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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The FCC has just made public some exhibits for the left Steam Frame controller (via SadlyItsBradley). We've known the FCC ID 2AES4-1013 refers to the left controller for the upcoming Valve VR headset for a while, but we now have iFixit-style teardown pictures of it, courtesy of Valve itself.

Things could presumably still change, but the main takeaway is that it looks like the controller could actually be pretty repairable.

The pictures show internals made of multiple little PCBs, rather unlike the Index's giant, finnicky PCB chunk that requires a soldering iron for some repairs. It looks like the new controller will have plenty of threaded screws, too, and everything looks pretty easy to access.

This isn't too surprising, given we were very impressed with the new Steam Controller's repairability. Our Jacob Ridley did a teardown of the Steam Controller and concluded: "Valve has shown it cares about repairability in the past and that holds true for the Steam Controller... Many parts of the Steam Controller should be an easy replacement with minimal fuss, especially once spare parts are available to purchase."

Regarding the Steam Frame more generally, Valve has been sticking to its summertime launch goal, and a recent shipping manifest suggests that Frame imports are already arriving in Valve's US warehouse. The new FCC filings are just further evidence of a hopefully imminent launch.

We still don't know how the headset will be priced, however. One thing to note on this front is that it's a standalone device, meaning it has to have memory so it can, well, run games—16 GB of LPDDR5, no less. In other words, it won't be immune to the RAMpocalypse.

Still, every little helps, and not having to fork out for a whole new controller if anything goes wrong would be a nice way to potentially keep costs a little lower, even if indirectly.

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.

"Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight," Riot Games taunts on X. A whole bunch of nefarious hardware tinkerers seem to now be on the wrong end of the company's Vanguard anti-cheat, as it seems Riot has gone beyond kernel-level and confounded even cheaters' attempts to bypass the anti-cheat by using a physical piece of hardware that directly accesses system memory to get to game data.

As anti-cheats have gotten more advanced, so have cheats, thus the perpetual arms race between game devs and cheaters. Usually, this involves going deeper and deeper into the system.

Once upon a time, cheat software would have run as a standard app in the OS by hooking game data directly from the game through normal methods—ie, using data that the operating system normally allows apps to read and change.

Most big games can prevent these attacks very easily now, though, so cheat makers started making their cheats hook information from deeper in the software stack, at 'ring 0', the kernel level where things like drivers live. Here, the cheat can read game data from memory without having to jump through the usual hoops that apps do, meaning they can bypass the anti-cheats that were developed to stop the previously mentioned cheats.

Thus, the kernel-level anti-cheat was born. These anti-cheats, which are used in games like Valorant, get access to relevant information at the kernel level, allowing them to check for dodgy software that runs at this level, too. If they detect cheat software running at the kernel level and hooking and changing game data illegitimately, they can block it and ban you.

So that's that, right? Nothing more to solve? Not quite, because there is a layer deeper than ring 0, and that's the hardware level. Kernel-level anti-cheats check for dodgy doings at the lowest level of the operating system, but that won't help if the dodginess occurs prior to making its way into the operating system's proper stack. Which is exactly the case with these DMA cards Riot is referring to.

Essentially, Direct Memory Access (DMA) cards do what they say on the tin: access memory directly. When games run, the data that's used regularly and needed quickly is held in RAM, and other hardware (such as the GPU) usually reads and writes to this with the CPU's mediation.

Many modern CPUs, however, sometimes permit hardware to bypass the CPU and access RAM directly for the sake of latency. Naturally, cheaters have jumped on this and started using DMA cards that physically slot into your PCIe slot and pretend to be harmless, but actually read game data directly from system memory to cheat at the lowest level, getting in before even ring 0, kernel-level anti-cheats can spot them.

Combatting this has meant ensuring the CPU's IOMMU (Input–output memory management unit) actually checks the right hardware and doesn't let rogue DMA cards, for instance, bypass the CPU. Previously, motherboard firmware didn't get IOMMU booting up and checking things soon enough to detect the dodgy DMAs, but this was patched with BIOS updates late last year.

Riot's X post was actually in response to another by ogisada which states, "Today’s Vanguard anti-cheat update blocked the majority of DMA firmwares using SATA/NVMe."

Given this, and Riot's lack of contestation over any of these details, it seems cheaters had still been managing to use DMA cards to cheat by disguising them as SATA or NVMe drives. But no longer.

The post by ogisada—which, again, Riot doesn't seem to contest—also states the following: "VGK suddenly triggered an IOMMU restart warning in-game, after which the DMA firmware becomes completely unusable, even without the game running or after uninstalling Vanguard. Only fix is a full OS reinstall."

In other words: paperweights. $6,000 bricks.

The response I've seen online has been mixed, with some claiming it's too far for Riot to mess with hardware like this. To my understanding, at least, it doesn't seem like any actual hardware has been messed with, just its means of interfacing with the operating system. Whatever the case, love it or hate it, Riot's never been one to hold back on its anti-cheat methods, and a bunch of cheaters are presumably finding that out now in a very expensive way.

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.

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."

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.

In front of me are two VR headsets. They're practically identical; both versions of the Pimax Crystal Super, a high-end, tethered unit. Though for their near-indistinguishable appearance, they are different in one very important way: one is fitted with QLED displays, and the other, Micro OLED.

My job for the past couple of days has been to switch between the two headsets. Trying one, then the other, and back again, until my eyes hurt. I've tested a range of games, carried out a selection of tests, and jotted down plenty of notes along the way. We'll get to those, but if you want the shortened version, here it is: Micro-OLED is excellent, with a few caveats that I'll go into greater detail about below.

The Crystal Super comes with, what Pimax calls, an optical engine. This is essentially the core of the headset and includes the lenses, screens, cooling, and even some of the tracking, including the eye-tracking sensor. A user can slide one optical engine out of a headset and replace it with another, and Pimax offers four to choose from for the Crystal Super:

All except the Micro-OLED use a QLED (LCD with Quantum Dot) panel with a Mini LED backlight, which allows for local dimming—switching on and off a small zone of the backlight to improve contrast. Every one of these optical engines is capable of displaying an impressive picture quality and with excellent brightness, but from my time with the 50 PPD and Micro-OLED options, the latter certainly takes the cake.

The Micro-OLED optical engine uses a Sony panel with a lower vertical resolution than the QLED option—presumably the Sony ECX344A with a matching resolution and 90 Hz refresh rate. The reduction is not noticeable, however, due to the second-highest pixel-per-degree (PPD) rating at 53 PPD. This is made possible by the reduced field of view, which is the second-lowest of the four.

PPD, pixel pitch, resolution, and FoV all play a part in the overall clarity of a virtual reality headset. Think of it like an image painted onto a folding fan: the wider the fan goes, the larger the image becomes, but the easier it is to spot the individual brush strokes and creases that make it up. Open the fan only three quarters of the way and the image appears to be a higher quality but you see less of it. Pimax, and other VR manufacturers, use varying lens designs to balance between overall FoV and clarity.

