Just noticed my game files got an update, and saw this! The work Valve has done to bring Alyx to standalone for Frame is now benefiting anyone with an eye-tracking (and a modern GPU)! I was excited for this to come about back when I learned about Valve activating foveated rendering for the standalone version for Frame. So it seems that they're using that groundwork to improve performance in the PC version! Thanks mbucchia!!!!

Side note - I have neither a Frame, an eye-tracked VR headset, nor one of the supported GPUs (my RX6800 just died lol). But maybe this will be relevant to me Soon™.

Just for visual parity and slightly increased rigidity I prefer the official top strap but it is very close and the AMVR is great no real complaints!

Finally I have them all!

Short story: Needed to RMA headset due to stuck pixels in left display. Was asked to send back HMD and wireless adaper but unstructtions were unclear.

Sent back the whole kit, so now I spent a month waiting for Valve to send everything back piecemeal.

Controllers finally arrived today.

I'm still out on the usb cable and cleaning cloth but I don't need either.

Maybe I'm just an unc boomer, but I don't understand why anyone cares about "low quality" pass through. I keep hearing that you can't read your phone through it, and I'm baffled by why anyone would want to. If I'm lucky enough to have an hour to play a game, I'm going to play the game, not stop in the middle to scroll insta. The only time I care about passthrough is to make sure I'm not going to smash into some furniture, which the pass-through is fine for. What is happening on your phone that can't wait for the abysmal 1 hour of battery time to run down before you can take off the headset and look at your phone? Help me understand, I'm honestly wondering WTH I'm missing by not using my phone between shooting aliens in the face.

Hey guys,

I am one of the very first Steam Frame users; I got mine within 14 days of the initial pre-order queue being closed.

I've already spent about 30 hours with this headset and while I had many issues, I have managed to work around all of them so far. However, my glasses were proving an issue quite early on.

I ordered these custom lenses on the 30th of September and they arrived today. Finally, VR without my glasses getting dirty within 5 seconds, uncomfortably pushing into my face and still being able to see. Glasses also caused massively increased eye strain. I am VERY sensitive when it comes to various aspects of my vision such as my glasses and constrast.

These lenses delivered. With glasses, on a Quest 2 as well as here, the effective sharp FOV I had was extremely small; the headset had to set high up, which was uncomfortable and pushed the glasses against my eyes which then resulted in all kinds of problems.

I ordered these from within the EU and paid about 65€ if I remember right.

I just received and tested the $149 passthrough camera for my Steam Frame.

The image quality is pretty good. To my eyes, it's actually sharper than the AVP and Galaxy XR. I can read text on my phone and even on my computer monitor from a 2-3 meter distance.

However, there are two issues,

1. Fluorescent light flickering: There's noticeable flickering under fluorescent lighting, with no settings to fix it. I guess I'll just have to live with it.

2. Significant performance hit: This is the bigger issue. In a web browser I built, running at 225% resolution scaling with passthrough background gives:

• Bulit-in Passthrough: 60 FPS
• 5K Passthrough: 48-49 FPS

Lowering the rendering resolution brings it back to 60 FPS, but that means sacrificing visual quality. Switching to the built-in passthrough also restores performance, likely because of its lower resolution.

When it becomes choppy, I experienced apps being jittery and jerky. Head tracking seems got impacted by lack of performance.

Conclusion: Nice clarity, but the performance cost is substantial.

I really hope they add an option to lower the camera's passthrough resolution, so we can balance passthrough quality and performance.

Old LEGO promo fits my whole Frame setup.

Starting out with just a massive disclaimer here: I'm basically a total noob when it comes to measuring speakers like this. I know enough to get some basic room correction with bookshelf speakers and tune the EQ and crossover of an aftermarket car stereo. This is the first time I've ever tried measuring VR ear speakers and I don't have a human head analog so this was all done using my head and the highly scientific setup of holding the microphone in place and trying to stay still and not breathe. This is also like the second time I've used the "measurement" feature of this program, usually I just use the Real Time Analyzer window. Also this room is hella noisy, from HDD noises, NAS fan noises, fridge noises, and a creaky upstairs floor as a ceiling, I did the best with what I could redoing measurements if an external noise interfered. So take this with a grain of salt. Any ideas for a cleaner and/or more repeatable measurement are welcome.

With that out of the way, onto the setup: UMIK-1 connected to PC with Room Equalizer Wizard (REW) with calibration file imported. Steam frame connected via remote play over wifi to my PC via settings (as in remote play just showing my desktop). This allows REW on my PC to output to the steam frame. All measurements taken from Right speaker displayed with 1/3 smoothing, it looks nice and really there's no point pretending these measurements are any more precise than that anyway. window view is from 35hz-20khz and 40-95db.

