XR Briefing: Steam Frame Lands Fifth Without Exclusives
Valve's Steam Frame takes 5.49% of Steam headsets in its first survey, and SteamVR 2.19.1 now supersamples streamed VR to 1.96x panel pixels.
#vr-hardware
20 posts on this topic. All topics
What Is Inside a VR Headset? Displays, Lenses, Cameras, Chips
A component-level look inside a VR headset: LCD and micro-OLED panels, pancake lenses, tracking cameras, IMUs, chips, and where the battery goes.
What Is OpenXR? The Cross-Platform XR API Explained
OpenXR is Khronos's open API between XR apps and headset runtimes. How the loader, extensions and action system work, and what the standard still leaves out.
XR Briefing: The Quest Upgrade Cycle Is Over
Meta's Q3 Reality Labs revenue fell to $443M on lower Quest sales, with losses guided to $15B in 2027 and no new headset without a breakthrough.
XR Daily: An Open Headset With Two Brains
Vector Gear's dual-chipset open headset, Owlchemy's XREAL Aura lineup, Alibaba's eye-tracking glasses, and Bluey's 2D rendering trick.
What Is Inside-Out Tracking in VR?
Inside-out tracking lets a VR headset find its own position and its controllers with onboard cameras and motion sensors, no base stations. How SLAM works.
XR Daily: The Memory Crunch Reaches XR
PS6 memory reportedly tops $680, Apple ships a Ti West horror film in Immersive, Virtuix bundles Quest headsets, and Supernatural goes independent.
Why XR's Next Headsets Render at a Quarter of Their Resolution
Valve's leaked OLED Steam Frame pairs a 3552x3840 panel with a 1776x1920 framebuffer. Memory, storage and battery budgets now shape XR hardware, not displays.
XR Daily: Pico Leaks Its Vision Pro Rival
Pico Space Pro leaks inside and out in Japanese filings, Steam Frame slips to 2027, Epic tells devs to stop hand-writing code, plus real-time cutting.
XR Daily: Pimax Takes On Steam Frame
Pimax's $1,400 Crystal Pro, Norway's smart glasses ban, a WebGPU summarizer, Ultimechs delisting, and a browser museum of PS1 and N64 assets.
XR Daily: Meta Buys Sony's XR Patents
Meta absorbs 43 Sony XR patents, Pimax prices Crystal Pro at $1,400, plus a WebGPU effects library, Nvidia's Vera core, and a 70-degree FOV simulator.
How VR Eye Tracking Works
VR eye tracking fires infrared light at your eyes, reads the pupil and the corneal reflection, and turns that into a gaze vector. Here is the full pipeline.
XR Daily: Meta's $1,300 Micro-OLED Bet
Meta VR Glasses arrive at $1,300 with a 37 PPD micro-OLED display and an off-head compute puck, plus Beat Saber's hand-tracking rewrite as Flux.
XR Daily: Holograms Before Connect
Meta preps a full-body Codec Avatar demo for Connect, a hard look at VR-ready PC costs in 2026, and a 93g headset closes Kickstarter at $1.29M.
How Passthrough Works in VR Headsets
Passthrough is the live camera view of the real world inside a headset. Here is the pipeline from sensor to display, and why depth and latency are hard.
XR Daily: Snap's Agent Lands First
Snap ships Specs with a cross-platform AI agent and an optional cellular case, Apple opens visionOS 27 to third-party IR accessories, plus scalper markets.
XR Daily: Blender 5.3 Embraces Gaussian Splats
Blender 5.3 adds native 3D Gaussian Splat import, NVIDIA ships Rust tracks for GPU kernels, and a 93-gram tethered headset raises $1.2M on Kickstarter.
Quest 3 vs Steam Frame: Specs, Streaming, and Which to Buy
Quest 3 and Valve's Steam Frame are both standalone headsets built for different players. How their specs, streaming, passthrough and prices compare.
August 2026: The Roadmap Slipped, the Tools Got Cheaper
Apple cut Vision Pro staff, Pico pushed its flagship to Q4, Schell laid off for the first time in 24 years. The month XR's constraint became cost, not capability.
Valve's Steam Frame: Comfort Is the Killer Feature
Hands-on impressions say Steam Frame nails what Quest 3 does not: all-day wearability, at around 440 grams with a top strap and glasses-friendly fit.