For the Micro-OLED optical engine, Pimax uses specially-designed pancake lenses. Pancake lenses require plenty of brightness—as Valve's engineers told me when I had a go with the Steam Frame, which also uses pancake lenses. Though brightness doesn't appear a problem with the Sony displays used on the Crystal Super. The ECX344A is rated to 1,000 cd/m², though not all of that is making it through the pancake lenses to your eyeballs. I never thought to increase the brightness during testing, anyways, which is a good thing, as on closer inspection I already had the brightness set to 100%.

These pancake lenses are concave, which is a little different to the ever-so-slightly convex lenses I'm used to seeing with the Quest 3. I'd guess in part due to the magnification required for the tiny Micro-OLED screens.

The Pimax has more glare than the Quest 3 and QLED Crystal Super, especially in tests that aim to show any glare at its worst. In practice, it's not anywhere near as distracting as it seems, though is a definite downside to the Micro-OLED optical engine compared to others.

The Micro-OLED optical engine only weighs 231 grams compared to the QLED at 355 grams, though at any rate, it's not as compact or convenient as the Quest 3. That's to be expected considering it's using the same shell as the non-pancake optical engines.

For the QLED options, Pimax uses aspheric glass lenses. All three QLED versions use the same panel, with the 57 PPD model able to offer a higher PPD with different lenses to the others. The Ultrawide, on the other hand, is able to increase the FoV with the same lenses and screen as the 50 PPD model by essentially moving the screens further apart—reducing what's known as stereo overlap.

Stereo overlap is the area that is covered by both left- and right-side vision. It's usually presented as a percentage, meaning the amount of L/R overlap; ie ~86% on the Micro-OLED Crystal Super. That's a lot higher than the ~77% on the 50 PPD Crystal Super, and as someone that prefers more stereo overlap than less, mostly for keeping my vision clear and my head straight, the Micro-OLED once again comes out on top here.

Tests for FoV, such as Wimfov (seen above), can have varied results from person to person. As such, my testing should be at the very least consistent between the two headsets, if not necessarily the same as someone else's.

You may be less prone to ocular mixups than me—perhaps I have a greater susceptibility to what is known as binocular rivalry, or in simpler terms, bad eyeballs—thus the 50 PPD QLED model may offer plenty of overlap. The Ultrawide model goes one step further again with less overlap. However, I prefer the increased stereo overlap of the Micro-OLED.

That's true even though I play racing games in VR, which is one of the best use cases for a wide FoV. The added visibility comes in handy when you're being overtaken by a late-braker or a serial shunter. Yet I don't race enough to justify moving fully from Micro-OLED, which has a few other big benefits.

One being no screen door effect. You can chalk it up to a combination of all those aforementioned features, such as resolution, PPD, etc., but also the construction of Micro-OLED. Manufactured directly onto a silicon substrate, pixel density can be enormous on a tiny Micro-OLED display by comparison to larger OLED and LCD panels.

The Sony ECX344A, as is likely used here (BOE also makes a similar panel but Pimax names Sony here), has a pixel pitch (the distance between the centre of each pixel and the next) of 6.3 µm. A standard 27-inch 4K monitor is 165 µm. To put it another way, a 27-inch 4K monitor has a PPI of 163, whereas the 1.3-inch ECX344A has a PPI of 3,389. Even a much smaller LCD made for VR applications like BOE's 5.46-inch 4K display has a PPI of 773.

A Micro-OLED is very small but densely packed. So much so that a human's eyes aren't very good at making out the gaps between subpixels on a Micro-OLED like they might a traditional monitor.

Look to the sky in Arizona Sunshine Remake while wearing the QLED Crystal Super and there's obvious screen door effect. Compared to older generation headsets, and due to the high resolution offered by all Crystal Super models, this effect isn't too bad, and less noticeable when you're playing the game rather than looking for imperfections as I have been. However, with the Micro-OLED Crystal Super, and even when I'm intently interrogating the scene, I see no sign of the screen door. No traceable lines—nothing.

Look to the floor in the same game, or to the green guide that Pimax uses to warn you when you're wandering out of your boundary, and you'll spot some slight jittering on finer details on both QLED and Micro-OLED models. However, it is less noticeable on Micro OLED than QLED.

Then there's vibrancy. Most know that an OLED panel naturally produces deep blacks, on account of the self-emissive nature of each pixel—essentially, per-pixel lighting. However, colours are also exceptional on an OLED panel and this Micro-OLED is no different. It's noticeable in combination with white levels and contrast. Within bright areas, due to its comparably large lighting zones, the QLED optical engine washes out a good part of any colour. This is especially noticeable on the Arizona Sunshine Remake icon in SteamVR, which is completely blown out on the QLED compared to the Micro-OLED, and that tracks throughout the sunny game. Micro-OLED has no such washout.

Now to come crashing back down to Earth. I kept myself in the dark on the price tag for the Micro-OLED optical engine for the longest time, but I'm all too aware of it today. It will set you back $1,199/£920. The Pimax Crystal Super with the Micro-OLED is $2,199/£1,700, or with any QLED optical engine is $1,799/£1,393. So, the question is whether Micro-OLED is worth an extra $400/£307?

I have to say, yeah, it probably is. Though I'm assuming something about your character there. I'm assuming that you're the type of person to spend big on a high-end VR headset to begin with. A budget-minded casual buyer might opt for the much more affordable Quest 3 and find that is plenty powerful, plenty fun, and plenty easy to use. The prospective customer of the Pimax Crystal Super 8K Micro-OLED is not that.

The Crystal Super is actually a pretty clunky device in ways. It's not as convenient, nor as comfortable, and while it does have inside-out tracking, it's still a tethered headset requiring a PC that's able to handle a very high resolution. It feels like a VR headset that hasn't got with the programme that even Valve, creator of the Valve Index, has ditched in favour of the streaming-first and standalone Steam Frame.

But the picture quality—oh, the picture quality—is too good on the Crystal Super to ignore. And the audio, too, from the optional DMAS earphones that keep the ear speaker dream alive—possibly the best thing about the Valve Index. As a headset for your average VR user, the Pimax doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But for an enthusiast that talks a little too much about subpixels and screen doors, yeah, there's a lot to like. Micro-OLED is seriously expensive but seriously good. At the very least, it's a lot cheaper than the Apple Vision Pro.

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.

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.

The Asus ROG Xreal Micro-OLED gaming glasses are... weird. This is the conclusion I've drawn after spending ten minutes with them at CES 2026, so take that as you will. However, it was enough time to realise that, while on paper they seem like they might be a good idea, in practice, it's... complicated.

The idea is, you get a virtual 177-inch monitor beamed in front of your eyeballs via a Micro-OLED display within the glasses, covering 95% of your vision with a 57-degree field of view of excellent gaming fidelity. Why have a massive screen on your wall, when you can have a tiny one that creates the same effect in a wearable form factor?

Mmm. We'll get on to that in a minute, because I've got some ergonomic issues to discuss first.

