research. "It’s not going to easily hit a mass-market price point. And it requires a top-of-the-line GPU and PC system."

I guess that roughly translates to 'Boba 3 will make Apple's headset look like a bargain' and 'Anything less than an RTX 5090 won't cut the mustard'. There are quite a few VR fans in the PC Gamer hardware office, though I'm a relatively new member of the club with a Meta Quest 3S. As much as I enjoy smashing things with a virtual sword or scaling cliffs with pants-filling terror, I'm never quite fully immersed because of the pixel count, contrast, and FOV.

But if Tiramisu and Boba 3 are truly representative of what the future of VR gaming holds, then I can't wait to strap on a Quest 9000 and give up on reality permanently. Let's just hope the gaming PC I'll have by then is up to the challenge. Both of Meta's prototype VR headsets will be showcased at this year's Siggraph event, so if you're heading over, make sure you get to see them in action.

This may scandalise some younger readers, but once upon a time you'd turn on the telly and simply watch what was on. The question of what to watch these days has only gotten more complex, with a wealth of streaming services now vying for your eyeballs. Well, Amazon may be touting AI as the answer—I mean, just judging by the undisclosed amount they've thrown behind startup Fable.

The Edward Saatchi-owned outfit has already been around for a few years, debuting with VR game Wolves in the Walls back in 2019. What's piqued Amazon's interest more recently is Fable's AI-generated 'streaming' service Showrunner (via Variety). Hop into the Discord, and you can start mashing out prompt-based animated scenes that are all about as bleak, monotone, and ugly as I was personally expecting.

Having already run as a closed alpha test with 10,000 users, Showrunner is currently free to use. The recent public launch offers a few 'story worlds' to plug prompts into, all powered by Fable’s SHOW-2 AI model. Exit Valley is a popular 'show' on the Discord, but very much reads to me like shockingly average adult animation that's trying way too hard. Using Exit Valley's AI stage you too can generate scenes like this one, where a cartoony Tom Cruise jabbers with a Kim Kardashian that refuses to skip arm day—and also inexplicably sounds progressively more Australian with every rep.

Fable wants to eventually implement a 'credits' system for creators, planning to charge between $10 and $20 a month to generate more AI scenes. However, all Showrunner content will remain free to view in the hopes of encouraging folks to watch and share clips on third-party video platforms like YouTube (where Showrunner's f-bomb heavy schtick may not even get demonetised).

Edward Saatchi told Variety that the vision for Showrunner is to create something "playable," in a not entirely dissimilar way to mashing dolls together in a dollhouse. He said, "The ‘Toy Story of AI’ isn’t just going to be a cheap ‘Toy Story.’ Our idea is that ‘Toy Story of AI’ would be playable, with millions of new scenes, all owned by Disney."

Dropping the big D isn't just a powerful name drop, as Fable is apparently in talks with the house of mouse about licensing its IP for Showrunner. But even with such upfront ambition, even Saatchi is saying: "Maybe nobody wants this and it won’t work."

In conversation with Variety, he says this within the wider context of his earlier ventures into VR not taking off as he had hoped. But Saatchi also concedes that "today AI can’t sustain a story beyond one episode," and that the technology is perhaps better suited to "deeply episodic shows with characters largely resetting every episode — sitcoms, police procedurals, space exploration."

I mean, points for self-awareness, but I'd argue even traditional intrigue-of-the-week shows often feature season spanning narrative arcs or even simple callbacks. Don't worry, I'll spare you my impassioned defence of Elementary as the genuinely better take on 'Sherlock Holmes, but make it a cop procedural' from the 2010s. Anyway, besides that, I was already looking at Showrunner's dollhouse and loudly wondering what the point of it all is.

For one thing, deciding what I want to watch via traditional streaming services already requires work amounting to a low-level research project—I already enjoy that work, so why would I put my energy into the well-draining black hole of AI? For another thing, 'playing' with established characters and IP just makes me think about the good old, wonky days of machinima—to say absolutely nothing about the fanfic burning a hole on my hard drive.

With these creative outlets and more already available to me, I don't really feel the need to play within the confines of Showrunner's corporate, AI playground.

