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Daily Tech News Show

20 Sep 2026 · 34m · 10 chapters

Episode artwork

Who is the Steam Frame For? - DTNS Weekend

In short

Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition discusses the Steam Frame VR headset—its $1,059 price, what it’s good at in 2026, and who should buy it—plus broader VR-to-smart-glasses convergence.

Guests

Scott Stein, CNET editor at large (reviews and coverage of VR/smart glasses; testing devices and reporting on upcoming events like Meta Connect).

Key claims

  • Scott rates the Steam Frame 7/10: price and current limitations prevent a “buy now” recommendation, but it’s fun and important for competition.
  • It’s modular (extra accessories like a $149 snap-on color camera; swappable parts/straps/battery options).
  • Hardware tradeoffs: no color passthrough, no hand tracking at launch, no eye tracking? (eye tracking is present), and battery life is about 2 hours.
  • It’s “tinkerers/early adopters,” not mainstream replacement; it’s a Steam Deck-like experiment in VR/2D universality.

Notable examples

  • Runs Half-Life: Alyx (with foveated rendering and eye tracking; finger tracking observed).
  • “Great-on-frame” VR games include Walkabout Mini Golf, Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Job Simulator.
  • Some older games fail or run poorly (e.g., a Rick and Morty title was nauseating; others like Elden Ring/Ratchet & Clank were messy).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes.

Chapters

0:26

Introducing the Steam Frame VR Headset

Discussion on the release and pricing of the Steam Frame VR headset.

“You're a pro at running your life, at committing to your workout, at showing up every day.”
2:57

Introducing the Steam Frame VR Headset

Discussion on the release and pricing of the Steam Frame VR headset.

“You might see his tail if you're watching the video version.”
4:39

Exploring VR Landscape in 2026

Scott Stein discusses the current state of VR technology and competition.

“I mean, glasses are just a big deal in 2026, it seems, and not all positive.”
9:39

Steam Frame Specifications and Reviews

A detailed review and discussion of the Steam Frame's features and performance.

“Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode.”
14:00

Exploring Hand Tracking and Streaming Capabilities

Learn about the expectations and capabilities of hand tracking and streaming on VR headsets.

“is something that is pretty common in vr and it's kind of a big deal i feel like hand tracking is kind of one of those things that more and more more expected i don't know if you agree with that It's helpful.”
17:25

VR Game Compatibility and Performance

Discover the performance challenges and game compatibility of VR headsets, especially from Valve.

“Not a lot of games take advantage of the app.”
22:05

User Experience and Controller Innovations

Understand the unique features of the headset's controllers and overall user experience.

“There was something called Proton that was on, that's been on Steam Deck and other things that has, helps with game compatibility and kind of like magically, automagically convert stuff to work better.”
26:31

Target Audience and Market Positioning

Examine the target audience for the Steam Frame and its positioning in the VR market.

“Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR, and then it influenced Meta where everything became these 2D apps, running 2D apps in this interface.”
28:00

Exploring Valve's ARM Chip Initiative

Discussion on Valve's use of ARM chips for gaming devices and potential impacts.

“This is where it's like, what is the proposition here?”
34:03

The Future of VR and Smart Glasses

Discussion on the convergence of VR, smart glasses, and the evolving tech landscape.

“What do you – yeah, what most excites you about like what's coming up, how they are kind of converging, these different form factors?”
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Transcript

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2:49Hello, everybody, and welcome to Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition, brought to you by me, Jason Howell. Also, my dog, Bronson, is wandering around. You might see his tail if you're watching the video version. This is gratefully provided to you because you support this show. So thank you for doing that. Today, we're going to be talking about virtual reality and specifically the release of the anticipated Steam Frame VR headset. This is not an inexpensive VR headset. It is right around$1 ,060,$1 ,059 if you want to be exact. But we'll go ahead and round it up just because it's a little friendlier.

3:32So it's not necessarily cheap like some of the more mainstream devices, you know, like your MetaQuest and everything. That's like, I don't know,$700 less expensive somewhere in that region. So what is it good at? Where does VR even stand in 2026? That's what we're going to talk about today. And joining me to do that is Scott Stein, CNET editor at large. Good to see you, Scott. Hey, good to see you too, Jason. I'm on the road because I'm looking at Snap Specs stuff tonight. So more to come on that. But that's in LA and then Meta Connect coming up. So it's a big, there's a lot of glasses, headset stuff happening.