For a start, there's a substantial cable attached to the rear of the left arm, which makes putting them on a very awkward event. I did it in public and nearly poked myself in the eye, as the glasses seem destined to fall in on themselves as you bring them towards your face.

Secondly, they made me look like a dork. Yes, I look like a dork already. You're very funny. But there's something very uncool about wearing gaming shades, especially ones with a fair amount of tech crammed in the front.

There's also a strip of RGB on each side, which really, really doesn't help with the aesthetic. The Asus glasses are reminiscent at first of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but in person they're a little too "Buddy Holly goes cyberpunk" for my liking.

"But what about the effect?", I hear you cry. Well, the image quality of the 240 Hz Micro-OLED display is actually pretty good, despite its relatively low 1080p resolution. Unfortunately, the glasses themselves are bulky enough, and the frames restrictive enough, that the experience is ruined by a distinct impression that you're all hemmed in.

The idea is to create the illusion of a massive display in front of your face, but in practice it felt to me like looking at a gigantic screen through a small gap in someone's front room window.

The screen also stayed in one spot no matter how I moved my head, for technical AR-based reasons I don't pretend to entirely understand. I've since learned this is because they were in "Anchor Mode", which I found very, very disorienting.

Angling my head back at the exact right angle to view the screen again had me looking like an old man trying to read a bus timetable on a stormy night. It's not, you'll undoubtedly be surprised to hear, a refined experience.

Anyway, I futzed around in a racing game for a bit, decided they weren't for me, and put them back on the stand where they belong. Certainly, they were drawing a lot of attention at the Asus booth. But as something I'd actually want to own? Nah, I'm good I think. Onwards.

In the first few days of the year, Asus has come in with a pair of gaming glasses that may be a contender for worst-named tech product at CES 2026.

As reported by Wccftech, the Asus ROG Xreal R1 AR is a set of glasses with a 240 Hz Micro-OLED screen which projects a virtual 171-inch monitor that effectively sits 4 meters away. Asus reports the glasses can cover 95% of the "human focus area" with its 57-degree field of view.

The one spec that gives me pause here is the FHD resolution (aka 1080p). With a screen being so close to your eyes and intended to give such a huge screen digital experience, this feels very low given how large the virtual screen will be.

Still, the display is impressive, with the Xreal R1 AR being the first 240 Hz gaming glasses. A Micro-OLED screen should look mighty impressive, but font fringing is a worry on OLED panels, especially at lower resolutions. These are designed as gaming glasses, so that should be less of a worry, but it's certainly something I'd consider if I wanted to use them in a productivity capacity too.

The glasses can plug into a control dock, which comes with DisplayPort and HDMI ports, for swapping between multiple devices. It's also compatible with mobile phones and Asus' gaming handhelds via a USB Type-C input.

The control dock can be left at home when not needed, which means you could technically bring the glasses and do some big-screen gaming on a train if you had the confidence. At 91 grams, the glasses don't seem super bulky, even if the idea of gaming glasses seems a tad cumbersome in the first place.

Asus does appear to have put thought into the onboarding process. Not only can it connect to the Asus ROG Ally or ROG Ally X without any setup, but the glasses also have 3D depth of field technology, which enables Anchor Mode. This allows you to pin a display to a fixed point, which you can look away from, without any worries.

This announcement comes just weeks after headsets using Meta's Horizon OS were put on ice. As someone who has spent a decent bit of time in VR, I get the appeal of projecting a huge virtual gaming screen right in front of me, but gaming glasses, especially at such a low resolution, feel like a big sell.

Ultimately, whether or not Asus' new glasses will be worth it depends heavily on the price point, and we don't have that just yet. The Xreal R1 AR glasses are reportedly launching in the first half of 2026, but that's about all we know. Still, it's not a bad way to kick off CES 2026.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Call me a nerd if you must, but I often think about the Apple Vision Pro. The VR/AR headset was a rare misstep from the company, a device that was subject to immediate ridicule upon its release primarily thanks to the fact it looked like a pair of SCUBA goggles, and came with a ludicrous $3,499 price tag.

It's just been updated with a new M5 chip and a bizarre headband, but yep, that's the Vision Pro alright—still looking like an intriguing, but oddly-designed take on how the future of wearable tech should be.

Well, Samsung has just launched its Galaxy XR headset, and if I'm not mistaken, I think I can hear the poor old Vision Pro howling from over here. Samsung looks to have used Apple's product as an example of what not to do, as many of the critiques of the Vision Pro seem fixed—on paper, at least.

The pricing, for one. At $1,800, the Galaxy XR is still a bit of a teeth-clencher, but it's still nearly half the price of Apple's initial offering. It's also a good-looking device, with an outer screen that doesn't appear to display your bugged-out eyeballs to all and sundry.

Sure, I don't think I'd be quite brave enough to wear one in public, but its got futuristic vibes that dip into the stylish, in my book. I reckon I'd still get my lunch money stolen if I wore one in my local park, but still. Progress.

It also runs Android XR, which is where I should probably start explaining the difference between VR, AR, and XR. VR, as I'm sure you're already aware, stands for Virtual Reality, ie complete immersion in a digital environment, while AR, or Augmented Reality, sticks digital elements on top of the world around you. Think Ray-Ban Meta glasses. When they work, that is.

XR is a combination of the two, and includes MR, or Mixed Reality, because we live in a complicated world expressed primarily in initialisms now for some reason. In essence, XR headsets can do all three, which Samsung has achieved by covering the Galaxy XR with 12 different cameras, along with five inertial movement sensors and a flicker sensor.

All this data is then pushed through a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, complete with a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, before the output is sent to two 3552 x 3840 resolution Micro-OLED internal displays and beamed through the lenses within.

Apple's software implementation left a lot to be desired in the OG Vision Pro, whereas Android XR looks to be a whole lot more customisable thanks to its open ecosystem. And as you might have guessed with the addition of the NPU, the Galaxy XR is promising a plentiful array of AI software features, complete with an app that allows you to draw circles around real world objects to search for information about anything in front of you. Which will make you look debonair and dashing, I'm sure.

Finally, just to stick the boot in, it appears that Samsung has fixed one last complaint about the Vision Pro for good measure—the reported feeling of claustrophobia when you wear one.

Verge reviewer Victoria Song has already tried out a pair, and reports that not only is the Galaxy XR much lighter and better fitting than Apple's original set, but there's an option to detach the light shield in order to leave the bottom of the goggles open, so you can get a sense of the outside world in your periphery while you use it.

Which will likely help those who find traditional VR headsets a little nauseating, like myself. It's also worth pointing out that the new M5-chipped Vision Pro is even heavier than the original, which suggests some of the right lessons are still yet to be learned at Apple HQ.

So, will all this convince me to buy a Galaxy XR? I doubt it. For a start, that price tag is still mahoosive, and when I could pick up several outstanding gaming monitors for the same price, I'm happy to leave my virtual experiences on a flat, desk-based plane for the most part, thanks very much.