If there's anything my sordid past spent reporting on console games has taught me, it's that haptic feedback is pretty neat. Sharp Corporation appears to agree with me, announcing a glove-shaped solution for bringing similar tactile feedback to PC gaming and virtual reality.

Though not every PlayStation 5 game leverages the DualSense's haptic capabilities, the ones that do enjoy a whole new avenue of sense for worming inside my brain. After pausing for breath in Returnal, only to feel the pitter-patter of raindrops in my palm, and playing Astro Bot's five hour hand massage—free with every console—I do find myself missing this gameplay gimmick on PC.

That said, I'm not sure I'm quite desperate enough to don Sharp's VR glove (via GamesRadar+). Though pitched with an AI-generated image of giving head pats to an anime girl, I can't deny I am at least as intrigued as I am horrified. "Reach out and touch Faye [Valentine]," indeed.

The VR haptic controller can be bought in a pair for the provisional price of ¥ 100,000 (about $667 or £504 at the time of writing). For that amount of moolah, Sharp talks an expectedly big game, offering not just touch feedback but also texture. Besides the price, pitching your product via the fantasy of poking, prodding, or dragging around an anime girl inspires immediate scepticism from me—and then there's the extensive list of Sharp's own disclaimers too.

Sharp is quick to say via the website that the VR glove is only in the early stages of development, with the machine-translation of its disclaimer reading, "Please note that development may be discontinued due to various circumstances, making it impossible to provide the products and services." The website also clarifies that the glove, should it ever ship, will not be capable of force feedback, fine-tuned finger-tracking, or creating sophisticated sensations of temperature like hot and cold.

Still, how would Sharp be hoping to bring this realm of sensation to VR? I'm so glad you asked! Underneath each fingertip is a small, segmented panel designed to vibrate in a number of ways in order to create different touch sensations (and yes, the machine translation does call this a 'vibrator' at least once, further highlighting the fact I should have paid an actual human translator).

Naturally, touch is communicated through more than just your fingertips, but it's an intriguing approach to sensation mimicry. Sharp also intends to allow folks to edit tactile data via software pitched at users with varying degrees of coding experience. Personally, I'm trying really hard not to think about what fresh nightmares for the flesh might be conjured with this bit of kit.

Anyway, pre-registration for Sharp's VR gloves has already closed, but this is far from the first bit of kit attempting to get all touchy-feely in virtual reality. For one thing, streamer GingasVR has an incredible VR setup that simulates both weather effects and actual bodily pain, demonstrating the wealth of kit that's already available. But beyond haptic vests and Razer's Sensa haptics stuff, there's also plenty of scientific projects like Shiftly, a transforming tactile feedback device, also pushing the boundaries.

If you haven't yet been sold on the idea of AI glasses, the short-sighted Mark Zuckerberg thinks you will be left behind if you don't get yourself a pair.

In Meta's Q2 earnings call (via TechCrunch), CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg presented the figures for this quarter, alongside announcing where the profit will be going to further grow Meta. Unsurprisingly, that means a lot of talk of AI. But one of the most interesting aspects of this call is when Zuckerberg turns his attention to AI glasses, something the company has been championing for some time.

"I wear contact lenses. I feel like if I didn't have my vision corrected, I'd be sort of at a cognitive disadvantage going through the world. And I think in the future, if you don't have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you're kind of similarly probably be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage."

Zuckerberg goes on to talk about Meta's work on this specific form factor and its focus on extra types of glasses, like those with style in mind. He says this is one of the main focuses of Reality Labs over the last "five to ten years".

Reality Labs takes the focus here and is part of Zuckerberg's Metaverse-y future plans for the company. The intentional name drop in this call could be tied to the fact that it has been a perennial loss maker, operating with a loss of $4.53 billion in Q2 this year, with it reporting losses of $4.488 billion in the same period last year. Meta still pulled in almost $20 billion in profit, but Reality Labs is a rather significant investment right now, and it needs to be regularly sold to investors.

Zuckerberg says: "Because we've been investing in this, I think we're just several years ahead on building out glasses. And I think that's something we're excited to keep on investing in heavily because I think it's going to be a really important part of the future."