4:12Tell me about it. I, uh, you know, probably like six months ago, I was like, you know what, I'm going to lean into glasses with my, like my YouTube channel and, you know, some of the other coverage that I'm doing on the other shows. And it's like, I put that energy out there and now I've just got this mountain of glasses next to me and I don't have enough time to get to them all because everybody's got different glasses, not just, you know, not just VR, which is what we're going to talk about predominantly here, but smart glasses. I mean, glasses are just a big deal in 2026, it seems, and not all positive.

4:45You know, some of it's negative too. A lot of it has been going negative and it's kind of like both asking for more players in the space to help define it out. And it's earlier than like most people haven't even really used the tech. So it's like early fears of the tech as well as legitimate concerns about what's going on. And it's all flying around and there's a million different types of devices too. A million different types with cameras without, I mean, you know, I've got the Haliday G2 are the ones that I'm working on right now. You know, do the frames fit your face? Is a whole other thing.

5:20Do they have cameras? No. Audio, all the things. But what we're going to be talking about today, I mean, primarily anyways, I mean, we can get to those other things. I'm fascinated by it all. But is the frame and you, well, I think you even have it in in your hot little hands over there there is the steam frame this is this is the steam frame all kitted out this is like with the accessories this head strap is extra um this is a modular color camera that you can get for 149 dollars that oh whoa it just like snaps right on or snaps right yeah right oh there's a wow this is one of the two modular ports on the steam frame There's a little like slot in there and this thing, Arcturus Vision, goes in there and gives it the color camera.

6:07So it's interesting. Plus like this whole thing comes off. The whole – I'm not going to detach now, but like this part comes off from here and there's a little plug-in thing that you could put in a different type of head strap and battery. And I'm sure there will be other – there's another option from Valve coming. But the whole thing is designed to be modular. It's one of the interesting things about this little headset curiosity that I've been reviewing. Okay. So first of all, everyone should go to CNET. You have a written review for the headset. You also have a video review. We were talking before we hit record on how it's like when you do reviews at CNET nowadays.

6:45And I guess it was this way when I was working there too. It's like twice the work because you got to do the written thing and then you got to go to a new team and do the video thing. So they keep you busy. but you gave it a seven out of 10. I guess we'll, we'll just kind of start right there. Okay. You know, could be better, could be worse. Um, I guess, why don't we start there? Like what, what is, uh, at the end of the day, kind of the high level, what drives the seven out of 10? If you had to summarize. Yeah, that was such a hard thing to land on. And I felt, uh, anxiety and, and second thoughts about it.

7:15I kind of looked over also landing afterwards when we all came out with the reviews and I thought, okay, yeah, because I mean, I don't like landing at a seven out of 10 because it kind of feels like I'm saying like a kind of like, meh, it's like, it's kind of easy to land there. But two things were at play here. One is that price, what it's doing right now, and what it can replace are rough. You know, this is not something where I would go, oh yes, this is something you should get. Or this is something that can absolutely step in and replace something or be the gaming thing that Valve wants it to be for everything.

7:51But at the same time, while it was buggy, while it had some weirdnesses and all sorts of things which are very Valve, I liked using it more and more over time. And I found myself happy to dip into it. I mean, I brought it with me to keep testing and have it with me because it's so close to the review. But it was kind of fun to take it with me. And I pay attention to those feelings. And I thought, okay you know plus i'm very glad that it exists in a way that i'm not it doesn't really factor into the rating entirely but it it kind of does in that i think it's a needed device in the landscape of anyone you don't need vr and that's the thing the question of you know is vr essential where it's always kind of alive and dead through all the years that i've been covering it and i'm used to that but it's gotten so condensed now like for all the players that were in the space it's kind of like meta and not many others.

8:43I mean, Apple's doing its own thing and it's hard to tell where it's going to Vision Pro. Samsung and Google are doing their own thing. And so Valve is necessary competition and kind of trying to solve a lot of problems that are for compatibility that have been lurking out there. That's a long answer, but basically I think it's kind of like a Rosetta Stone to figure out, to translate a lot of different missing pieces in the landscape. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files, and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step.

