Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar believes Beyond headsets could be among the top five systems in use on Steam in the next few years.
On that path, Shankar hopes to fully catch up to demand for Beyond 2 headsets in February so they “ship within 1-2 business days, including custom-fit and universal-fit orders.” In April, Bigscreen marks 10 years of shared co-watching in VR on Steam with Shankar suggesting over email “perhaps we’ll keep the ‘beta’ tag forever.”
Shankar said Valve’s announcement of Steam Frame coincided with “one of our biggest sales days” as “the Beyond 2 has become the obvious upgrade path for those who want ultra-lightweight high-resolution micro-OLED and still use their preferred SteamVR tracking/controller setup.”
With Valve preparing to launch the Frame headset, I asked Shankar whether Bigscreen would support flat screen co-watching to devices like Steam Deck. Shankar responded:
“This has regularly come up in the past decade. We’ve stayed focused on VR, and I think that’s our strength. Many others (especially Valve) will do a good job of cross-play across PC and VR. We’re focused on the areas in which we think we have an exceptional edge in capability and knowledge. We have nothing to announce yet on our software development, need more time to develop 🙂 but we haven’t been sitting idle, that’s for sure.
Bigscreen just launched Dynamic Foveated Rendering for the Beyond 2e headset with early access in iRacing and DCS World among the first to explore support for the feature, which promises “eye tracking-driven performance improvements.” I purchased a Beyond 2 without eye tracking and received it near the end of 2025 to keep my base stations in service another couple years. We’ll be curious to hear reports from 2e customers when it comes to their real world performance using the feature.
“Many customers – hundreds of thousands around the world – are actively using SteamVR Base Stations and Controllers right now with their Valve Index, HTC Vive, etc., and the Beyond 2 has become the obvious upgrade path for those who want ultra-lightweight high-resolution micro-OLED and still use their preferred SteamVR tracking/controller setup,” Shankar wrote. “We are firmly committed to manufacturing the Beyond 2 with SteamVR Lighthouse tracking for the next 2 years. We can say this with certainty as we’ve inventoried components and have setup a continuously running production line. We’ve signed commitments to enterprise customers as they are reliant on our hardware for their businesses.”
Beyond 2 was announced in March 2025, shipping started in July 2025 with a universal fit cushion shipping near the end of the year.
“December is our biggest month of shipping, shipping more units in a single month than we typically did in an entire year with Beyond 1 in 2023 or 2024,” Shankar wrote. “We faced a lot more demand than we expected, with Beyond 2 already selling approximately 3 times more than Beyond 1 did.”
“We thought we would have inventory on hand for fast-shipping by August/September, but demand has just been too high. Each time we ramp up supply/production, demand was going up even further.”
The Steam Hardware Survey suggests that, as of this writing, Beyond headsets still need to climb past PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest Pro and both Windows Mixed Reality and the Oculus Rifts to make it into the top five.
“Perhaps within 1-2 years, we’ll be Top 5 alongside Steam Frame, Quest 3, etc,” Shankar wrote. “Beyond 2e’s built-in eyetracking cameras is the first computer vision-driven product we’ve shipped. It should be no surprise that we’ll eventually have more cameras inside Bigscreen Beyond, but there is no timeline for that. Camera R&D started years ago, and it’ll still take years before we release anything. The bar is very high for any camera-based feature.”
“I think the size of the existing SteamVR ecosystem is underestimated, and with Steam Frame dropping Lighthouse support, we’re actually seeing growing sales.”
Shankar said 2026 will see Bigscreen focus on expanding the company’s international presence.
“We currently sell in the US, Japan, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (>50% of sales are international). To improve the speed of European fulfillment and support, we’re planning to open a facility in The Netherlands in early 2026,” Shankar wrote. “It currently takes 3-10 days to ship products into the EU from our Los Angeles factory, and we aim to improve this to 1-2 days with our local European center,” Shankar wrote. “We’ve achieved meaningful scale as a company (expecting to cross $100 million in annual revenue in the next year). We’ve stayed true to our values, built by passionate VR enthusiasts for VR enthusiasts, and we’re here for the long run.”