Right now, Meta's AI glasses can connect to the AI app, where they can access an assistant, share photos, and do some browsing. Sure, Zuckerberg is making an argument about the future of the glasses, and therefore the future of AI, but at the moment there's not a whole lot that would make you cognitively advantaged over someone not wearing a set of their smart Ray-Bans. The suggestion of some future cognitive advantage inevitably feels nebulous and hard to quantify without anything to pin them to today, but no-one's ever going to let that get in the way of an investor-facing marketing pitch.

Unless it can be significantly easier to use than picking up your phone, I don't think I'm quite sold on its potential. Maybe agentic AI could help cut down on the time you spend actually interacting with it via your glasses, but it seems like any AI advancements made here will also be made on other devices.

Despite my scepticism, our Hope does at least seem to quite like her Ray-Ban Meta glasses. As well as noting, "I kinda like them shut up", she told me: "I really like them for taking photos on holiday (not of people) without having to stop the flow of exploring." She also sometimes uses them for PoV videos of painting.

Though it's not the AI part of these glasses she likes, the form factor does seem to be pretty solid. And that seems like the true selling point of Meta's glasses so far; their convenience, less so their ability to improve your cognition. We'll have to wait and see if all this AI investment pays off in the smarts department down the line.

If you've spent the better part of $1,000 on a high-end VR headset and perhaps the same again on a graphics card, you'd be pretty frustrated to find it didn't work properly on your Linux gaming rig.

Imagine how you'd feel if the problems continued for more than a year. That's been the exact situation for some Bigscreen Beyond owners, but the end is nearly in sight, as Nvidia promises a fix with its next major driver release.

It's not exactly clear when the problem was first noticed, but a post on Nvidia's discussion forum, dated May 2024, at least sets the scene. The opening message in the thread, by user Babblebones, is pretty straightforward: "The Bigscreen Beyond HMD [head-mounted display] is not able to be utilized on either the Nvidia proprietary or open kernel drivers."

That's rapidly followed by other users reporting the same issue, with one providing a photo of what they see in each of the VR headset's lenses—half the image is nothing but garbled static, making the device essentially unusable.

A few more users confirm the problem until Nvidia's staff steps in to confirm that it also had issues with the headset, but had resolved the problem in its Windows drivers. Unfortunately, the staff member couldn't say when Team Green would be able to do likewise with its Linux set.

Months go by with Bigscreen Beyond owners popping into the thread to see if there was a solution to hand, only to have their hopes dashed with Nvidia reporting no progress at all. Then, after a full year from when the thread was opened, a short announcement was posted:

"We’ve root caused the problem (the driver was not properly handling the “DSC pass-through” bit from the EDID). The fix should be available in an upcoming release. I’m very sorry for all the delays."

Let me decipher some of that for you. DSC stands for Display Stream Compression, a feature of DisplayPort that greatly reduces the amount of data required for a video stream, without any noticeable loss in quality. Pass-through refers to a system where a display device can receive a DSC video stream and then just 'send it on' without needing to decompress and then recompress it.

Pass-through is needed on VR headsets to seamlessly blend multiple video streams into a coherent image, especially if one is using an augmented or mixed reality mode.

EDID, or Extended Display Identification Data, is how a display tells a graphics chip what resolution, refresh rates, timings, etc, it can do. In short, the Linux drivers were mangling the information about DSC Pass-through, resulting in the headset producing garbled images.

Yesterday, Nvidia announced when the solution itself would be released: "The fix will be included in our 580 release series. I apologize for the delays." Unfortunately, there's no word on when the 580 driver set will make an appearance, but given that the latest Linux 64-bit 575.64 Feature Branch set is dated July 1, we probably won't have too much longer to wait.

For Bigscreen Beyond owners who have been essentially unable to use their lightweight VR headsets, the drivers can't come soon enough. At least the end of the painful road is now in sight…if one pardons the pun.