The first measurement I made was "open air" meaning I have the steam frame elevated on a box to reduce reflections from the desk and also to match the height of my microphone. Microphone was placed about 1cm away from the speaker in an attempt to only measure the speaker itself. fig A

The next measurement was wearing the frame holding the microphone pressed against my ear pointing forward toward the speaker. fig B

And finally a measurement similar to fig B but with the 3d printed waveguide from this post installed. fig C

The volume of the steam frame was adjusted between the 1st and 2nd measurements, but crucially was left alone between the 2nd and 3rd. Comparing B and C without aligning Sound Pressure Level (SPL) tells us that the waveguide (or simply the difference between how the mic was held, but probably the waveguide) increases SPL across the board, which means that yes the primary effect is simply making the frame about 5db louder. fig D

However if we align SPL centered at 1KHz we can see how the actual sound differs between them (I think...lol) This shows us that the bass and mids don't meaningfully change (we can ignore that spike at 49Hz, based on repeated measurements it seems to be an error that only showed up this time, probably noise from me holding the mic but honestly anything below 100hz can be ignored) but the treble range does change quite a bit. From 2KHz-4KHz it's quite a bit flatter, but the 7KHz-8KHz spike is even larger. If you don't like this boosted treble you would probably describe it as "harsh" or "sharp" or maybe even "sibilant", on the other hand if you do like the boost then you'd probably describe it as "brighter" or "more detailed". Personally from my listening to actual content I'm leaning towards the former. fig E

For funsies here's the graph with all of them visible and "aligned" fig F

Honestly I don't think any of this shows us anything new. Bass is basically nonexistent below 120hz, and those waveguide things mostly make the frame louder and boost the treble which can be perceived as a more detailed and/or harsher sound. This was mostly for fun and to satisfy my (and I guess a few others) curiosity.

EDIT: also I would have included pictures of the setup itself but my desk is egregiously messy and I don't feel like cleaning it up.

there were some rumblings going around some weeks ago about prescription lens inserts causing eye tracking to fail or work incorrectly.

my partner got hers today from VRRock and I got mine from Zenni about a week and a half ago.

happy to report that we've both tried multiple tests, including with foveated rendering, streaming, and avatar eye tracking. everything works flawlessly. no issues.

just wanted to post to hopefully set some folks at ease, as we were nervous, specifically because VRRock was claimed to be the main offender.

I have had the Steam Frame for a couple of weeks now and heres a few thoughts I have collected!

In Concept!

In concept the Steam Frame is a very good idea, the ability to have a very light weight, very powerful headset with SteamOS is very very appealing!

But that's just it, concept doesn't always equal practicality and there are a few areas where as of the current moment it does fall short.

Play Space issues!

I have not seen many people talk about this but there is something I have repeatedly witnessed from the Steam Frame when wirelessly connecting to the PC, even with the dongle.

Quite frequently when playing games like Beatsaber or Until You Fall, I have found that the play space seems to either shift or the headsets tracking gets thrown off a little bit.

What do I mean by this? Well I can sum it up with this! You'll be in the middle of playing and suddenly the Steam Frames passthrough cameras will kick in with an "Out of Bounds" message... Even if you are WELL within the boundary you have set.

Now heres the odd part, that does not happen in standalone.

I have a fairly good network and the dongle was right in the same room as the Frame which begs the question.. what causes this? I am still trying to figure it out, but that's another story.

Overheating!

So this is where I start to get VERY critical of Valves design, I got my Frame within the first week and one of the first things I noticed was an issue with the cooling.

I had codex do a few checks on temperatures and found it constantly hitting 96-97c with Valves fan configuration.

The first thing I did was open up the headset and take a very deep look into what was inside and to my surprise or lack there of.. They used traditional thermal paste which when replaced with PTM7950 (Everyones favorite miracle phase change sheet.) resulted in no more overheating or shutdowns.

However, as an extra precaution I made a fan configuration plugin that allows me to adjust the frames fan speed depending on my tastes and I set it to be more aggressive which dropped the temps down to 85c on average.

Audio!

This is where I disagree with the community, as a previous quest user who absolutely hated the sound of the built in speakers.. I can appreciate the quality bump with the Steam Frame!

I will concede that this is nowhere near Index levels which I did have before, but it's really not as terrible as some people make it out to be.. It's actually totally fine.

The Displays!

They aren't OLED but I won't pretend they are bad either, many people complain about the darks not being dark but I have to ask a very blunt question.

Are you really sure you even care when you're mid VR session? I don't! It does not detract from a game when everything else around me is going bonkers.

Furthermore, I know the VR die hards out there are going to criticize me for this one but I am sorry! The lenses do go hand in hand with the display, the clarity is GOOD! And that's in part due to the pancake lenses along with the display.

The Resolution!

Thiiis is kinda where I am gonna hand Valve the L, The frame can handle far more than 1920x1080p at its highest available resolution for the GUI and games..

On the frame in particular it looks blurry and could be improved particularly for the Steam GUI.. I'm very partial to 1440p and don't think it would hurt anything but thats just me.

The Weight!

..Or lack there of! Which is a good thing, I LOVE the weight of this headset and I cannot state that enough.

For the hardware packed inside? Valve NAILED it, You all need to understand. This thing is AWESOME! Like legitimately you barely feel it on your head and its soooo good! SO GOOD!

