Steam Frame passthrough quality can be dramatically upgraded with an accessory from Arcturus built over the course of a lengthy partnership with Valve. The add-on also captures higher quality spatial video than Apple Vision Pro.
The Arcturus Vision Camera sells for $149 and snaps into the port in the nose area of Steam Frame to immediately upgrade the headset’s passthrough with high-resolution stereo color. Good Virtual Reality spoke with Arcturus CEO Jeffrey Powers for a 21-minute podcast covering the launch features and long-term potential for the device.
Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review
Spatial Video Capture & 3D Gaussian Splatting From Steam Frame
The company offers companion software on PCs for processing captured content into 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively pulling reconstructions from recorded video. A pair of apps in Steam Frame enable spatial capture as well as viewing the Gaussian splats. Arcturus Vision Camera can also record pose information as a kind of stabilization system during playback for more comfortable viewing of spatial captures.
Powers talks about how increasingly efficient on-device algorithms can do depth estimation, leading us to discuss whether there’s value in headsets including an additional depth sensor. The conversation ends up being a valuable introduction to the state of the art in spatial video and computer vision. Apple Vision Pro, for instance, captures spatial video at just 30 frames per second while the Arcturus add-on can record stereo video to internal storage or the removable microSD card at 60 frames per second in 5K resolution as well as even higher frame rates at reduced resolutions.
The accessory’s debut alongside Steam Frame suggests Valve made a shrewd design decision to reduce cost and weight in the headset by including camera sensors tuned specifically for positional tracking. Simultaneously, Valve partnered with Arcturus to extend the headset’s capabilities substantially for the subset of buyers interested in these features. The Arcturus Vision Camera weighs under 10 grams.
“It should be one of the best devices in the world for recording spatial memories,” Powers says on the Good VR Podcast. “We just went through a house remodel and it took a really long time and one of the things that I was luckily able to do with early versions of our camera was shoot footage and stills of the interior just by walking around. I just walked around and I’m just recording all these frames and then processing that into a 3D reconstruction…I now have these 3D replicas of my house while it was under construction. And so I can go back and see what was in the walls.”
I viewed and captured some stereo video with the Arcturus Vision Camera in headset and I was very impressed by the scale of arms in the scene matching my own arms held out in front of me. The stabilized viewing mode that moves stereo video around you using the pose information during capture is also extremely impressive and now my preferred way to view this type of media. The IPD of the camera’s lenses is very near the average distance between the eyes of adult humans.
Below is video from Cubism, a game that utilizes passthrough on Steam Frame and also shows how the add-on switches from monochrome to color on the fly.
You can watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube with some clips provided by Arcturus showing the passthrough quality and video player.
Below is a 60 FPS test video I shot in Central Park at dusk my first day with Steam Frame. I converted it on Mac using Arcturus’ Vision Sync into various formats for playback.
* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Quest Format
* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Vision Pro Format
* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Side By Side Format
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Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review
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