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11:49Explore further at RangeRover.com. Harvard Business School Executive Education delivers breakthrough learning for leaders. stimulating classes led by faculty at the forefront of their fields. Topics that will define the future of business, discussions that transform perspectives and ways of thinking, and access to the brightest business minds on the planet. Learn more at hbs.me slash breakthrough. That's hbs.me slash breakthrough. So it's setting out to solve some of those problems and compatibility. does it does it actually do so i mean you mentioned in your piece that like um you know it's kind of like a steam deck in disguise maybe that kind of ties into the answer a little bit from from a universality perspective but like you know you can play your your regular vr games on here you can also play your flat 2d games on here um kind of seems to that end i kind of understand like oh it's a steam deck but in your goggles and when you want that extra dimension you can go there, but you don't necessarily have to.

12:55How does it do at handling all things and being more universal in its approach? It feels a little underpowered for what it's aiming to do ambitiously, but I also feel like Valve was trying to stick a landing. It's kind of similar to Steam Machine in the sense that I think Valve tries to build these things without going over the top. It's hard to say that because also the prices are high. We're also at a time where all the prices are going up and valve seems to you know acknowledge that that the prices on these products are all higher than they intended um hard to tell where it would have landed without ramageddon and everything but but like even with steam deck back when the price was lower there was a sense of them trying to get to something attainable without going too over the top and so the frame kind of feels that way it feels like they they got the chip set that they could get it's it's not a qualcomm xr chip it's a it's a it's a snapdragon 8 mobile chip which is unusual didn't have color pass through cameras which are pretty common i mean they've been on the quest headsets that are that are cheaper for years um and apple and samsung have those so it doesn't have hand tracking which is something that is pretty common in vr and it's kind of a big deal i feel like hand tracking is kind of one of those things that more and more more expected i don't know if you agree with that It's helpful.

14:16And then Valve says it's coming. So I believe them in the sense that I think that that would be very capable with the cameras that are built in. But it's like they're working on it and it wasn't like an essential piece in the beginning. It was more about the controllers. So those are some of the oddities. But at the same time, they call it a streaming first headset, I think. And paradoxically, I mean, people might get upset about this in my review. It's also because I don't have a gaming PC at home in my everyday life. And we have ones at CNET. But I'm not a big PC gamer, actually. I'm just not that person.

14:49And it is designed to be a great experience if you're plugging in the included streaming doggle to stream. But that even wasn't the most interesting thing to me, because while it'd be nice to have a nice streaming PC headset, there's a lot of headsets that can do PC connections. And even the Quest can do that reasonably well at a lower price. But it's the standalone promises of all these things that I was like, I want to see what it can do with that. So a lot of my time I spent with that, um, part of the puzzle, okay, as a VR headset, I had to mention those limitations and then what games work on it right now, this is very valve to the, the grade on frame category is an, is a narrow subset.

15:31And, you know, not, not that many games are in that category yet. That was true with steam deck. That was true with steam machine at launch. It was probably like 130 and growing. It keeps, it keeps increasing. um when i started reviewing it it was like 60 you know and um and then you want to see what what things can play valve does not prevent you from loading anything on it which is kind of cool and weird in that you could just take anything in your steam library and boot it up your mileage will 100 vary sometimes it will just totally fail out sometimes it'll sometimes it'll really be rough And in a 2D game, that's fine.