You'd think a genre with the word "immersive" in its name would obviously be a good match for virtual reality, but there haven't been that many VR immersive sims. There was Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice and the Espire series, but mostly we've seen immersive sim-adjacent stuff like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners—games that take inspiration from immsim classics to spice up a regular shooter. (0452 games, basically.)

Sure, you could use vorpX to play games like System Shock or Dishonored in your VR headset. But if you want something new, your options are limited. Thief VR aims to fill that gap.

"VR is a natural fit for an immersive sim because it allows players to physically engage with the world around them", says Eugenio Aguilar Oriani, lead publishing producer at Vertigo Games. "In Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow, classic elements from the series—like stealth-based gameplay, exploration, and the thrill of thieving—come to life through physical actions. Players must crouch, hide, and move through shadows to avoid detection, pick pockets with their own hands, and interact with the environment in tactile ways, from lockpicking to uncovering hidden switches behind picture frames or solving puzzles built into bookshelves."

I'm intrigued by the lockpicking. While I don't love the floating disembodied hands Thief VR has gone with, which are more jarring than fully modeled arms even when they turn into tangled spaghetti, I do like the idea of picking a lock with virtual lockpicks.

"The lockpicking mechanic has been fully designed for VR controls", Oriani says. "Using both hands, you'll need to carefully manipulate the pins to find the sweet spot. For maximum immersion, it's possible to rely entirely on haptic feedback—but for those who prefer guidance, a UI-assisted option is also available."

The trailer shows you can pick pockets as well as locks with your own physical hands, which looks like fun. I'm less enamored of the way it shows rope arrows working, with clear anchor points they can be shot into rather than just being able to twang one into any wooden surface you find. For me, immersive sims are all about inventing your own solutions rather than using ones you're clearly supposed to. They're games about stacking crates to climb walls, not shooting an arrow at the one square you're allowed to shoot an arrow at.

Russ Harding, chief creative officer at developer Maze Theory, defends the decision. "We've integrated anchors into the environment in a way that feels natural and diegetic. You'll need to read the space, stay alert, and think like a thief to find them. It's a system that rewards observation and encourages vertical exploration. We believe the approach preserves the spirit of rope arrows—clever tools for those who take the time to look up, scout ahead, and plan their next move—while making traversal feel intuitive and comfortable in VR."

The other thing that's core to my interest in immersive sims, and the Thief series especially, is how tense they are. There's the constant stress of trying to remain unseen, knowing how hard it is to fight your way out of situations if you go loud, but there's also the way the Thief games include at least one level that's right out of a horror game.

"I don't want to spoil anything," Oriani says, "but I can say that we didn’t set out to make a horror experience—that hasn't been a core focus for us. That said, creepy supernatural elements are part of the Thief universe, and this is no exception."

And this will be part of the Thief universe. While the 2014 reboot starred a new protagonist who was coincidentally called Garrett just like the protagonist of the original trilogy, there were hints that—rather than being a new setting—its version of the City was the same place hundreds of years in the future. Thief VR confirms this, as Harding explains.

"Thief VR is set roughly 200 years after the events of Deadly Shadows and 200 years before the events of the 2014 reboot. This gave us a unique space to develop: we're not retelling the past or rewriting what came after, but instead creating a connective branch between two distinct timelines. Threading the needle between the original trilogy's gothic, steampunk world and the more industrial, authoritarian tone of the reboot meant carefully considering how the City itself would evolve. You'll see echoes of both eras in Thief VR, the decline of the Keepers, the shifting political landscape, even how glyph magic fades into myth."

We won't be playing another Garrett this time, though Stephen Russel has returned to voice his version of the master thief as a ghostly voice heard by Magpie, Thief VR's brand new hero.

"You begin Thief VR as an ordinary street thief," Harding says, "raw and unproven. But as the story unfolds, your actions shape your path toward becoming a master. That growth is part of the fantasy, and it reflects the arc fans loved in the original games, without simply repeating it. Of course, Garrett's legacy still lingers. It's in the tools, the City, and the history you're stepping into. And while we won’t give too much away, let's just say his voice and presence still significantly echoes throughout the game, and we're honored to have Stephen Russell return to voice the character of Garrett. This approach allows us to honor the past while opening the door for new players. You don't need to know the lore to get immersed, but if you do, you'll find a world rich with callbacks, secrets, and connections worth stealing."