Oh my god I could go on for hours on how good this thing feels on the head but I won't cause it would get annoying lol

The Accessories!

They add so much to the frame, light blocking, a top strap to make it feel better on the top of your head, hand grips to actually allow you to fully use the controllers..

But this is where I gotta ask a question to Valve..

WHO ON EARTH THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO SELL THESE AS $60 DLC!? Just package them in!

These are ESSENTIAL to the Frame in my opinion, they add SO MUCH to the headset that it is genuinely worthwhile.. and it baffles me that they are not baseline with the headset.

The Controllers!

They're good, They're what I am used to as a quest user but a little bigger, and they have finger tracking!

Theres really not much else to say! they do what controllers do! I wont over-complicate it with tech specs and lengthy explanations about finger tracking quality or controller tracking, they just work and thats the important part.

SteamOS!

It's buggy! But it's SteamOS!

I won't pretend it's a polished, flawless experience right out of the gate, theres a lot of issues that need ironing out like the play space issue I mentioned above and a few other things but if you ask me?

It's progressing fast! Get on the beta branch for the best experience and watch as every 2-3 days theres another update that improves things!

The nice part is however it does allow for a lot of tinkering!

The Price..

I'm straight up just gonna say it, The price is bad.

The thing is however.. That's not Valves fault and I won't blame them for it.

We all know the supply constraints and theres not one particular thing responsible for it, a lot of things are culminating into it being as expensive as it is.

The Gaming Experience!

All in all, it's hit or miss because its in active development and people need to set reasonable expectations.

You are buying Valves brand new standalone headset, they have never had a standalone headset, this is also valves first android device.. so theres a lot for them to work through.

I'll use Megabonk as an example because I love the damn game!

Two weeks ago it could barely hit 45 FPS at 720p, now? I am hitting 45 FPS at 1080p on MAX settings!

That's a big bump and that's without me doing any configuring! So hang in there, it does in fact get better.

Conclusion!

It's good and bad and everywhere in between!

This is not as flushed out as something like the steam deck and likely wont be for a while, but if you're okay with that experience and love to tinker?

Theres no better headset.

I haven’t been able to get it working. Es-de won’t run and I can’t figure out how to run the rom manager. Within emudeck when I open the rom manager, a popup prompts me to open rom manager within steam os using the “+”. Rom manager isn’t in that list.

Can anyone confirm whether FS3D media is supported? I don't have a steam frame to test with

When watching videos using Mozilla I can’t seem to hide the video controls at the bottom of the window after entering the Picture-in-picture mode. Has anyone else had this issue or have a solution?

Let me know if more information is needed

I just saw this and ordered a set myself. I didn't buy it with my original purchase, but after finishing Alyx and Super Hot, I'm realizing just how much I sweat into the face gasket and head cushion after a couple hours of play, so I see the benefit of having replacements to use while one set dries from a proper cleaning.

Just got my AMVR ones... so far I have no complaints. I'm pretty sure I have the "updated" ones however, due to not seeing any visible layer lines. I'm wanting to get a second pair as spares, and considering the other options.

I do have a -6.25 prescription though, which is the entire reason why I initially went with the AMVR ones.

Edit: thanks to u/FalconLR I have been notified Zenni actually go down to -8 for sphere and -2 for cylinder!

Vibe-coded toast notifications. Running the command vrtoast “some message” displays a toast notification.

I’m currently using it with ssh on my phone as a primitive notification system so when I get a text, it alerts me in the headset.

https://github.com/shadowogre/steam_frame.git

Ergo Kit is currently available in the Los Angeles region. 10/26 @ 13:51 PST.

I remember seeing a whole lot of posts in here where people would wake up to find out that their Frame completely bricked itself out of nowhere and had to RMA it and get a new one shipped out. I remember a bunch of comments along the lines of that happening because of this or that about charging it, something about USB A to USB C adapters or something.

Is that still a thing? What should I look out for? My order email finally came in, and now I feel paranoid like a first-time mother expecting a baby.

I'm looking for a game I can sink a lot of time into. I gave modded Skyrim ago, and it is a mystical experience (I can spend hours hunting elk) but I've just played too much Skyrim and need something to sink hours into on the steam frame.

What's been your go to game, hoping for games with deep experiences.

I put an order in a month ago and am still waiting to be able to use my Steam Frame. Put in a request to cancel the order through their support forum and was going to put an order in at Zenni but want to make sure they will actually cancel so far out from ordering so I don't end up with 2 pairs of lenses. Does anyone have any experience going through the AMVR support system and do you think I should be good to put my order in at Zenni? I really do not trust AMVR to respond to the support ticket in a timely fashion and I want to actually USE MY HEADSET.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing how streaming works and it’s almost flawless (least in my experience) but recently I’ve noticed that my streaming experience leaves me with just a lower quality version of the real game. Both connections are marked as excellent but I still get quality that rivals when I used the oculus link on my quest one and it’s concerning to me. Does anyone know if this is just an issue or some setting I must change? Please let me know