Valve made a triumphant return to the hardware market with the Steam Deck and its OLED-toting counterpart, and now it’s having another crack at virtual reality with the Steam Frame. Steam Frame is Valve’s long-rumored headset previously codenamed “Deckard”. The company also announced a new Steam controller and PC called the Steam Machine. All three devices are coming in 2026.
Valve says the Steam Frame is a wireless, “streaming-first” headset. It supports both VR and flatscreen games. The company has created a plug-and-play 6GHz wireless adapter that you can slot into your PC (or Steam Machine). It has a dual-radio setup to help reduce interference, with one radio dedicated to audio and visual streaming to the headset, and the other for Wi-Fi.
Steam Frame has a customizable feature called Foveated Streaming. Valve says it uses low-latency eye-tracking to optimize detail in the image wherever your eyes are looking. The company claims it can provide “10 times improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth”. Foveated streaming is said to work for every game in your Steam library.
The headset features dual 2160 x 2160 LCD panels with refresh rates up to 144Hz. Valve stated that “the thin and light custom pancake lens provides edge-to-edge sharpness and a large eye box.” As for audio, the Steam Frame has dual stereo speakers on each side with support for high-fidelity audio. Valve says the speakers on each side are “oriented in opposite directions to cancel vibrations”, which can affect the tracking system.
The Steam Frame is far from Valve’s first VR headset. It released the Valve Index in 2019, and previously worked with HTC on its Vive headsets, which were initially consumer VR products before HTC shifted its focus to business and enterprise.
While none of Valve’s previous PC-centric headsets have had the mainstream impact of Meta’s Quest lineup or even PlayStation VR (which by all accounts Is is still an active platform, not that Sony’s release calendar supports it), the company is responsible for possibly the greatest games in the medium Half Life: AlexAnd with SteamOS being such a hit on Steam decks that other companies are practically begging Valve to put it in their rival handhelds, it’s easy to imagine Steam Frame becoming a serious rival to Meta Quest,
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