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00:00I'd like to draw an analogy to where Steam Deck was, right? If you think back to the original
00:08Steam Machine, way back when, we threw that out there. We learned a lot from that experiment.
00:13We learned a lot that we'd go back and do more work, right? And that's how Proton came into being.
00:17That's how we knew we had to simplify the ability of partners to put content on the device. And by
00:22the time all that work had been done and ready, it sort of came to fruition for the Steam Deck.
00:27I think it's in a very analogous thought process for this device.
00:31So the Steam Frame draws upon a lot of the technology from Valve Index and sort of that VR catalog.
00:38But it also, we had to wait until the computing technology was on the headset for us to have
00:43not just a good streaming experience, but we wanted SteamOS and ARM and all of that support
00:48VFX, which is the ability to allow us to play content locally. We wanted those all to come
00:52together to be able to create a device that really breaks those boundaries and lets you
00:57do both. So I mentioned this earlier, but I think one of the real superpowers for this
01:02device is to not have to choose before you put it on whether you want to play VR or non-VR content.
01:07So I love the Index, I love my Steam Deck, but I would very often have to think before I picked up
01:12one of those devices, am I interested in playing a VR game? Okay, go to the room with a VR system.
01:16Or do I want to pick up my Steam Deck and play that catalog? With the Steam Frame you don't have to
01:22make that trade-off. You just put it on, you have your Steam catalog in front of you, and you can
01:25just browse through it and see what you feel like doing. And so for us, the reason we're doing it
01:30now is because we can finally create that lower friction experience that really lets you think
01:35about it and being able to enjoy that full catalog in a different way.
01:38Yeah, and I think one of the things that also goes into that is when we think about the
01:42streaming experience from the PC, the PC obviously can run, you know, your entire Steam catalog.
01:47So we wanted to make that streaming experience as seamless as possible. So you're looking at
01:53your Steam catalog in front of you on your headset on the Steam Frame, and you can easily choose
01:59if you want to play a game streamed from your PC, both 2D games and VR games. And so that process
02:07right there, once again, the friction is super, super low. And you can basically say, you know,
02:13I want to be able to play local content, I want to play streamed content, and you really don't have
02:20to be taking the headset off, putting it back on, and that friction is as low as we could get it.
02:26We would have loved to have built this device five years ago, but the technology just wasn't
02:30there for us. We really had to wait until all of the compute and the form factor, that's only
02:36recently become possible. And that's why now is the time for us to build this device.
02:43We have sort of three things together that create a really great streaming experience. The first one
02:47is the dongle. So people might be familiar with streaming, and they might be familiar with some
02:52of the challenges and gotchas involved with streaming. I think people, when they think about
02:57streaming, they might think about the cloud, where you have some computers at a nearby data center,
03:01and then they send that information across the internet, and they send that information across your
03:05home's Wi-Fi. And when it finally hits your device, there's a certain, certain challenges
03:10enjoying that type of content. With the included wireless link, we take all of that out of the
03:15equation. We have a direct connection between the headset talking to your PC or your laptop, where you don't
03:21even have to think about it. It's designed to be plug and play, you plug it into your device. Steam just
03:25directly makes that connection, and you don't have to think about when you hit the play button, whether it's on your
03:29local device or whether it's streaming. We've also done one other thing in conjunction with that, which is
03:34the eye tracking in the headset. We showed this to you earlier, but we do a new technology. We're calling
03:40it foveated streaming. A lot of customers might be familiar with foveated rendering, where you spend more
03:47of the PC's compute ability to render the pixels where you're looking. This is not that, but it is similar in
03:54spirit to that, but applied at the transport layer. So we call it foveated streaming, where we send
04:00the highest quality information, essentially full fidelity for the area you're directly looking at,
04:05and then the rest of the scene is sent at lower fidelity. And that trade-off gives us a much higher
04:11effective bandwidth. So say, for example, the foveated area is one tenth of the size of the frame.
04:17You can think about it as an effective 10x multiplier in bandwidth and quality improvement you get from
04:23that. So those two things together, or really three things, are what let us have a streaming
04:28experience we're really proud of, and that we think everyone will be able to enjoy. It's not just
04:32about the antenna, it's about all of the trade-offs, right? So there's only some number of channels in
04:36the spectrum. There's always errors that happen, like forward error correction. There's always trade-offs,
04:43and so you're really balancing bandwidth, robustness, and latency because of retries and things like
04:49that. And there's no magic bullet, right? There's no magic solution. So us being able at the system
04:55layer to introduce this multiplier, this 10x factor, really just gave us like budget, like link budget
05:01for free, and being able to spend that. So even if we made it a more powerful radio or a more powerful
05:06link, I would still want to bring this technology and apply it in this case, because it just makes
05:10things better. The same team that's working on SteamFrame, we all worked on Index, right? So we
05:19definitely have, you know, have the history of, you know, all of the different VR headsets that have
05:24been made over the last 10 years. And so, you know, we've put on a lot of headsets on our faces, and
05:31we've said, okay, how can we make our own headset that really does a really holistic job where we say,
05:38okay, let's put as low of a weight as we possibly can on the person's face. Let's get the battery
05:43someplace else. Let's put it in the back. Let's put the charging port, the Type-C port in the back,
05:50so that if you happen to be using an additional battery in your pocket, for example, that cable
05:56would be in the back. We have, you know, the facial interface that's as soft as we possibly can. We've
06:05iterated like crazy to make that as comfortable as possible. We've, you know, made the audio that's
06:11built in on the on the sides of the head strap as high quality as possible. You know, we're always
06:18trying to shave weight, make the eye tubes as small as possible. We're basically just constantly
06:26wanting to make the device as lightweight, as comfortable as possible, so that when somebody
06:30puts the device on their head, they immediately feel comfortable and they're thinking, okay,
06:34what content do I want to, you know, enjoy right now? What game do I want to open? And they're not
06:39thinking, man, this thing is uncomfortable, right? And so there's a huge focus on comfort, and then
06:45within that saying, okay, what performance can we squeeze out of the chip that's in here? You know, how
06:51much battery life can we get? And then having that ability to have a very high performance wireless
06:56link to your PC. So, you know, we're, we have a very high end radio that's on device. We have a very
07:03high end, uh, uh, SOC that's in there as well. So all of these things all together are really basically
07:10saying, uh, within this package, how can we get a really high performance device that feels good on
07:18your face and that you're going to be happy to put on and not be immediately thinking, man, I really don't
07:25want to be wearing this thing right now, right? So that's, that's a huge, huge thinking process.