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is due out this year, and will be available on Steam.

In April of last year, Meta announced it would be working alongside Microsoft to make an Xbox-themed Meta Quest. As we noted at the time, we said the collaboration "probably means it's black with a bit of green." Well, you can imagine how shocked the PC Gamer office was this morning when we saw a leak of the upcoming Xbox Meta Quest 3S box, complete with a headset that is black with a bit of green.

As reported by UploadVR, according to a now-deleted thread from VR developer RJ White, the photo of the Meta Quest 3S Xbox edition comes from a Best Buy employee who presumably found it in stock at their store.

This all follows a rumour from Game Sandwich claiming the headset would be surprise launching at some point this week.

Game Sandwich also claims that the Xbox Meta Quest 3S would be launching at $399. This is $100 more than the 128 GB model of the original Quest 3S, and it comes with the same base storage. It is still $100 cheaper than the standard Meta Quest 3, though the Quest 3 comes with better lenses and storage. However, in return for the extra $100 for the Xbox Quest 3D, you not only get the black and green theming but also an Xbox controller and Xbox colored Elite Strap.

To top it off, this headset is reported to come with three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It is not clear if that is a general Xbox Game Pass code or one that can only be activated by first-time subscribers, like some Game Pass subscription codes. If you were to buy all of these separately, it would end up around $30 more than the reported cost of the Xbox Quest 3S, plus the cost of Xbox Game Pass. This does assume you actually want or need these accessories, though.

The intent with this collaboration is to encourage users to access Xbox Game Pass in order to stream their games to the headset, with the controller connected via Bluetooth. You will still be able to play VR games via the Meta Quest store, but this isn't Microsoft finally entering into the VR headset market. We likely won't see a VR Gears of War game anytime soon (despite my numerous emails).

This isn't the only move in the last few weeks for Microsoft to further divest its Xbox division away from Microsoft-made hardware. The Xbox ROG Ally X appears to effectively be a Windows handheld with some extra UI flourish and Xbox-branded controls.

Last November, Microsoft put out the 'This is an Xbox' campaign, where it showed Xbox games running on a breadth of devices like handheld PCs, phones, and laptops. Ever since, Xbox messaging seems to be moving further and further away from Xbox consoles.

Taking after the continued success of Windows, Microsoft seems ever more intent on putting its software on every device it can. Though this doesn't seem like a bad strategy for its software, I've had less and less faith in Xbox's hardware ever since getting my Xbox Series X in 2020.

Personally, I'd need quite a lot of convincing to pick up a Game Pass subscription for use in VR with its limited streaming library. This is especially true with GeForce Now right there, and just as easy to access.

The trailer for Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow ends with the protagonist, a young woman named Magpie, finding a strange mechanical eye. Which then implants itself in her face. Before questions can be asked (like "What happened to her squishy real eye?"), a familiarly gruff voice declares, "I thought I was dead. And who are you?"

Now I clocked that as Stephen Russell, the voice of Garrett from the original trilogy of Thief games, but then I've spent more time listening to Garrett cynically muttering about rich people than I spend listening to most of my friends. Other people raised doubts, perhaps due to the possibility of an AI imitation. But no, that really is Stephen Russell, as the man himself declared in a YouTube video.

"We've had a long history together," Russell said, "and it is so delightful to be back with him again. I've missed the old guy! He's got such a great sense of humor, and they have perfectly captured that in this new game."

While this cements Thief VR as a sequel to the original Thief games, that doesn't mean it's disregarding the 2014 reboot. For starters, it's using the same logo. But it's also building on the references in that reboot suggesting the events of the first three Thief games were part of the same continuity—only in a distant past before worship of the "old gods" was banned, as detailed in a deep-dive video during this year's VR Developer Direct.

"Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow takes place between the original trilogy and the 2014 reboot," said Richard Bunn, lead game designer at Maze Theory, "centuries before the latter. The City is fractured, ruled by fear and surveillance, under the thumb of Baron Northcrest and his obsession with forbidden knowledge. The Keepers are gone, but their secrets linger in hidden glyphs and relics."

