Who is the $1,059 Steam VR headset for?

The Steam Frame costs $1,059 for the entry-level model with 256 GB of storage, and $1,299 for the terabyte version. That is not a typo. Valve's new standalone VR headset—the company's first since the wired Valve Index—is trying to be everything at once: a wireless PC VR headset, a standalone Android game machine, a portable Steam Deck-like device you wear on your face, and a Linux desktop you can use to run Discord and a web browser while playing a game on a virtual screen the size of your living room wall. It is, depending on how you look at it, either the most exciting VR headset in years or a $1,059 early-access beta that Valve shipped unfinished.

What the Steam Frame actually does

The Steam Frame runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, similar to what you'd find in a high-end phone, and it runs a version of SteamOS on Linux. It can play PC games streamed from a nearby computer using a dedicated 6 GHz dongle—Valve calls this "foveated streaming," where the headset tracks your eyes and delivers the highest resolution only where you're looking, lowering quality everywhere else to save bandwidth. It can also run Android games natively via a new compatibility layer called Lepton, which is essentially Proton for Android apps. And it can run Windows games on ARM via a ported version of Proton. That means the Steam Frame can attempt to run almost anything in your Steam library, bu