16:10In VR, that can be brutal. And there's no heads-up warning. So you really want to notice those great-on-frame recommendations carefully. But all those great-on-frame VR games are very much quest ports, like things that you've seen before if you played VR. Kind of the greatest hits of stuff. Walkabout mini-golf. Beat Saber is even on there. Beat Saber, yeah. Yeah. Synth Riders. I looked at old chestnuts, job simulator. and that's kind of where VR is at where it's like you see a lot of these games that kick around are still good but it's been years and years um those play fine and not surprising and they're getting better with the updates of originally like the refresh rate wasn't so great it was like defaulted to 72 hertz now I see games are going up to 120 the headset can go up to 144 which is a fast refresh rate um the display is good it's like 2160 by 2160 per eye so it's like and it has like these clear pancake lenses so they're like the meta quest 3 um i would say it's kind of equivalent display wise it's not the bleeding edge display experience of a samsung galaxy xr vision pro though like you notice a big a big difference there but it's more than good enough for games you can play videos on it i'll get to that in a second but um but the uh so display actually felt good it's lightweight too so like that factors in where i felt like this is smaller and more comfortable to wear um like one pound or something it's super lightweight yeah and it's balanced with the back thing but in exchange for that the battery life is low even by vr standards it's two hours at best like i found that most of the time after an hour i wanted to recharge it um i saw a lot of people also having those experiences the good news is you could you could tether it to something or daisy chain but then you're tinkering and then it's like there's going to eventually like a pro thing with a hot swappable battery pack and um but this starts to get like how many pieces you want to start adding to it um yeah and so the game so the games were like fine i like the controllers the controllers are very standard vr feel controllers there's a couple of things that are particularly unique one is that the buttons are all like a regular controller on them with d-pad and button layout so and this goes into is it also a steam deck you can just use it as a regular controller for pretty much any game which is really nice because on a on a quest or other things you usually have to reach for a type of controller you want to pair yeah you don't have to do that here yeah yeah and so you don't have to do that here for for pretty much everything as standard steam layout that it taps into the other thing is like this actually has uh hidden touch sensors all around the front and the bottom so wow so so So even the control surface itself, if you're not on the controls themselves, the actual full face of it is touch sensitive.

19:00Yes. And not a lot of games take it. Yeah. Not a lot of games take advantage of the app. But they so the wild game that I played on this is Half-Life Alex, which is the one people thought, would this run on the Steam frame? And it does. It's like it was a pre-release build when I played it. But that's the one that would get people geeked out because, I mean, this was six years ago now. But it was a premium. It is a premium killer VR game. And Valve made great efforts to port it on here. There's definitely compromises, but it works. It uses foveated rendering, which is another thing I didn't mention on this VR headset as far as how does it compare.

19:39There's eye tracking. For all the things it lacks, eye tracking is a very advanced feature. and um valve ambitiously put this in here to lower the processing um requirements to try to squeeze more performance out of this headset for both streaming and for on headset but like half-life alex is the only one fovea rendering if you don't know is like where it's enhancing the pixels only where your where your fovea looks so makes everything else kind of invisibly blurry it kind of requires eye tracking in order to do that right because yes it's kind of like where you're looking and all the things it's kind of like the way your eyes work it's interesting like well working optical illusion you don't really notice it and it worked pretty well um so half like alice was half life alice was like the the pinnacle of where things could go on the headset i think that's why they showed it off and and the point is that also uh this tracked finger motions like in that i could move my fingers here and i noticed they were showing up in the vr headset i was like wait a second it notices my pinky moving and my finger so that type of cool stuff I didn't see in any other VR game on the headset you know and would any developer bother to develop for this and do that I have no idea but they could you know yeah they could and so it kind of like descended in like excitement and expectations on that a lot of it felt familiar but then I hope and would like to run classic VR games there's like all the stuff going back Valve was one of the first VR pioneers in this new age like they were up against oculus 10 years ago where they paired with hgc vive steam vr there's like this um adventure time magic man head games that um came out around that time my kids love adventure time and i was like they haven't ported this over this would be great to run on the frame i hope it runs it doesn't run um and then i tried uh i tried um they had this old rick and morty game that was really fun it was like a kind of like you go around the place and play with stuff and that loaded but at a horribly unusable muzzy inducing frame rate and i think they're promising that those games might eventually work but they may require developers to fix some stuff i was gonna say yeah is that a system update or is that a developer going in there to optimize and if that's the case i don't know yeah you're not going to get everything the way you want so and and then valve like you go even deeper into this where it's like Like Valve is using all these like little magic tools.

22:07Like they have compatibility tools. There was something called Proton that was on, that's been on Steam Deck and other things that has, helps with game compatibility and kind of like magically, automagically convert stuff to work better. And they have something on this called Lepton that is supposed to be like a VR conversion tool. And I'm just like, just go with it. So I'm kind of, it sounds like over time, they may start having things find tools to help convert stuff more. They claim that Android APKs and apps will work on this too, which I haven't tried. But part of the cool part of this and why I get excited is that there's a very open feel to it in terms of it's just like all the other Steam devices.

