Arcturus Vision adds colour passthrough to Steam Frame
A $149 add-on gives Valve's headset 10-bit colour passthrough and tracked 3D video capture, though the mixed-reality library is still catching up.
Valve's Steam Frame ships with black-and-white passthrough. Arcturus Vision wants to fix that, and its colour camera module is now taking orders.
What's actually going on
The Arcturus Vision Camera weighs under 10g and plugs into the Steam Frame's PCI-E expansion port. It uses two 32-megapixel Sony RGB sensors spaced 64mm apart and delivers 10-bit HDR stereoscopic colour passthrough at up to 4928x2464, which works out at 2464x2464 per eye. Passthrough runs at 60 frames a second by default, with 72 to 144fps available through a special configuration. Arcturus warns that the higher rates can flicker or band under artificial lighting.
It is not only a passthrough upgrade. The module also turns the headset into a spatial camera, capturing tracked stereoscopic 3D video that can be played back inside the Frame. Arcturus is asking $149 for it and says orders can be cancelled free of charge before 20 September.
Steam Frame itself costs $1,059 and launched with monochrome passthrough and a copy of Half-Life: Alyx, which now runs standalone on the headset. That left it as a mixed-reality machine with one obvious gap, and Arcturus is selling straight into it. The two companies have history: Arcturus worked with Valve in 2020 on a depth-correct 3D passthrough mode for the Index.
Why you should care
Colour passthrough is the difference between mixed reality feeling like a novelty and feeling like something you leave switched on. A grey view of your own room is functional. A full-colour one is why people stop taking the headset off, and it is the feature Meta has leaned on for years to sell Quest hardware. Steam Frame owners now have a route to it, at a price that is about a seventh of the headset.
Our opinion
The upgrade is welcome and the price is not silly, but it turns a $1,059 headset into a $1208 proposition, and the value case stays thin until the software catches up. Colour passthrough matters most for mixed-reality libraries, and Steam Frame's is still small; Cubism, Puzzling Places and Table Space are the names Arcturus can point at. There is also a practical warning buried in the spec sheet, because passthrough that flickers under your kitchen lights is not an upgrade. Buy it for the spatial video capture, which is genuinely new, and treat the colour view as the bonus.