But, I still think Samsung might have a winner on its hands. It seems like a well-thought-out device overall, and the price is low enough that a few of the more well-heeled among us might be tempted. I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out that we test a lot of VR headsets, and that Jacob and James, our two VR/AR/XR enthusiasts, seem rather impressed by what they've seen so far.

We'll have to try out one for ourselves to be sure, but in the meantime, spare a thought for the Apple Vision Pro. It flew too close to the sun, by my estimations. Or, if the aesthetics are anything to go by, too close to the bottom of the sea. Sorry.

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.

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.

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'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.

A few days ago we were treated to a sneak peak of the recent collaboration between Xbox and Meta Quest. The Xbox themed virtual reality headset was leaked by a BestBuy employee earlier this week, but now the official news blast is out. This limited edition black and green Meta Quest 3S is now available for purchase on Meta's website, or at Best Buy for folks in the USA, Argos and EE for UK readers.

The headset looks almost exactly how we pictured it, harkening back to the original Xbox design. The matt black finish is highlighted with vibrant green trimmings, which I have to admit do look pretty cool. There's something to a VR setup that's giving Matrix aesthetics, just as long as I don't also have to be held in a weird gooey egg thing while machines harvest my life force. The headset would have to be a little bit cooler before I sign up for that.

The special Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition bundle is going for $400 USD, but includes a bit of extra kit. Alongside the black and green 128 GB Meta Quest 3S, you also get Meta Touch Plus controllers, a limited-edition Xbox Wireless controller, and a Meta Quest Elite strap all themed to match.

Alongside the bundled hardware are also a couple of subscriptions to help let you try out some VR games. You get 3 months of Meta Horizon+ and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to try. This will let folks try games like Asgard's Wrath 2, which has been a highlight for VR gamers since its release.

Judging by the included Xbox Wireless controller, this bundle isn't intended to limit folks to VR games on the headset. Instead it looks designed to be used as sort of theatre room replacement, where you can play all your Xbox games from the comfort of your headset. It's also worth noting if you already have GamePass these extra 3 months should stack and give you a bit of extra time on your subscription.

The thing about this bundle I struggle with, however, is you'll never see it when using it. Half the joy of a limited edition fancy looking console or controller is looking down at it and smiling smugly to yourself during use. Thinking how it's cool that you have this nifty version of a thing you love that's just a little bit different to what's out there. This is really hard to do while wearing a VR headset.

If you are keen on this collaboration, you might want to get in fast; stock is said to be super limited for this bundle. Personally, I'd forgo this and work on getting a full Quest 3 instead. Those heightened specs are well worth the price difference—which is why that's our pick as best VR headset right now—and that's certainly more beneficial than a black and green colourway.

I utterly despise Google's AI summaries. I dislike how they're placed right at the top of the page, I dislike how prone to hallucinating the answers I'm searching for are, and I dislike that when it does offer something vaguely helpful, it's almost definitely scraped from another human that actually did the legwork. Thankfully, the Bye Bye, Google AI browser extension means I no longer have to glower at them—if only I could do the same for similar eyesores, like bus stop ads and marketing billboards, in real life.

Software engineer Stijn Spanhove is currently tinkering with an AR project that does just that. Using Snapchat's Spectacles and Google's Gemini, he's built an XR app that deploys the power of ad block via the lightweight frame of a wearable (via Tom's Hardware). Unfortunately, as an experimental project that Spanhove is still tinkering with, ads are currently being replaced by glaring red boxes.

That quirk aside, the demo video Spanhove shared on X is no less neat. The app's positional consistency is impressive, and is seen 'blocking' out billboards, newspaper ads, and even branded food packaging once activated. This is thanks to the use of Snap's Depth Cache library shared via GitHub, but this also makes the project a Spectacles exclusive for the time being.

Besides the Snap exclusivity, the biggest hurdles to my mind are those garish red boxes that are arguably more distracting than the ads themselves. Perhaps developer Stijn Spanhove will in future add the option for users to replace ads with something of their choice—like an AR mural to Miku Hatsune…hypothetically, I mean.

More broadly speaking, big tech keeps trying to make smart specs happen, despite even Meta admitting earlier this year they'd yet to crack a killer use case for their in-development Orion AR glasses. Speaking of Meta, the fact that what you snap or record with the company's Ray-Ban smart glasses may be used to train AI models also turns me off from the whole tech wearables fad.

That's all before even mentioning this student project out of Harvard that uses Meta's smart glasses to instantly dox anyone the wearer claps eyes upon. Okay, I admit that's a lot of doom and gloom about wearables—but you're no longer thinking about my AR Miku Hatsune mural, are you?

With Trump's tariffs on tech leading the PC gaming industry in uncertainty around potential price hikes, HTC Vive is taking advantage of the situation with a special sale. This gives anyone who didn't manage to get themselves fully kitted out in some of the best VR machines on offer the chance to do so at pre-tariff prices. It's a smart move, turning the impending price hikes into an opportunity for one last taste of affordable gaming for those in the US.

While we've definitely seen tech prices go up due to the tariffs, it's worth noting we don't know exactly how much HTC intends to price things in the future. As such, how much of a deal these regularly priced pieces of tech end up being is up in the air.

"Order by 5/31, we'll cover the tariff cost!" boasts Vive's sale site. Essentially it's a sale, but for the prices you'd' have expected to see before these announced taxes. The sale covers the Vive Focus Vision, Vive Ultimate Tracker 3+1 Kit, Vive Tracker (3.0), and the Base Station 2.0. This should let most people get setup for a full VR experience, or just grab those last bits before having to pay the extra on top.

For those brand new to VR, the Vive Focus Vision might be the way to go. It's the latest headset from Vive and works as a PC headset as well as a standalone VR machine. This means you can go via display port and have a wicked high fidelity experience with a capable PC connected or just go lite mode with what will run on the headset. It also offers mixed reality, eye tracking, and additional tracker support.

If you compare to the potentially more commonly owned Meta's Quest 3 headset, it's similar but more feature complete. Realy, the Vive Focus Vision looks more like what the Apple Vision Pro headset was claiming to be, only probably good. It currently goes for $999 on the website, so you've got until the end of the month if you want to pick it up before that price goes up.

The Vive Ultimate Tracker 3+1 Kit is a set of accessories that allows you to track more of your body than the standard setup. This one needs to be paired with a SteamVR compatible headset and controllers, so is better as an augment to a current setup, or an addon to the Vive Focus Vision. Once set up, it lets you track your head, hands, waist, and feet without lag. It's worth being aware that the benefit of something like this will depend on the games you're looking to play too. You can pick this up in the not-quite-a-sale sale for $599.

If that seems like a bit of overkill for your setup, then there's the Vive Tracker (3.0). This is a cheaper tracker that works with base station-compatible headsets and allows you to replace controllers with your body movement. Again it'll depend on what you're playing and your setup as to whether or not this is worthwhile, but you can pick it up for $129 until the 31st.

