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. The Steam Frame is the long-rumored headset from Valve that had previously been codenamed “Deckard.”
The company also announced a new Steam controller and PC called the Steam Machine. All three devices are coming in early 2026. Valve is holding off on announcing pricing and exact availability of the new hardware. There are Steam Frame dev kits available for developers.
Valve says the Steam Frame is a wireless, “streaming-first” headset and you can hop into your games as soon as you pop it on. It supports both VR and flatscreen games. The company made a plug-and-play 6GHz wireless adapter that you slot into your PC (or Steam Machine). It has a dual-radio setup to help minimize interference, with one radio dedicated to streaming audio and visuals to the headset, and the other for Wi-Fi.
A standalone VR headset
But you don’t need a PC to play games on the Steam Frame. As with Meta Quest headsets, it can run games as a standalone device.
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The headset has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of built-in UFS storage. There’s a microSD card slot, along with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. Of course, the headset is powered by SteamOS. As with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, there’ll be a Steam Frame verified program, so you can see at a glance which games will run on the Steam Frame in standalone mode.
What’s more, the Steam Frame will support Android games. It seems Valve is hoping that developers who made games and VR experiences for Android-based headsets (such as the Meta Quest lineup) will bring them to Steam.
The Steam Frame runs on a rechargeable 21.6Wh Li-ion battery. There’s one USB-C 2.0 port at the back that you’ll use for both charging and data transfers. You can recharge the battery at a rate of up to 45W. It’s unclear how long the Steam Frame’s battery will run on a charge.
The battery is positioned on the rear of the headstrap. So you won’t necessarily need to have an external battery pack that’s attached to the system by an annoying cable. It’ll be possible to swap the standard headstrap (into which the audio drivers are integrated) for a different option, perhaps one with a larger battery.
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Even with the battery built into the headstrap, Valve says the Steam Frame weighs just under a pound at 440 grams. The core module — the front part — is 185 grams (6.5oz) and the headstrap weighs 245 grams (8.6 ounces).
Image optimization tech
The Steam Frame has an optimization feature called Foveated Streaming. Valve says this uses low-latency eye-tracking (powered by two internal cameras) to optimize the detail in the image wherever your eyes are looking. The company claims it can offer a “10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth.” Foveated Streaming is said to work for every game in your Steam library.
The headset has dual 2160 x 2160 LCD panels with refresh rates of up to 144Hz, a field of view of up to 110 degrees and an IPD target range of 60mm to 70mm. Valve added that “thin and light custom pancake lenses provide edge-to-edge sharpness and a large eye box.” The company says the maximum width for eye glasses is 140mm.
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 out vibrations,” which can impact the tracking system.
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Speaking of which, the headset has four high-res monochrome cameras for controller and headset tracking — the Steam Frame uses inside-out tracking. Valve says there are infrared LEDs on the outside of the device that can help support tracking in dark environments. There’s monochrome passthrough support too.
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Steam Frame controllers
Naturally, you’ll need a way to play all of the games, so the headset comes with a pair of Steam Frame controllers. The headset tracks the positions of the controllers for VR games, with full 6-DOF tracking and IMU support. They have a split gamepad format with a D-pad, thumbsticks, ABXY buttons, triggers and bumpers. They’re designed to work with your entire Steam library, and they certainly look a bit more intuitive than the PlayStation VR2 controllers.
Rather than going down the Hall effect route, Valve opted for magnetic thumbsticks, which support capacitive finger tracking. Each controller is said to run for around 40 hours before you’ll have to swap out the AA battery that powers it. If you’d rather play games on the Steam Frame with the new Steam Controller, you’ll absolutely be able to do that.
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-focused headsets had the mainstream impact of Meta’s Quest lineup or arguably even PlayStation VR (which by all accounts is still an active platform, not that Sony’s release calendar backs it up), the company is responsible for what is probably the medium’s greatest-ever game in Half-Life: Alyx. And with SteamOS on the Steam Deck being such a hit that other companies are practically begging Valve to let them put it in their own rival handhelds, it’s easy to imagine the Steam Frame becoming a serious rival to the Meta Quest.
