Deckard lives. Valve have officially announced the long-leaked Steam Frame virtual reality headset, and as rumoured, it is indeed a hybrid VR kit: one that can play both high-fidelity games streamed from a PC, and simpler stuff that’s installed on the headset itself. A departure, then, from the Valve Index’s pure focus on cabled-up PC VR.
Yet neither is it a Meta Quest 3 with a Valve badge on it. Besides its smartphone-spec internals breaking new ground for the kind of hardware that Steam games can run on, the Frame is built with modularity in mind, potentially making it as upgradable and long-lived as an actual PC. As well as their other new gear, the refreshed Steam Machine and Steam Controller, I gave the Steam Frame a test run during a recent Valve visit, and mostly liked what I saw – though it’ll need to make sure its ambitions to do everything in the VR space are more firmly realised than they are right now.