22:52It's Steam OS, but it's also Linux. So you could just open the Linux desktop part and start downloading random Linux apps and, you know, download Chromium. If that's what you really want to do inside of VR, I guess you can. If you want to do that. Sync up like a Bluetooth keyboard so you could get some productivity done inside of VR. Put a Bluetooth keyboard on? Hack your stuff around? I mean, for those people, it's like a Reddit dream where like you can just, yeah, you can go hog wild down any road. And that's where I was kind of like, oh, okay, like, I don't know. I'm playing around with this a bit.

23:26I'm not going to do that all the time. but i appreciate it um yeah you appreciate that that's there the meta quest is is a little bit more controlled i mean you kind of have to hack away i think at that to get it to do you know certain other things but um okay but it's so this but it's rougher and so that's the vr answer and it's kind of like yeah would it be the vr headset no for pc people could it could it be a really good reply i mean for the old index yeah it would be a really good replacement and it's kind of like the same price a hundred dollars more so in that sense um what you get for your money over time is actually a lot more exciting now even though the price seems so high it's like i think i kind of look back and i was like oh yeah the valve index was a thousand dollars and it needed a pc okay you know it's like that's and then i forgot that the quest pro was like fifteen hundred dollars so it as expensive as it is like you said vr headsets are actually pretty expensive across the board especially now like vision pro i mean galaxy xr is 1899 and the vision pro is ridiculously 3600 um the quest is artificially low because meta i think keeps it that way and and so it's like it's kind of an impossible price like and why nobody else has ever released headsets in that price range um so it's it is it is cheaper but i don't even think anyone i think the price this would have been would have been like 700 if i were to guess and that's probably what things like that cost um so okay so then touching touching on that that's really interesting because like meta doing what it apparently and obviously has the resources to do price that incredibly low become you know makes it much more of a main staple for the majority of of like entry level or mainstream VR users, let's say.

25:18But then you have to really, like being that it's artificially lower price, a headset like this, that's two to three times more expensive, it's really got to prove itself then for those users. So who is the audience for this? And does it do enough to separate itself from what you can get for like a third of the price? Yeah, no, it doesn't do enough to separate itself right now. And who it's for, I think, and I was talking to Sean Hollister at The Verge about this. We did a Verge cast and it was a lot of fun. And it was like, you know, he really honed in on this too. It's for the tinkerers. It's for the early adopters.

25:50We've heard this before, but I really think for this one, it's like, if you want to go for the ride and you are X, I mean, I've seen a lot of people on social and people I know in XR spaces, people geek out on this and are like, oh my God, I got to test this out. I want to do this. And there are very few products that can try to develop some of these tools that are compatible and allow that type of openness. that's like your that's kind of like you know it's like it's like the cyberdeck trend you know of like people going like i want to have something i can you know hack up this is that product like you know have fun go for the ride valve's usually pretty good at they're promising a lot of support for this that's a huge i don't like going on promises for uh potential that is like that is always a trap i would say historically valve has proved it out but it is unknown of course what will happen with that so that's what i feel exactly it is a leap of faith and um and then we didn't even get to the steam deck part which is yes please equally interesting in that this like we have this whole trend in vr headsets lately uh ones that don't call this as vr headsets but still are.

27:00Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR, and then it influenced Meta where everything became these 2D apps, running 2D apps in this interface. And this kind of takes that same approach. And so they're trying to make it like a yes and device. They're very intentionally making this a, sure, it's VR. It's also not VR. It can run whatever you want, like the whole Steam library. Run 2D games on this and put them on big screens, much like what you can do on a Vision Pro or Galaxy XR and other things like that at a lower price. So I felt like, oh, that's kind of interesting. In that lens, the pricing makes a lot more sense.

27:38Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. But more expensive than a Steam Deck, although the Steam Deck's gone up in price. PC handhelds have gone up in price. As a handheld, it's not quite a handheld. You're wearing it on your face. And so it's a different experience. In some sense, it's great and luxurious because you can put stuff on a big screen. The games you can run on it are also a subset of the games that run on a Steam Deck. This is where it got. This is where it's like, what is the proposition here? And the question of how that will change over time. And to the bigger thing of what I think is really going on with Valve is this is running on an ARM chip.

