{"id":381379,"date":"2025-11-15T19:37:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T19:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/381379\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T19:37:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T19:37:12","slug":"the-engineering-behind-valves-new-vr-headset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/381379\/","title":{"rendered":"The Engineering Behind Valve\u2019s New VR Headset"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valve\u2019s new Steam Frame is what all the well-connected YouTubers are talking about, but most of them are talking about what it\u2019s like to game on it. That\u2019s great content if you\u2019re into it, but not exactly fodder for Hackaday \u2014 with one exception. [Gamers Nexus] gives us a half hour of relatively-unedited footage<\/a> of them just chatting with the engineers behind the hardware.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great stuff right from the get-go: they start with how thermal management drove the PCB design, and put the SoC on the \u201cback\u201d of the chip, sandwiched betwixt heat pipes. We don\u2019t usually think of taking heat through the PCB when building a board, so it\u2019s a neat detail to learn about before these things get into the hands of the usual suspects who will doubtless give us teardown videos in a few months.<\/p>\n

From there wanders to power delivery \u2014 getting the voltage regulators packaged properly was a challenge, since impedance requirements meant a very tight layout. Anyone who has worked on this kind of SBC might be familiar with that issue, but for those looking in from the outside, it\u2019s a fascinating glimpse at electrical sausage being made. That\u2019s just the first half.<\/p>\n

The heat-regulation conversation is partially repeated the next conversation (which seems to have happened first) where they get into the cooling requirements of the LCD screens. This requires less than you might think, as they like to run warm for fast refresh. It\u2019s really more about keeping your face cool. They also they discuss acoustic vibration \u2014 you don\u2019t want your integrated audio shaking your IMUs apart \u2014 and why the prototype was being blasted with freakin\u2019 laser beams to monitor it.<\/a><\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t seen or read any other coverage on the Steam Frame, you\u2019re going to miss some context here, but if you\u2019ve not hid under a rock for that announcement, this is amazing detail to have. We\u2019re hugely impressed that Valve let their engineers out of their cubicle-cave to talk to media.<\/p>\n

Sure, it\u2019s not an open-source VR headset<\/a>, but compared to the deafening silence coming from the likes of Meta, this level of information is still awesome to have.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Valve\u2019s new Steam Frame is what all the well-connected YouTubers are talking about, but most of them are…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":381380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[158,67,132,68,729,730],"class_list":{"0":"post-381379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115555404552520585","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}