Lastly, there's the Base Station 2.0, which works with Vive Pro Series and Cosmos Elite headsets. This allows for higher precision wide-area tracking of up to Up to 1000 sq. ft, so it's a good bet for those that have a whole room setup for their VR gaming shenanigans. This one is priced at $199, but at time of writing doesn't appear to be in stock on the HTC website.

Whether or not Vive's lineup is what you're looking for in a headset, this sale makes a good point. If you're looking to get into VR, or any other kind of gaming tech, it might be worth doing so before price hikes take hold if they haven't already. Hopefully we'll see some other companies follow in HTC's footsteps here and offer some tariff sales to help offset the sudden shock these price hikes are likely to bring to the wallets of the general public.

Something that always impresses me in videogame tech is our ability to make it feel like you're doing something you're not. It's wild how quickly we get used to pushing buttons to control our virtual selves. Feedback for these interactions, on the other hand, has always been one of the weakest factors when it comes to interacting with these digital worlds. Things like rumble feedback, and even smell-a-vision can help with this, but they still don't really come close to approximating touch.

VR is one of the fields making the strongest advancements with all kinds of haptic feedbacks, partially because it's so often used for tech outside of games. These little innovations, usually designed for specific tasks, often make their way back to the gaming world. One such enhancement I'm hoping to see come to games is something a bit like this origami based Shiftly. A device designed to use complex folds to mimic various shapes and surfaces for use in VR.

IEEE Spectrum spotted Shiftly after its sister paper published a study where people tried out the device blindfolded and reported their feedback. It was then further tested in VR, and tested again at a conference in Los Angeles. Each time the users were asked to touch the device and then match it up with an image that most likely resembled what they were feeling. The resulting consensus seems to be that this little origami machine does a decent job of replicating most simple surfaces.

Moreover it can do it relatively quickly thanks to the origami design. For simple transitions, it can take as little as 0.25 seconds for Shiftly to transform. Even more complex ones take only around 4 seconds to complete a transition. Curves and waves seem to offer the best representation, while sharp diamond shapes were the most difficult to identify. Of course, Shiftly can't do anything more complicated like a mug handle, yet, but it's still cool to see what it is capable of so far.

“This could indicate that Shiftly can provide plausible haptic feedback for a wide range of surface geometries,” says Tobias Batik, an associate researcher at the Complexity Science Hub. Batik started work on Shiftly for his master’s thesis with the Virtual & Augmented Reality Group at TU Wien, in Austria.

As the tech is new, the use for videogames is fairly limited but it has my mind racing with possibility. Even in its current iteration, I can imagine using it to enhance my VR gaming experience. Imagine a game like No Man's Sky where the different rock minerals on some of the trillions of new planets to be added have different textures when you touch them. Or even feeling slightly different handles for weapons you pick up in something like Gorn. Maybe a TekDek style finger skating game with ramps, or bomb defuser game like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes with a morphing tactile box.

For now, my dreams will remain dreams, but I'm hopeful we'll start to see some of these advanced haptics make their way to gaming soon. For now I'll have to settle for my glorious VR treadmill antics without anything fun to touch.

While OLED gaming monitors might be a stretch goal for many of us, miniature versions are already being crammed into VR headsets. Much like their bigger, desktop-dwelling cousins, however, the price can be pretty prohibitive. Pimax may be bucking that trend, as it's announced the Dream Air SE, a lighter weight, slightly lower-specced version of its Dream Air Micro-OLED VR headset with a much cheaper pre-order price than the standard model.

It's still $899 for the Lighthouse version, which comes without controllers. Boo. Still, that's a full $1,000 cheaper than the non-SE controllerless version, and what you're getting in the headset itself is still pretty impressive.

Two 2,560 x 2,560 resolution Micro-OLED panels sat behind tailored pancake lenses, for a start. That's not quite as impressive as the 3,840 x 3,552 resolution Sony versions you'll find in the standard Dream Air, but the SE should be much less hardware-demanding as a result. And it's still a fair few more pixels than the 2,064 x 2,208 you'll find in each LCD panel of our current best VR headset pick, the Meta Quest 3.

Plus you get integrated audio and eye tracking, and the whole headset weighs less than 150 grams, which makes it significantly lighter than many traditional headsets I've strapped to my skull over the years. It's a downright gorgeous-looking design, too, if you're into the "I-just-fell-through-an-Apple-factory-in-Cyberpunk-2077" aesthetic.

Should you wish for the luxury of included controllers (and Pimax's camera-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping technology, negating the need for a base station tracking solution), you'll be looking at a total cost of $1,199. The best VR headsets we've tested to date are significantly cheaper than that, but none of them come with Micro-OLED screens, and they don't come cheap.

That price isn't exactly chump change, granted—but compared to the $2,099 you'd pay for the controller-including regular Dream Air (or the ludicrous $3,499 you'd pay for an Apple Vision Pro), I'd say it's a relatively reasonable sum.

If that's still too pricey a proposition to pay in one go, you could take a look at the Pimax Prime membership program, which lets you pay off the base price of a headset before paying instalments on the rest, with a discount available for the one-off payment in relation to the standard retail price.

It's all a bit overcomplicated if you ask me, but if Micro-OLED VR is where your dreams lie but the price is holding you back, it's probably worth considering.

I haven't had a chance to get hands-on with the Dream Air myself, but I did visit the Pimax booth at CES 2025 for a play around with its Crystal Light VR headset, and the results were impressive.

I've never been particularly sold on VR in general, but as a newly-discovered flight sim fan I have to say it really adds something to the experience of bombing around in a fighter jet in DCS World.

Plus, our main critique of the Pimax Crystal Light is its overall bulkiness. The Dream Air and Dream Air SE look downright svelte by comparison, which matters when you plan on wearing something attached to the front of your face for a sweaty, adrenaline-filled gaming session.

Now, where did I put my wallet? Oh, that's right—I've locked it away to prevent myself from buying more gorgeous tech I don't necessarily need. Want, though? Most definitely.

In a Japanese first for the console, the Kochi District Court has delivered a guilty sentence for modifying and selling Nintendo Switch consoles. A 58-year-old transportation worker from Ryugasaki City, Fumihiro Otobe has been met with a fine and jail time for soldering and selling second-hand Switch consoles loaded with pirated software. Though these consequences seem like a slap on the wrist when compared to Nintendo's usual litigious tenacity.

TechSpot reports Fumihiro Otobe was arrested in January this year after his house was searched under the suspicion of modifying Switch consoles to run pirated games. Police found four modified Switch units which had their circuit boards soldered allowing them to run modified games. Though they likely didn't even need to look with Otobe confessing immediately upon being charged saying "I was curious if people would think I was great for selling modified machines."

Otobe does what Nintendon't.

While far from impossible, modifying Switch console hardware isn't easy. Even when using an also illegal premade modders chip, there's some super finicky soldering involved that most don't recommend consumers tackle by themselves. So, even if the police and Nintendo clearly aren't, I'm a little impressed by Otobe's efforts here.

