The headline numbers belong to another story. Alex Reeves has the prices and what ships in the box, and Nina Castillo has the step by step for the reservation list that closes Thursday morning. This one is about the camera.
A certification mark, and two companies carrying it
Valve lists two products under that accessories heading, Zenni’s prescription lens inserts and the Arcturus Vision Camera, which the page says will “add 5K HDR color passthrough and spatial video capture capabilities” to the headset. Beneath both sits the line that matters more than either product: “Products with the Steam Frame Compatible mark have been tested to work with Steam Frame.” Anyone who shipped accessories through the Made for iPhone years knows what a vendor-tested mark on a device with an open hardware port tends to become, which is a gate, and Valve put the first two names through it on launch day.
Arcturus’s own site lists dual 32-megapixel Sony RGB sensors, a weight under 10 grams, and a single connection through the Frame’s front expansion port, the slot that Road to VR described on September 2 as a Gen 4 PCIe x1 lane alongside two MIPI camera connectors. Passthrough runs at a stereo 4928 by 2464 and 60 frames per second by default, with 72Hz available at that resolution, and 144Hz at 2464 by 1232, through what the company calls a special configuration. UploadVR reports the price as $149 or the local equivalent across eleven markets, which matches what Arcturus’s US storefront returns. Orders are open now on terms built around Valve’s lottery, with the card authorized but not charged, free cancellation until September 20, a limit of two units per customer, and shipping <a href="https://comicvibe.com/5-best-indie-games-of-all-time-ranked/” title=”5 Best Indie Games Of All Time, Ranked”>timed to the headset.
The supplier selling the upgrade built the part being upgraded
Arcturus Vision, which UploadVR notes was formerly Arcturus Industries, did not discover the expansion port and a business plan at the same time. Road to VR identified the company as the computer vision specialist behind the Frame’s own camera tracking system, and its about page traces a founding team, now split between Bellevue and Madrid, back through six years at Occipital, where it shipped Structure Sensor and the Bridge headset, to a color passthrough system built with Valve for the Index. UploadVR credited that feature, Room View 3D, in June 2020 to computer vision algorithms developed by Valve, Arcturus Industries and Occipital. The module first surfaced through an early Komodo Station listing, which our Steam Frame specs page has tracked since.
