Steam Frame looks like an incredible VR headset

The Valve Index has been one of my favorite VR headsets I've used, but it's gotten a little long in the tooth. Today, Valve announced the follow up to their highly rated Index and it's called Steam Frame.

Sporting two 2160x2160 LCD panels, the Steam Frame is a stand alone VR headset with inside out tracking (Rest in peace, Lighthouses). Like the Index, it can run at 72Hz all the way up to 144Hz in experimental mode. Why didn't Valve go with OLED panels? Well, they are using pancake lenses, which will provide great clarity, but can lower the brightness of the displays. Thus, LCD panels were selected over OLED.

Eye tracking is built in and you'd think it would be used for foveated rendering. Well, there's also going to be foveated streaming, meaning it will stream at the highest bitrate the area you are looking at. Which is really cool and should help reduce the amount of bandwidth needed for streaming to the Steam Frame.

The battery is built into the back of the Steam Frame where it cups the back of your head, helping distribute the weight. While the Steam Frame comes with a strap that goes around your head, they will sell one with a top strap as well for a more secured fit.

While the knuckles are gone, we have controllers that are Meta Quest 3 like, but retains the ability to sense your fingers via capacitive touch. Valve will sell some straps so if you want the ability to let go of your controller without dropping it, that will still be possible. 

It is a stand alone headset meaning you can install games on it. Running on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Storage options include a 256GB or 1TB drive and the Steam Frame can expand on that with a built in micro-SD card slot. You can install Android apps via sideloading as well as Steam games. Yes, the headset runs an ARM version of SteamOS, which is pretty exciting.

There are pass through cameras, but they are only monochome meaning no full color pass through like the Quest 3. That's a little disappointing, but maybe someone will come out with a full color camera attachment for it. 

For wireless streaming, Valve is including a Wi-Fi 6E wireless adapter. With it operating at 6GHz and its bandwidth dedicated to streaming to the Steam Frame, it sounds like it'll have some very high quality wireless VR capabilities. The headset itself does have a Wi-Fi 7 chip so in the future if it needs it, it can utilize the higher bandwidth and speed of that standard.

It all looks pretty damn exciting and sounds like, on paper, a great follow up to the Valve Index. Look for the Steam Frame early next year with pricing coming near the time of release.