07:30I think, uh, one of the consistent threads throughout all of the Valve hardware projects
07:34is that we use the devices ourselves a lot. Yeah. So I know some more traditional types of hardware
07:39organizations, you might have a team that's responsible for the battery and another team
07:43that's responsible for the processor and another team that's responsible for the software. And they're,
07:48uh, very dedicated, independent teams. But one of the challenges with that type of organization
07:53is that it's sometimes hard for that feedback to, uh, make it across, uh, and to be acted upon.
07:59And similar to our game teams where, uh, I don't know if people are familiar with how our game
08:03teams work, but they're very sort of an ad hoc organization where you sit by who you're working
08:07with and anyone could give feedback on any system. Uh, Valve hardware works exactly the same way.
08:13So if I'm wearing the headset every day, uh, writing software or working on the user interface,
08:17and I have feedback about the weight in the front and exactly how it fits,
08:20I walk over 20 feet. I tell that to the designer and then I'll have a new version the next day.
08:25I think all of us acting as real users and play testing these things every day,
08:29as well as being so closely tied to the interdisciplinary engineering where you can
08:34just literally walk across the hall and talk to someone who's working on something
08:37radically, a radically different part of this design has just allowed us to turn the crank
08:41really quickly and go through a whole bunch of iterations. And that's one of the reasons I think
08:45we are uniquely able on small teams to do such awesome devices.
08:51So, uh, the FOV is up to 115 degrees. Uh, they're pancake optics. So people are familiar with those from,
08:57uh, other sort of top tier premium devices. That pancake optical design is a folded optic system
09:04where it has both refraction and reflection, and that allows you to have a very compact,
09:08uh, small form factor, which really helps the ergonomics, as well as still getting, uh, sharpness edge
09:13to edge over that up to 115 degree FOV. Uh, the panels are 2160 by 2160 per eye. They allow their
09:21LCD. Uh, they allow for refresh rates from 72 Hertz up to 120 Hertz. And then, uh, 144 is allowed as well
09:29with, uh, we call it experimental mode. Uh, exactly the same as index. Actually we have integrated cameras.
09:34There's four monochrome cameras on the exterior doing tracking. They're specifically designed to be, uh,
09:40very good at tracking as well as very good at doing that in low light. Uh, they pair with, uh, integrated IR illuminators,
09:47which allow you to track in certain environments in complete, uh, darkness. We also have two cameras on
09:52the inside for eye tracking, which as we discussed is a large advantage, uh, for streaming. Uh, we also,
09:58just to talk about the APU a moment, uh, we also have 16 gigabytes of RAM that's, uh, standard and then the
10:04processor. Yeah. The processor is the, uh, a four nanometer Snapdragon, uh, generation eight. Uh,
10:10it's a Snapdragon 8 gen three, also known as the, uh, 8650 platform. And that is a very, very capable
10:18processor right now that combines together a ton of things as far as being able to talk to all of the
10:24different peripherals, as well as the very high performance, uh, wireless solution. All of it goes
10:31together with, uh, essentially running steam OS now on arm. And what's really cool about that is that
10:37allows us to bring together a whole bunch of different ecosystems onto one device, both on the
10:43VR side, the, uh, uh, non VR side, whether it's streamed running content locally. And we also have, uh,
10:51256, uh, gigs as the, uh, base skew for, uh, storage, one terabyte option. And we also have an SD card
10:59slot, um, and the SD card slot would allow you to, uh, plug in, you know, one terabyte, two terabyte,
11:06uh, SD cards. Um, and that's, you know, something where you could even take, for example, your SD card
11:11from a steam deck and plug it directly into the headset. And now you have your games, uh, running
11:16right there. Um, another option there would be, or another interesting detail there would be, uh, we do
11:22have the camera expansion port on front, um, that has two different modes, a high speed camera interface,
11:28as well as a PCIe port. So a lot of interesting, uh, modularity and functionality there.
11:38Yeah, there've been a lot of awesome games that have come out in the last few years.
11:42So I think we're really excited about where it's at and even going forward. One of my favorite
11:46thoughts is that VR feels like a little bit of a segregated, uh, island from non VR gaming.
11:53I know on steam very often you think about it as, uh, there's VR users and non VR users.
11:58But when we look at the playtime data, what we see is it's, it's, uh, blended a lot more than that.
12:03A lot of the people who, uh, play VR also play non VR content. And that's one of their major, uh,
12:08decision factors in us deciding to come to market with this type of product.
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