[STEAM] Steam Frame Isn't Valve Index 2, And That's A Good Thing

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Of the many things Steam Frame is, what it isn't is a Valve Index 2. But that's a good thing.

When Valve Index launched in 2019, it was one of the most expensive VR headsets on the consumer market.

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had just launched the $400 Rift S and Oculus Quest headsets, and there was nothing like Apple Vision Pro or Samsung Galaxy XR.

At $1000 for the full kit, Index was a premium product for enthusiasts, meant to push the high-end, with (relatively) wide field of view lenses, off-ear speakers, and precise laser tracking. The thick, heavy tether and wall-mounted base stations were a feature, not a bug.

Based on some of the reactions to

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over the past few days, it's clear that many Index owners, and hardcore VR enthusiasts in general, were hoping that Valve would repeat its last-decade strategy, with another high-end tethered headset.

They wanted 4K micro-OLED panels (or at least, say, 3K LCD with local dimming) fed by yet another DisplayPort cable, with ultra wide field of view lenses, face tracking, and "Lighthouse" base station tracking, backwards-compatible with existing SteamVR peripherals.

But there are good reasons why Valve didn't do this, and why Steam Frame is the better strategy.

Index was relatively successful for what it was trying to be, by all accounts. More than six years later it still makes up around 15% of SteamVR usage. But what it did not do is meaningfully increase the total number of people playing VR games on Steam.

Instead, it was the $300 Quest 2 that achieved that feat. Less than six months after launch it

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the most used headset on Steam, and today standalone headsets make up over 2/3rds of SteamVR use.

Standalone headsets with computer vision tracking allow anyone to connect to SteamVR on their PC with a couple of clicks, completely wirelessly, with no base stations or other complex setup required. And that they are wireless matters.

Among existing VR enthusiasts, there is a sentiment that wireless is a nice-to-have, but far from essential feature, while some are even actively opposed to it, adamant that they'll never cut the tether.

But there is a selection bias at play here. People who considered the cable a dealbreaker didn't buy the Index, or any other tethered PC VR headset. And they are the majority.

Since the HTC Vive Wireless Adapter, seven years ago, it has been

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that wireless is the ideal for VR. You don't have to stow a cable and avoid running over it with your chair wheels. You can rotate freely in VR without worrying about getting tangled. And you can truly lose yourself in the virtual world because you don't have a tether reminding where your PC is.

In fact, in 2017 Valve CEO Gabe Newell called wireless VR a “solved problem”. “My expectation is that wireless will be an add-on in 2017, and then it will be an integrated feature in 2018”, Newell was

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as saying during a press conference that year.

Of course, the Vive Wireless Adapter relied on a 60GHz signal, unable to penetrate solid objects at all, so the transmitter had to be wall mounted and the receiver positioned on the top of your head, plus it was expensive. It was the right goal, but with the wrong technology.

Within days of the release of Oculus Quest people started using their existing home Wi-Fi network for wireless room-scale PC VR, leveraging the same H.264 codec used for video streaming. The death of tethered PC-only VR headsets, or at least their relegation to a tiny niche, was now inevitable.

There are two problems with this approach, however.

Firstly, the high compression ratio means that this kind of wireless VR doesn't look as good as a DisplayPort signal. And secondly, while some enthusiasts have ideal dedicated network setups with a high-end dedicated access point, most people rely on the cheap router their ISP supplied them a decade ago, which may not be near their VR playspace and also has to handle the traffic from the rest of the household.

With Steam Frame, Valve is using a combination of both hardware and software cleverness to refine the compressed wireless streaming experience. The headset has dual wireless radios, one of which is dedicated to the PC wireless adapter included in the box. And eye-tracked foveated streaming is used at all times, optimizing the video stream quality for where you're currently looking.

Essentially, Steam Frame is trying to package the high-quality wireless VR setups that only enthusiasts experience today into a relatively mainstream PC gaming product.

It's not about delivering yet another tethered PC VR headset with higher resolution – there are

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and

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headsets for that. Instead, Steam Frame is focused on delivering the best possible wireless PC VR experience that can be sold for less than $1000 (Valve's current plan).

And it's exactly this that PC VR needs. A product that out of the box, for every buyer, delivers an excellent wireless PC VR experience, without modifying their home network setup. Steam Frame isn't Index 2, but it's the better move for Valve. And instead of selling to the same few hundred thousand enthusiasts, I suspect it could sell millions of units through its lifetime, bringing far more customers for developers building PC VR games.

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