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

Valve’s caller streaming-first VR headset — the Steam Frame — employs a clever instrumentality to assistance marque crippled streaming consciousness arsenic low-latency arsenic possible. It’s called foveated streaming, and it means the headset requests a higher-quality representation for the contented that’s close successful beforehand of your eyes portion lowering the solution of your peripheral imaginativeness to trim bandwidth and processing demands. 

The headset relies connected a mates pieces of hardware to marque that happen. The archetypal is simply a dedicated wireless streaming adapter that sends games from a PC to the headset. The 2nd is simply a brace of eye-tracking cameras wrong the headset that travel wherever you’re looking. If you’re acquainted with foveated rendering, which headsets similar Apple’s Vision Pro deploy for on-device processing, it’s a akin idea.

Valve tells The Verge that foveated streaming won’t beryllium exclusive to the Frame. While it’s presently optimized for the Steam Frame, foveated streaming tin enactment with “any headset that supports oculus tracking” and that is “compatible with our Steam Link streaming app,” according to hardware technologist Jeremy Selan.

I’ve seen foveated streaming successful enactment myself, and it’s highly impressive. While playing Half-Life: Alyx connected a Steam Frame streamed from a adjacent PC with that dedicated 6GHz wireless streaming adapter, I honestly couldn’t archer that the crippled wasn’t moving locally connected the headset. While Valve hasn’t specified erstwhile foveated streaming mightiness beryllium disposable connected different headsets oregon which mightiness beryllium capable to usage it, I’m gladsome to perceive that owners of different VR headsets volition beryllium capable to usage the diagnostic to play their games.

It doesn’t dependable similar Valve has plans for different VR headsets to beryllium capable to instrumentality vantage of the wireless adapter, though. “Supporting the wireless adapter is much hard without lower-level OS support, arsenic we person with SteamOS,” Selan says.