After modifying, Otobe was selling these modified switches online for 28,000 yen or about $195 USD. They also came generously prepackaged with 27 pirated games which could be worth somewhere between nothing and $70 USD a pop. Given a brand new Switch is about $300 USD, and even a Switch 2 is only slated to be $450, that seems like a pretty good deal. Morally questionable, sure, but still a good deal.

What makes Otobe the great's work really impressive here is just how lightly he got away with it all. He's only been ordered to pay a 500,000 yen or around $3,500 USD fine, and his two-year prison sentence has been suspended for three years. This usually means as long as Otobe plays nicely for the next few years he might not have to serve any time at all. It seems fair given this we can assume his scale of operation was pretty small and you'd have to be one of a lucky few to score one of his consoles.

The small scale here is also why we see such a stark contrast in punishment when compared to other Switch hackers. In 2022 we saw one of the faces behind creating a slew of those Nintendo console modding chips we talked about earlier receive a 40-month sentence and a $14.5 million fine for his crimes. That 400,000% price hike on the fine is less ridiculous when you realise he was part of an operation that far exceeded the hobby tamperings of Otobe.

His last name is also Bowser, so it seems fair Nintendo wanted to make sure they got as many gold coins out of him as possible.

There've certainly been a lot of Valve Deckard rumours over the last couple of years, but this one, at least, seems more tangible than previous ones referencing driver files and so on, because it's at least about something physical that's actually moving around in the world.

The word on the street according to prolific Deckard leaker SadlyItsBradley (via Notebookcheck) is that "Valve has been importing equipment to manufacture VR headset facial interfaces inside the USA. The equipment is being provided by Teleray Group who also manufactured the gaskets for the Valve Index and HP G2 Omnicept."

SadlyItsBradley is a YouTuber who talks all things VR and who has previously divulged VR leaks, some of which have been pretty spot-on, such as various ones about Meta Quest headsets. One such leak featured CAD drawings of the then-unannounced Meta Quest Pro, and this led to Meta cutting ties with the contractor that gave SadlyItsBradley this information.

According to a shipping manifest reported by the tech YouTuber, Valve's also been receiving shipments of face gaskets, these being the foam that sit around your eyes when you place a VR headset over your head.

All of this, if true, points towards Valve Deckard, a long-rumoured Valve headset said to be standalone, unlike the Valve Index which requires a PC to power it. The Index was a fantastic, top-tier headset when it launched, but that was almost six years ago, now. Tech has certainly moved on since then—the much cheaper Meta Quest 3 has a higher resolution, for instance.

So, some might say it's high time Valve released a new industry-busting VR headset. It would make sense for this to be a standalone Deckard given the market has shifted in this direction, not to mention the fact that Valve now has experience creating a cracking entry-level, value-oriented physical product in the form of the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

Late last year there was word that codename 'Roy' controllers for Deckard were being tooled for mass production, alongside a Steam Controller 2. Now, if these latest shipment and import rumours are true, there's even more reason to believe that a standalone VR headset from Valve could be right around the corner, though with Valve there's no telling how far away that corner really is (Half Life 3, anyone?).

SadlyItsBradley gives some interesting speculation, too, this being that Valve might be making these import moves to avoid any potential future US tariffs.

The latest on this front is that Trump's hit a pause on them for most countries except China, but things are so up-and-down right now that it's hard to tell what the future will hold. Valve might be smart to pre-empt anything and get its Deckard ducks in order nice and early.

We'll have to wait and see whether these rumours bear fruit, but if they do, we can be hopeful they'll be mighty tasty. Given Valve's recent record with physical tech, Deckard could be great news for prospective VR gamers. Here's hoping, anyway.

Sometimes small is actually big—at least when it comes to advancements in LED technology. For a bright, clear picture, OLED screens are where it's at; they easily outperform traditional LED displays and have breathtaking Micro-LED displays beat when it comes to price—though that's not hard to do when a reasonably sized Micro-LED screen can easily cost thousands of dollars still. We all love a screen that boasts accurate backlighting, but not that much.

Researchers at Zhejiang University and Cambridge University have unveiled LED display technology that's even smaller and potentially a darn sight more efficient. In a blog post, it was announced the team had created not just micro-LEDs but nano-LEDs featuring "pixel lengths of 90 nanometers" (via Tom's Hardware). These make them not only the smallest LEDs in the world but also mean screens of the future leveraging this tech could potentially cram in an astonishing 127,000 pixels per inch.

To put that into perspective, a 27-inch 4K gaming monitor has just a piffling 163 pixels per inch. Even if you start counting the individual sub-pixels, one for each colour channel, you're still getting less than 1,000 per inch.

So, what's the secret sauce of these teeny tiny LEDs? Perovskite, a mineral most commonly used in solar panels (not unlike this wacky solar-powered laptop from Lenovo). As such, the researchers refer to their itty bitty, Perovskite-based LEDs as "nano-PeLEDs," and they claim that "unlike the conventional micro-LEDs based on III-V semiconductors, the micro/nano-PeLEDs exhibit minimum performance reduction upon downsizing." Talk about small but mighty.

Developing these nano-PeLEDs was hardly straightforward though, as Perovskite tends to be too fragile to withstand the photolithographic processes usually required to create LED displays. To put it very simply, the researchers instead deployed a bespoke process that deploys "lithographically patterned windows in an additional insulating layer" to protect the Perovskite in a way that also doesn't compromise image quality. For a much longer answer, the team wrote at length about the process in an article recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

When discussing the future of this technology, gaming does get an explicit mention from the team. To briefly rewind, Micro-LEDs are a compelling option for VR headsets despite their expense. However, to complete the illusion of virtual reality, you need a screen that can produce an image that holds up to scrutiny at blinking distance.

Unfortunately, the efficiency of a Micro-LED display taps out when you really try to hide the seams between pixels by making them much smaller. For the time being, LCD and micro-OLED displays rule the VR roost, but Nano-PeLEDs could instead succeed where Micro-LEDs have so far failed.

Professor Zhao Baodan of Zhejiang University muses in the blog post, "The efficiency of micro-LEDs drops rapidly when the pixel sizes are smaller than 10 micrometers, which are the desirable pixel sizes for high-end [virtual reality] applications with ultra-high resolutions. Halide perovskites are a new class of semiconductors. It would be interesting to see how perovskite LEDs perform when they are made extremely small."

Virtual reality dreams aside for now, the team have partnered with LinkZill, a Hangzhou-based company specialising in thin-film transistor tech, in order to jointly create "a prototypical active-matrix micro-PeLED display driven by a [thin-film transistor] backplane." This prototype is likely the first step towards more widespread commercial uptake of micro- and nano-PeLED tech…so you could say, the future looks bright. And very, very small.

Last week we reported that Varjo Aero VR headsets seem to not be working with RTX 5090s, but at the time there was no official response from Nvidia other than asking to fill out a driver feedback form and give more info. In the latest 572.83 driver announcement, however, Nvidia has acknowledged the problem as an 'open issue'.

