THE FRAME OF THE GAME

Valve’s long-awaited new VR headset offers two ways to play your library of Steam games

- Words: Tom Wiggins

Play all your love on me

Six years is a long time in any reality, but in the world of VR it feels like a lifetime; so while the Steam Frame has been a long time coming, it looks like it was worth the wait. Replacing the now discontinued Valve Index, which was released back in 2019, the Frame is a lot more versatile than its predecessor. For starters it doesn’t need base stations to know where you or the controllers are, using four builtin tracking cameras instead – but perhaps even more significant than that is the fact that you can use it without a PC.

I have a stream

The Frame runs SteamOS 3 and has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of RAM, so some games can be played directly from the builtin storage (256GB or 1TB, expandable by microSD card). But it also comes with a 6GHz dongle that lets you connect it wirelessly to your PC if you want to play something more taxing. There are two 2160x2160 LCD screens on the inside, and it uses eye-tracking cameras to only fully render the bits you’re actually looking at.

Super drooper?