Valve’s new streaming-first VR headset – the Steam Frame – uses a clever trick to help make game streaming feel as low-latency as possible. This is called foveated streaming, and it means that the headset requests a higher quality image for the content right in front of your eyes while reducing the resolution of your peripheral vision to reduce bandwidth and processing demands.
The headset relies on a few pieces of hardware to do this. The first is a dedicated wireless streaming adapter that sends games from a PC to the headset. The second is a pair of eye-tracking cameras inside the headset that detect where you’re looking. If you’re familiar with the foveated rendering that headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro deploy for on-device processing, it’s a similar idea.
valve tells The Verge That preferred streaming won’t be just for frames. Although it is currently optimized for Steam Frame, according to hardware engineer Jeremy Sellon, foveated streaming can work with “any headset that supports eye tracking” and it is “compatible with our Steam Link streaming app”.
I’ve seen foveated streaming in action myself, and it’s extremely impressive. while playing Half Life: Alex On a Steam frame streamed from a nearby PC with that dedicated 6GHz wireless streaming adapter, I honestly couldn’t tell that the game wasn’t running locally on the headset. While Valve hasn’t specified when foveated streaming might be available on other headsets or who might be able to use it, I’m glad to hear that owners of other VR headsets will be able to use the feature to play their games.
However, it doesn’t seem like Valve has plans for other VR headsets to be able to take advantage of the wireless adapter. “It’s more difficult to support wireless adapters without lower-level OS support, as we have with SteamOS,” says Sellon.