28:14And I think this is one of the most important initiatives of what Valve is doing with this headset, which is that I wrote about this in November. it's like machine was pushing the hardware experiments up but but still below pcs and this is going down and that's interesting to me because if it runs on a phone type chip my mind races in all these directions outside of vr where it's like could this mean steam os running on a phone could mean running on a tablet could it run and with ramageddon and stuff like that you start getting pc gaming handhelds that are running uh more affordable chipsets things that are smaller that can basically run what you need and maybe be a little less powerful, like the Switch Lite, but they actually have the same chipset.

28:56But it's like something where you're like a little lighter, less expensive. It feels like Valve's kicking the tires on that for the whole Steam library. I kind of feel like there's more, I would imagine there's more developer support for that initiative too, because VR is a little bit floaty right now. But for 2D games, to get them running on arm chips i feel like uh there makes a lot of sense like there's a lot of things you could potentially optimize for that for all sorts of things so the games that work for that are again like there's stuff like cuphead hollow knight um uh what are the types of games i played on this um dave the diver uh bellatro these are things are not pushing any sort of intense thing portal 2 is the one that valve put on it really old game but great game but like you know a little more 3d um i tried other games to test out some of them worked kind of like the steam deck surprisingly well like sectory which is a great twitch arcade shooter uh baby steps which is a really fun bizarre indie game played pretty well um you know crazy taxi i have this old you know in my library i was like oh this old version of crazy taxi plays cool uh elder ring was a mess and Ratchet and Clank was a mess.

30:16Those were like unplayable. Some games like the, didn't even like authorize properly. So it is, you know, experimental, but they do sound ambitious about getting more games to work with it. And then it's that same thing of like, I remember Steam Deck. I was really late to review Steam Deck. I didn't review it. Dan Ackerman reviewed the first Steam Deck at CNET. And I saw people talk about how it was a mess. And then all of a sudden it became great. When I reviewed Steam Deck OLED, I came aboard and I was like this is fantastic like I was like this is probably the most exciting handheld next to the switch and I found that there were a lot of games that worked at that point so I kind of hope that like could Elden Ring ever work on this thing like I don't know but um I think more games will start optimizing but that goes back to short battery life kind of weird with you more expensive and less game support equals no i would not call this a steam deck replacement but but i could see um yeah it's like they're trying to bring all these pieces together in this junction yeah and then you play with um you play with glasses now too one thing i didn't bring up with this is something you can already do on on a steam deck which is plug in a pair of display glasses which is not vr okay right and then you think like wait a second so i got a steam deck i'm putting a virtual screen up like xrail or feature isn't that kind of the same thing as what i'm doing with the steam frame and it is but i wonder if valve is also thinking about like the pieces where it's like steam deck 2 in the future could there be like and that xrail aura that is a more advanced vr-like pair of glasses coming super interested in that yeah i'm like wouldn't valve possibly this is all speculative wouldn't valve possibly make a steam deck 2 where you plug in more advanced glasses and suddenly it's kind of vr-like and then that's kind of where frank like i'm like that's where frame should go um so it kind of feels like an old-fashioned for like if for all we talk about future tech it's an old-fashioned form for a boundary breaking we're in a season where i'm looking at devices including snap specs and xreal aura where all these things feel like they're kind of melting the forms they are and that's the thing that excites me most about steam frame yeah it's yeah but you know i think the direction is exciting yeah yeah right right it does sound like maybe this device is a stepping stone device of some sort, a testing ground.

32:57Yeah, okay. I think the 7 out of 10 sounds pretty valid.

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33:56So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com. Kind of rounding things out here, like, you know, as we look forward to the next couple of years in VR, I think you've kind of actually already answered what I was going to end with for the most part, which is how these things are blurring together. What do you – yeah, what most excites you about like what's coming up, how they are kind of converging, these different form factors? It is converging in a numbing, messy way now that is colliding with AI in a kind of helpful and distracting way.

34:42reminds me of like the metaverse overblow, you know, where it was like suddenly train wrecked everything. In my opinion, still going back, it's like people go, the metaverse was, you know, bullshit, but it's like, I thought the concept of the metaverse was real, but it got in shitified by the hype cycle and by, you know, NF2 crypto and, and everybody just trying to turn everything into everything. And then you don't know what's legit, what's not, and everything's being overly forced. AI now feels like a clear tool that's going to start, especially on smart glasses and AR, yeah, is already going to become a key factor.