Under the 'open issues' section, the Nvidia driver forum announcement post says: "Varjo Aero VR headset may fail to establish connection." (The reason I'm referring to the forum post rather than the Release Notes [PDF] is because this particular issue, amongst others, is mysteriously absent from the official document.)

That's potentially good news for Varjo Aero VR headset owners with an RTX 50-series graphics card, then—though of course we'll only be sure once the issue is moved to the 'fixed' column hopefully in one of the upcoming driver releases. Though Nvidia does point out with its driver issues section that these aren't always its fault.

The problem is that the headset just doesn't seem to work with some users' RTX 5090 cards at all, at least not without hacky workarounds. Users have been trying all sorts, including plugging the headset into a Thunderbolt expansion card, essentially cutting the monitor out entirely.

The RTX 50-series hasn't exactly been issue-free thus far, either. Black screen issues have been the main bugbear, and previous driver releases have claimed to fix these black screen problems.

It's noteworthy, however, that the announcement for this new driver release states "GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs crashes with black screen" has been fixed… again... which means more fixes for more black screen bugs.

It does appear to be Nvidia that's responsible for fixing this particular Varjo issue, though that's not yet confirmed. A user in the original forum thread regarding the issue said: "Varjo Support informed me that they are awaiting a driver to release to resolve these issues, but at this time this is outside of their control and can only be fixed by Nvidia."

Well, at least Nvidia seems to be recognising this now and is considering it an open issue for its own drivers. Fingers crossed there's a fix in the pipeline.

Sometimes I rue my position as the PC Gamer hardware team honorary weirdo. Because while I'm naturally drawn to the unusual, the interesting, and the downright bizarre, it means I sometimes have to write about bits of tech that gross me out—and this VR-ready electronic tongue is doing just that.

A team of researchers at The Ohio State University have developed this monstro… interesting project to attempt to replicate realistic flavours for virtual reality experiences (via New Scientist). Essentially, open your mouth, insert this potentially gag-inducing electronic strip under your tongue, and delight in the experience of having artificially-flavoured hydrogels pumped into your most sensitive of areas.

Well, one of the most sensitive, anyway. The team has published its work under the catchy title of "A sensor-actuator–coupled gustatory interface chemically connecting virtual and real environments for remote tasting", although they've realised it's a bit of a mouthful (apologies) and instead chosen to call it the e-Taste system.

Delicious (or not so delicious) food is first analysed with sensors to detect flavours, which are then replicated via the oral insertion of several taste-inducing chemicals—these being sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami.

I don't know about you, but nothing makes me hungrier than the thought of magnesium chloride and glutamate hydrogels being pumped under my tongue by an electronic strip. Time for lunch.

And I'm back. Apparently the system works relatively well, as 70% of a small test group of 10 people reported they experienced the same level of sourness as a real sample of sour food when compared to the artificial flavouring. Moving on to more complex flavours, 80% of test subjects reported they could distinguish between lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup, and coffee.

Not a great achievement, I would argue, as I reckon you couldn't find two more totally disparate flavours than lemonade and fish soup. Still, it's early days for the project, and perhaps the beginnings of a much tastier virtual reality future to come.

Or not, as the case may be. Speaking to New Scientist, professor Alan Chalmers of the University of Warwick points out that replicating flavours purely in the mouth has limited uses, as we humans use many of our senses together to perceive taste.

"Next time you have a strawberry, close your nose and eyes" says Chalmers, which sounds a bit like a romantic evening for one. "A strawberry is very sour, but it is perceived as sweet because of its aroma and the red colour. So if you send just sour across with their device, you will never know that it is actually from a strawberry.”

Deep, man. Still, the e-Taste system is not the first mouth-involving hardware we've covered over the years, taking its place next to Planet Licker and Kiss Racer, two games you control with a peripheral-linked tongue.

And as for the virtual reality uses here? I'm not sure my Skyrim VR experience would be enhanced by tasting every mid-dragon-fight wheel of cheese, although I'm prepared to change my mind under test conditions.

Actually, scratch that. You can keep your e-tongues to yourself, thanks very much—although I look forward to seeing a plethora of gagging attendees at VR booths during my next trade show visit. You'll find me in the food hall, enjoying a lovely slice of cake and laughing myself sick.

After buying a fancy new $2,000 RTX 5090 card, some VR users are discovering their Varjo Aero headsets are not working with their rig. The answer, for now, seems to be plugging the headset in via a Thunderbolt cable, setting the Varjo Base (Varjo's software) to 'Very Low', or waiting for drivers—but none of these options are ideal.

As originally posted in the Nvidia forums under a thread titled "Please make Varjo VR Headsets work with RTX 5090!", one user reports that after almost two months of trying, they could not get their Varjo Aero working on their RTX 5090. In response, Nvidia staff asked them to fill out a driver feedback form and capture a crash dmp file.

In our Varjo Aero review, we liked the VR headset's display, found it all very comfortable to wear, and praised its price point, even though the required base station, lack of included controllers, and heavy feel weighed it down somewhat. At the time, there was no support for AMD GPUs, and now you can add reports of no support for RTX 5090s to the pile.

We don't have the equipment to hand, so can't verify this problem first hand. However, digging a bit deeper shows multiple reports of the same issue over at the Varjo Discord server.

A handful of solutions have come in so far, with perhaps the most creative being one user plugging their headset into a Thunderbolt 4 expansion card without using the included Varjo Link Box. This seems to effectively take the output from the port and redirect it to the VR headset, which means users are losing access to their monitor whilst playing VR.

Another user claims that setting their Varjo Base to 'Very Low' has fixed the problem, though others have had less success with this approach. It seems like tinkering heavily is the only way users have managed to get any sort of success from setting up their Varjo VR headset with their shiny new RTX 5090.

In the original Nvidia forum thread, user Sepian78 claims: "Varjo Support informed me that they are awaiting a driver to release to resolve these issues, but at this time this is outside of their control and can only be fixed by Nvidia."

We have reached out to Nvidia for comment on this story and when we might expect a potential solution.

This story is reminiscent of the fact that many new RTX 50-series owners were met with black screen issues following their launch. Before the VBIOS and driver fixes for the cards were released, our Dave found you could often bypass it by setting your monitor to 60 Hz, though this was not a satisfactory long-term workaround for a high-end gaming GPU, and didn't work for every app. Dave found these black screen issues while using HDMI, so RTX 50-series display bugs aren't solely the purview of Display Port, right now.

The Varjo Aero, which seems to be the only reported VR headset I could find with this issue, was discontinued in early 2024. Other VR headsets do not seem affected by this peculiar problem.

We've all seen those Meta Quest adverts, in which a practically-challenged human being wears a VR headset for basic construction tasks, like building a crib, with great success. However, The Swedish Maker has taken things further by several orders of magnitude—by wearing a Meta Quest 3 for the entirety of a woodworking project, including while using power tools.

He's fine. That's the main takeaway. Still, the project threw up some obvious challenges right from the off, as the headset's outer cameras introduce a small amount of lag between what you see, and what's actually happening with your hands in relation to high-speed cutting tools.

