Valve’s new VR streaming trick won’t just work with its own headset

Valve’s new streaming-first VR headset — the Steam Frame — employs a clever trick to help make game streaming feel as low-latency as possible. It’s called foveated streaming, and it means the headset requests a higher-quality image for the content that’s right in front of your eyes while lowering the resolution of your peripheral vision to reduce bandwidth and processing demands. 

The headset relies on a couple pieces of hardware to make that happen. 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 follow where you’re looking. If you’re familiar with foveated rendering, which headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro deploy for on-device processing, it’s a similar idea.

Valve tells The Verge that foveated streaming won’t be exclusive to the Frame. While it’s currently optimized for the Steam Frame, foveated streaming can work with “any headset that supports eye tracking” and that is “compatible with our Steam Link streaming app,” according to hardware engineer Jeremy Selan.

I’ve seen foveated streaming in action myself, and it’s extremely impressive. While playing Half-Life: Alyx 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 which 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.

It doesn’t sound like Valve has plans for other VR headsets to be able to take advantage of the wireless adapter, though. “Supporting the wireless adapter is more difficult without lower-level OS support, as we have with SteamOS,” Selan says.