Valve's new Steam Frame wearable PC is a $1,059 headset with 256GB of storage, or $1,299 for a 1TB model, and it is aimed at gamers rather than the broader VR market. The company positions the device as an experimental spatial computer that can play a user's existing Steam library alongside VR titles. It ships with an optional top head strap and weighs just over 1 pound, or 469 grams, with that strap attached.
The Steam Frame costs two to three times as much as similar-looking headsets from Meta, and reviewers testing it for nearly three weeks describe an experience that still resembles early access hardware. Games have crashed hard enough to require a reboot, virtual objects, controls and audio have disappeared, and the device has lost power entirely more than once. Battery life runs one to two hours, and some fan noise is audible.
The headset can play games in several ways, including streaming a title in a window, streaming an entire PC desktop, or running software on its own Qualcomm chip. It includes a 6GHz wireless dongle for short-range PC streaming, though Valve's multi-link technology that balances Wi-Fi and the dongle currently works only when streaming a full PC. The wands emulate a full Xbox gamepad and include laser pointers that can cross between virtual screens, but the gamepad emulation does not work during full-PC streaming.
A tester used the Frame inside virtual reality with six virtual screens, three streaming from a desktop PC's three monitors and three running on the headset itself, placing Windows and Linux desktops side by side in one view. Attempting to add a seventh screen caused the device to fail, making all seven screens and the entire user interface vanish. Pass-through cameras work only with streaming windows, not with streaming entire PCs, and Bluetooth keyboards and mice paired to the Frame did not control a full-PC stream.
On its own chip, the Steam Frame offers more performance than expected, enough to play VR titles such as Half-Life: Alyx from start to finish, with fan-made Alyx mods natively supported. Lightweight flat games including Dave the Diver, Blue Prince and Streets of Rage 4 also ran on the device. The reported drawbacks center on instability: crashes, bugs and inconsistencies that make the product feel unfinished rather than a device that missed the VR craze.
More gadget news from TechManNews.