As one of maybe three people at PC Gamer who still cares about VR, I'm up for a game that explores what VR can do for old-fashioned immersive sims. Sure, I'd have preferred a full-length Thief sequel for flat screens, but I'm pessimistic enough to doubt that was ever on the table. It's not like people are lining up to buy first-person stealth games in 2025. If we weren't getting Thief VR, we probably wouldn't be getting another Thief game at all. So I'll take what I get, especially if it means I get to hear Stephen Russell make snarky comments about rich people's decor like, "A throne room! How pretentious can you get?"

We're in a smoky, dimly-lit boardroom. Sitting around a table are sallow-faced executives sniffing wads of cash. The cash is on fire. The videogame industry is on fire. Embracer has just made another completely ridiculous decision while it kicks the corpse of Thief, one of PC gaming's most important and influential series.

Nothing Embracer Group ever does makes a lick of sense. The Swedish holding company, formerly Nordic Games, rapidly grew between 2013 and 2023 as it gobbled up just about every stray game property it could get its hands on. And little good has come from it.

It swallowed up THQ, grabbed Deep Silver, snatched Coffee Stain Studios, and it just kept going. Studios, publishers, long-dead yet still beloved games—it was throwing money all over the place. In 2022, it made a deal with Square Enix and spent $300 million on Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal.

That's how it managed to pilfer Thief.

Shortly after the Square Enix deal, Embracer got into a spot of bother. A number of its acquisitions had come to nothing, it rarely seemed to know what to do with the treasures it had looted, and a gargantuan $2 billion investment deal fell through. Its share price dropped dramatically and the restructuring began.

Cancellations, layoffs, studio closures. In just a few months, nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs. It started selling rather than buying. But, unfortunately for us, it kept Thief. And that's why, yesterday, we were treated to an ugly trailer for Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow—one of the most disappointing reveals I've had the misfortune to witness since I started writing about games.

Embracer is not the kind of company you want determining the fate of anything you care deeply about. And I care a lot about Thief. It was a formative game for wee Fraser, and while its glory days are firmly in the past (25 or 21 years back, depending on how you feel about the actually extremely good Thief: Deadly Shadows), the impact it had on game development was gargantuan.

Look, you might not really care about immersive sims. Most people don't, judging by how poorly they tend to sell. But nothing encapsulates the giddy brilliance of gaming, and especially PC gaming, like these ridiculous creations. And from Thief we got some truly incredible, ambitious, uncompromising games: Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, Deus Ex, Dishonored—the GOATs.

And let's not forget its influence on stealth games: pretty much all of them. It's really where the genre properly began. And when you get excited about being able to do stuff like snuffing out a light in Assassin's Creed Shadows, you've got Thief to thank for it.

Since sneaky immersive sims aren't huge money-makers these days, it's often smaller studios taking on the risk, which is great, but I'm gonna be straight with you: I would rather have something a bit more polished, a bit easier on the eyes, and with some fancy tech to back it up. I want my cake and to eat it too.

A new Thief, then, obviously piqued my interest. Thief 4 was disappointing, and also more than a decade ago. I'm ready for someone to take another crack at it. But this? A fucking VR game? Come the hell on.

Look, VR is a gimmick. It's always a gimmick. It promises everything and delivers nothing. It was like this when I was a kid and it was the hot new thing, and this time around nothing has changed. Occasionally something kinda cool appears. Like Half-Life: Alyx. But I ain't restructuring my entire living room and strapping an uncomfortable headset on for the promise of a tiny handful of decent games that, frankly, still ain't all that.

And beyond the fact that it's a real bummer that I'd need to shell out for a niche bit of hardware to enjoy the new Thief, the really disappointing thing is that it just looks kinda rubbish. A large part of that, I'll admit, is just seeing those awful disembodied hands. It will never not look ridiculous. VR pretends that it's all about next-level immersion, but all the ways the vast majority of VR games have you interacting with the world—whether it's the tactile, fiddly things, or simple traversal—takes me right out of the game.