35:23But it's such a cart and horse thing where it feels like everybody's dropping things and running to the AI that I don't know if the focus is being kept on. I like to believe that it's all going to work together, but there's a lot of stuff just being like shoehorned in and thrown in there. And so that gets into like form because the whole XR space is like kind of having a midlife crisis. And then glasses were supposed to be this evolution or transformation or companion to VR. But then as people started backing out of VR, including meta, although they're probably coming back with a new type of smaller, more glasses like headset, they may be talking about next week, according to reports.

36:10Um, and they still have the quest, but they, they D I mean, they, they basically stripped so much stuff out of it in the past year. Yeah. Game teams and support for things. And they, they, they, they admitted it's not doing the levels that they had thought, but, you know, I think that glasses have not stepped up to help replace that. And so it feels premature to power that down and for stuff like, like something like snap specs just talking about them because we already know they exist um are like one of the only ar glasses attempts that's out there that's real at this moment they're all kind of saying they're coming but yes we're we're seeing these like hodgepodge yeah we're seeing all this like bits and pieces being glommed that aren't aren't really that and can't do anything like it so that's like the the long answer like you said the melt is and where we're going i've seen vr headsets that are getting more compact and glasses like and i would even call the frame a tiny step in that direction doesn't i mean it's still vr i mean it's still big but it's bad it's so light like it's it's really it's lighter and it doesn't feel gigantic even like just holding it and i was like this is not gigantic it's like this is a year of tiny valve devices i was like machine is delightfully small this is like really not that big um and you know the meta phoenix thing which already i mean it looks like a pretty good leak of what they're going to have is a very thin thing um it's like everybody's driving to get to that next thing and glom it or find a bridge so i think we're going to start seeing more of that that x-real aura i was talking about it's like vr but in a glasses form and i think it's yeah it's fantastic i think it's really Really cool.

38:00Yeah. And then I hope Google keeps up development for it with Android XR. You know, there's all these. That's where, again, Steam's position in this I really love because they're actually one of the more stable pieces. Steam is a massive library of stuff. It's the main go-to for indie developers. It's not perfect. But they tend to keep stuff around, too. So like all the libraries and support and like, you know, Steam VR. Meta's flexing and Google is like unknown. Apple's unknown. Like I think there's too many like floaty pieces. So like when we talk about that path of where things are going, I'm like, Valve may be one of the most stable pillars in the space.

38:52Yeah. So go, Valve, go. But yeah, it's like I think it's it feels like. Yeah, it feels like walking on moving pieces of ice right now. Yeah. Yeah. Which would be a great game inside of VR. Scott Stein, thank you so much for carving out a half hour to talk about your review and the future of VR and smart glasses and all the things you do. Excellent coverage at CNET of all of these. Thank you. this whole side of the industry. I'm always, you know, when I see that you've got something new out, I'm always super interested because I'm very fascinated by the glasses as well. So if people want to find more of you online, I mean, clearly your coverage is on CNET.

39:38If they want to find you, like, what do you want to point people to? Definitely look for my, if you Google up my CNET profile, Scott Stein, it lists all my stories that are coming. So it's helpful. It's not like prominent on CNET's main page, but you can look They are seen as YouTube channel has a lot of our breaking stuff. I am on blue sky a whole time. And I also have my own little newsletter called the inner twist that is on a beehive. And I don't always post things there, but it's kind of my extended after hours thoughts on the melting space. So look for that. Sign up and it's free. So I don't know.

40:10Just I'll that's another thing. I'll have more there. And I'm working on a continuing podcast thing. So I'll tell you more about that when I'm when it's all together. her but it's great talking about all this with you yeah yeah absolutely scott thank you for carving out time again have good uh have a good time with the rest of uh of your time in la for snap oh thank you yeah we'll talk more there's a lot coming snap meta google uh xreal we have a lot of dominoes left this year yeah yeah indeed indeed you'll be following it all okay thank you again scott uh and of course thanks to all the people who support uh this show especially those of you on the Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS.

40:51We are, it's right down there. We'll be back on Monday with a whole lot of news to talk about on the show. Appreciate you. We'll see you next time. Talk to you later.

41:04The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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From the publisher

Scott Stein, CNET Editor at Large, walks through the new Steam Frame VR headset, where it sits in the pantheon of VR devices in 2026, and whether its price is justified.


Featuring Jason Howell and Scott Stein.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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