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 Th

See Full Page