But there's also just the lack of any novelties on display. Using your rope arrow to climb up buildings or snuffing out light sources is classic Thief, so that's not the problem, but I can do that in any Thief game. What justifies this being imprisoned on VR headsets? What's the big idea? How is this pushing stealth forward in the way the classics did?

The answer, probably, is that it isn't. The hook is that it's a VR game. That's it. And that's a bloody terrible hook. It immediately massively limits who can enjoy the game and, let's face it, limits what it can really do. VR games by their nature are games full of sacrifices and concessions.

It's just another baffling call that suggests the people making these decisions don't really understand Thief, or care to understand it. There's just this property that they have lying around, doing nothing, so why not waste it on a VR game, long after most people stopped giving a shit about VR?

When your company is on fire and you've either laid off or sold off almost half of your nearly 16,000 employees, what's one more little cock-up? But as someone who actually loves Thief, and a lot of the games Embracer now controls, I'm pleading with it: stop. Just stop messing with games. Make terrible cars or something instead. Sell everything, get out of the industry, and please just leave us alone.

I've been waiting more than 10 years since the botched Thief reboot for a new game in the series, and now that it's happening all I can think about is the old "careful what you wish for" adage. Because coming later in 2025 is Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow.

Thief VR is a "reimagined" take on the once-great stealth series, taking players back to the City, "a place of shadows, ruled by the tyrant Lord Ulysses Northcrest."

"You are Magpie, a cunning thief orphaned by Northcrest’s brutality and shaped by the streets, who steals as the only means to survive," the YouTube listing states. "That is until you uncover something greater: a legendary artifact holding a legacy from the past."

For those not familiar with the series, that artifact—assuming the trailer isn't a big ol' misdirect, and spoilers ahead for a 27-year-old videogame, by the way—is the artificial eye constructed by the Hammerites for Garrett, the hero of the first three Thief games. And Garrett himself seems to somehow be contained within, although that voice at the very end—"I thought I was dead"—doesn't sound exactly like him. More like a pretty good imitation. You might even say that about the whole thing, although the "pretty good" part remains to be seen.

In any event, here's what's on the table:

• Steal with precision - Pickpocket guards, pry open hidden compartments, and bypass locks with tactile VR interactions.
• Master the Shadows - Stick to the darkness, evade patrols, and outmaneuver enemies with real-time stealth mechanics.
• Precision and Skill - Master tools like the bow, blackjack, and water arrows with realistic haptic feedback
• Unravel a conspiracy in a city where shadows speak louder than words

All of that does sound like a Thief game, and it has the right look, if you count Deadly Shadows among them, which I sometimes do and sometimes do not depending on my mood. There's a decent chance that it could turn out to be a very solid VR experience. And as devoted as I am to Stephen Russell, if the Thief series is going to carry on, it probably is time for a new lead—or at least to start making moves in that direction.

None of which un-sours my mood. Superficial Thief trappings aside, the fact that this is walled behind VR makes it essentially a non-entity. Which I don't mean as a slight toVR fans, but simply a reflection of the fact that VR exclusivity limits the potential market size to the point where it's almost irrelevant. It is, quite frankly, a space for spinoffs and throwaways, and maybe I'm being stubborn or cranky (or both, I am old, after all) but it genuinely rubs me the wrong way to see Thief, after such a long absence, end up in that pile.

(In my defense, I am at least consistent on this front: I was also pissed off when Ubisoft announced a new Splinter Cell game that turned out to be a VR thing back in 2020.)

Gloomwood creator Dillon Rogers may not feel quite so strongly about it, but he definitely has feelings.

PC Gamer's Fraser Brown, on the other hand, feels even more strongly about it: He called Thief VR "a huge slap on the face and kick in the teeth for everyone who has been waiting for more than a decade to return to the City." Boy, and I thought I was mad about it.

Thief VR is being developed by Maze Theory and published by Vertigo Games, whose previous releases include Metro Awakening and Arizona Sunshine, both of which are reasonably well regarded amongst the VR community, so that's a point in its favor if you're into that sort of thing. It's set to arrive this year and is up for wishlisting now on Steam, Meta Quest, and PlayStation VR2.