Arcturus Vision Camera Adds Color Passthrough & 3D Video Capture To Steam Frame

The $149 Arcturus Vision Camera, weighing just 10 grams, adds 6 megapixel per eye color passthrough to Steam Frame and captures tracked 3D HDR video.

If you missed it: Valve announced the price of Steam Frame and opened registrations, as well as confirming that it comes with Half-Life: Alyx, which is now standalone-capable.

Out of the box, Steam Frame has monochrome passthrough, grayscale with a configurable tint, that in terms of angular resolution feels sharper than Quest 2 but significantly blurrier than Quest 3, as well as lacking color.

To solve this, Valve has closely partnered with Arcturus Vision (formerly Arcturus Industries), a startup making a $149 addon that attaches to Steam Frame’s PCI-E expansion port.

Arcturus, you may remember, was also one of the companies that worked with Valve to add a depth-correct 3D passthrough mode to the Index headset in 2020. Six years later, it’s now providing an even bigger upgrade for Frame.

Arcturus Vision Camera connects to Steam Frame’s PCI-E expansion slot, affixing to the headset, and automatically upgrades the headset’s passthrough in both the home environment and all mixed reality games, including Cubism, Puzzling Places, and Table Space.

Arcturus Vision Camera features two 32 megapixel Sony RGB sensors spaced 64mm apart (around the average IPD), though for passthrough it uses only around a quarter of this resolution. There are two modes you can choose from:

• Full Resolution: 2464×2464 (6MP) per eye at up to 72Hz (60Hz default)
• Half Resolution: 1232×1232 (1.5MP) per eye at up to 144Hz (experimental)

Passthrough runs at 60fps by default. Arcturus warns that higher refresh rates can exhibit flickering or banding under artificial lighting, so are best used with natural lighting.

Arcturus Vision Camera doesn’t just upgrade Steam Frame’s passthrough, though. It also turns Frame into a spatial recording device, capable of capturing tracked stereoscopic videos.

Tracked 3D Video Capture

Capturing stereoscopic video has been a core feature of every new standalone headset since Apple Vision Pro, and Arcturus Vision Camera adds this capability to Steam Frame, plus a unique twist.

The Arcturus Vision Camera app on Steam captures 2464×2464 per eye (6MP) 10-bit HLG HDR video at 60fps or 1232×1232 (1.5MP) at 120fps. But unlike with other headsets, Arcturus also saves the tracked position of the headset throughout the recording.

Saving the tracked position of each frame enables a novel playback mode only possible in VR: Stabilized Immersive Playback.

During Stabilized Immersive Playback, the tracked 3D video itself will move around you to match the tracked position of each frame. Having briefly tried it out, it’s the best way I’ve seen yet to watch first-person 3D video.

The startup also offers an Arcturus Vision Sync tool that lets you easily convert the captured file to play on Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, and other VR headsets, though this of course lacks the Stabilized Immersive Playback feature.

Arcturus Gaussian Splat Viewer

Having the tracked pose for each recorded frame is also incredibly useful for using the footage to generate a Gaussian splat.

Arcturus doesn’t today offer a simple, streamlined GUI pipeline for generating Gaussian splats. If you’re expecting a Steam Frame version of Meta’s Horizon Hyperscape, that’s not what this is.

What the company does offer is a Gaussian splat viewer highly optimized to run on-device on Steam Frame, called Arcturus Vision Gaussian XR. It automatically discovers and lists PLY and SOG files on your Steam Frame and lets you explore them in VR.

To actually generate a new splat using footage captured by Arcturus Vision Camera, the startup provides a recommended workflow involving open-source tools on a Linux workstation PC with an Nvidia GPU.

An Essential Accessory?

UploadVR has an Arcturus Vision Camera for evaluation and, while we’ll be fully assessing it in our coming Steam Frame review, we can already declare it an essential addition to Steam Frame.

Even if you have no interest in mixed reality, being able to clearly see your surroundings while in the home interface or playing a flatscreen game is sorely missing from Steam Frame, and Arcturus Vision Camera seamlessly solves it.

It does, however, have a battery life tradeoff while active. And as we’ll cover in our review, the battery life will already leave you wanting.