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

Valve’s first new streaming VR headset – Steam frame – Uses a clever trick to help make game streaming feel as low-latency as possible. It’s called streaming, and it means the headset dials up a higher-quality image of the content right in front of your eyes while lowering the resolution of your peripheral vision to reduce bandwidth and processing requirements.

The headset relies on two pieces of hardware to achieve this. 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 track where you look. If you are familiar with Lovely submissionwhich uses headphones like Apple’s Vision Pro for on-device processing, it’s a similar idea.

Valve says Edge Your favorite stream will no longer be exclusive to Frame. Although it’s currently optimized for the Steam Frame, Preferred Streaming can work with “any headset that supports eye tracking” and is “compatible with our Steam Link streaming app,” according to hardware engineer Jeremy Silan.

I’ve seen the live stream in action myself, which is very impressive. While playing Half-Life: Alex On Steam Frame streaming from a nearby PC using the dedicated 6GHz wireless streaming adapter, I honestly couldn’t tell the game wasn’t running locally on the headset. Although Valve didn’t specify when Favorite Streaming might be available on other headsets or who 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 stream their games.

It doesn’t appear that Valve has plans for other VR headsets to be able to take advantage of the wireless adapter. “Supporting a wireless adapter is more difficult without lower-level OS support, as is the case with SteamOS,” Celan says.