Our intrepid host set out to build a bedside table with built-in drawers, a not-entirely-simple project—especially with VR headgear involved in every step (via Hackaday). At multiple points he complains of nausea and discomfort, but the crucial step of cutting large pieces of wood with both a table saw and a handheld power saw is a difficult watch, particularly as visual warping means the blade seems to move and wobble by itself.

Rather you than me. Still, it's not exactly The Swedish Maker's first rodeo when it comes to woodworking, and as a result, he took some reasonable steps to up the safety factor.

After declaring "Let's start, just do it" (surely the beginning phrase of all great human endeavours), he places his hands in a very wide stance on either side of a piece of wood being cut by a table saw, before letting a piece fall off the end of the bench after the cut was made rather than attempting to catch it.

It's still a heart in the mouth moment, but hey, it could have gone a lot worse. In fact, all of this seems like a terrible idea—but the project does throw up the odd plus point for using a VR headset while you work.

The ability to bring up a PDF file of the project in his field of view seemed to help solve some design issues, and at one point he even displays a plan on the side of his workshop while working outdoors. Still, that visual warping effect meant that it was very difficult to measure things accurately, while looking at other displays through the headset's camera delivered bouts of nausea that seem genuinely uncomfortable.

"I'm officially taking a break," he declares at one point while looking like he might lose his breakfast. "It's so good to take the headset off."

Who could have predicted? Anyway, eventually a very handsome set of drawers is created, and while The Swedish Maker admits that it's not his best piece of work, it certainly looks a lot better than I could do without any headset "help."

As a massive, honking, end-of-article warning: Do not try any of this at home. The Swedish Maker is a highly skilled (if perhaps, risk-taking) woodworker with obvious experience, and it's this experience that means he emerges at the end with all his digits intact.

As the top YouTube comment points out, he's probably now going to be personally responsible for several new warning labels on VR headsets moving forward.

Leave the limb-endangering experimentation to the, err, professionals, that's what I say. It'll be a while before my buttocks unclench after watching the footage, at the very least.

Last month, Google introduced the Android XR platform in partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm, which is "a new operating system built for this next generation of computing". Now, Google has bought part of HTC Vive's engineering team, HTC Vive of course having ample experience engineering VR headsets.

Google says this handover of engineers is "subject to customary closing conditions" and emphasises that they are "an incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space, and we are looking forward to working with them to accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem."

With Android XR, Google is intending to "create a vibrant ecosystem of developers and device makers for Android XR." The OS itself should enable you to do all the kinds of MR (mixed reality) things that got people so initially hyped over the Vision Pro.

Google explains: "You can fill the space around you with apps and content, and with Gemini, our AI assistant, you can even have conversations about what you're seeing or control your device. Gemini can understand your intent, helping you plan, research topics and guide you through tasks."

Plus, you know, all the usual 'watch videos on a giant screen that's not really there' business—which I'd love to hate but can't help but quietly covet.

Google's not a stranger to the industry, although it's been a decade since its first attempt at smart glasses was abandoned, and its later Google Glass reboot ended in 2023. Hype for XR—especially for AR—does seem to be hotting up, after all, with projects like Meta's Orion offering a glimpse of an increasingly digitally enmeshed future.

Though with Android XR it's teaming up with Samsung for what is our first glimpse of actual hardware. Project Moohan is the name, and XR is the game.

With Android XR, all signs point to Google looking to compete with Meta on on the XR ecosystem front.

Meta's Horizon VR operating system is included on its Quest headsets, such as the Quest 3. Though that's all changing soon. Soon it will be available to third parties—it looks like Asus will be the first third-party manufacturer to use it.

Much in the same way that different Android device manufacturers must cede to the Google Play Store, Meta Horizon becoming the default OS for third-party VR and MR headsets and glasses could mean such device manufacturers needing to cede to a Horizon OS store.

In other words, it's possible that Meta could become to the VR ecosystem what Google is to the Android ecosystem, and Horizon being open to third-party devices is a step in this direction.

It's powerful to have your store at the centre of the "next computing platform", if that is how you feel about mixed reality. Meta definitely feels this way, it's said so.

Google might be pushing along similar lines here, hoping to compete in the VR OS/store ecosystem space. Talk of a "vibrant ecosystem of developers and device makers" certainly leans in this direction, as does Android XR's partnership with Qualcomm in particular—standalone VR headsets tend to use Arm chips such as Snapdragons from Qualcomm.

Who knows, maybe the next few years will see Meta and Google vying for proprietary ecosystem adoption across the VR space. Interesting times ahead.

A recent leak suggests some impressive features are coming to Asus' upcoming VR headset, like eye tracking, face tracking, and possibly even an OLED display, yet perhaps the most intriguing news is that it may be among the first third party Meta Horizon OS launches.

As reported on X by @Lunayian (via PCGamesN), Asus' new project, codenamed Tarius "will likely be one of the first 3P Horizon OS HMDs to ship" which is to say that the headset could ship with Meta's Horizon OS built in.

It is also currently planned to have both eye and face tracking, which is not only good for controlling the UI, but helps the likes of the PS VR2 run dynamic foveated rendering. Foveated rendering essentially dynamically renders the things you look at to a higher degree to allow you to get more power out of your rig.

For a headset like this, the implementation of something like foveated rendering will likely be software-based but, even if it doesn't have it, this could allow for better tracking, controls, and face reading in social apps like VR chat. Alongside this, the headset is rumoured to either have QD-LCD displays with local dimming or µOLED, a form of OLED display.

Luna has a good track record as a leaker in the VR space, previously showing renders of Project Ventura before launch, later known as the Meta Quest 3S. After this, they successfully reported on the Meta Quest 3S 'Action' button, accurately speculating on its use as a passthrough toggle.

The collaboration between Asus and Meta was officially announced early last year, with Lenovo and Microsoft also confirmed to be working with Meta. Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram statement laments the 'closed model' of Apple's iPhone ecosystem and likens Meta opening its OS for partners to the PC's 'open model'.

This is exciting news for Asus' project as it means more than just taking the look of the OS and Meta's menu layout. It is the implementation of spatial computing, with how it handles data and virtual spaces. It also grants users access to Meta's storefront, which is one of the key areas where Bytedance's Pico 4 Ultra loses out.

The tech rumoured to be in the headset so far, combined with Asus ROG's approach to computers implies that this will be a relatively high-end VR headset, and that could make it a formidable competitor in the market. The use of the OS suggests it is capable of working standalone, but the OS compatibility should grant it smoother access to PCVR and it also means any games you already own on Meta's platform should be playable at launch.

Meta's headsets are, undeniably, the best VR headsets right now, but a dominant force in the market and lack of competition can lead to a lack of innovation so new competitors working with Meta's OS could help level the playing field. Last year, a report suggested Meta would be taking a step back from hardware production, and opening its OS could help with that transition.

This way, Meta wins even if it loses.