Valve recently announced Steam frame promises a unique twist VR headsets. Besides the fact that I Quest 3A standalone style headset that can both stream games from a powerful PC and run less demanding games on its own internal devices. The latter won't be limited to VR games—using SteamOS as its operating system, Frame can run any Steam game in your library locally, as long as it can run on the hardware.
This is all good, especially in the sense that it gets around classic virtual reality problems, such as the need for base stations or an expensive desktop computer. But the smartest thing in VR right now isn't the Steam Frame. It's not even hardware. This is a mod. Enter Praydog's UEVR or Universal engine Unreal Engine VR: A mod that has quietly turned hundreds (potentially thousands) of Unreal Engine games into room-sized VR gaming experiences since its release.
Frame's ability to locally run your Steam library is provided by SteamOS, the same operating system that powers Steam deck may be something new, but ultimately it's about running flat games in a 2D cinematic experience, and that's what Valve's own SteamVR platform has been doing for years. UEVR actually changes games, not just the screen you use to display them.
This free, open-source tool brings VR support to Unreal Engine games (currently in UE versions between 4.8 and 5.4) by tapping into Unreal's own built-in stereo rendering pipeline. It allows for truly stereoscopic 3D rendering using Unreal's own VR path, as well as head tracking using 6DOF, so the in-game camera is actually your head and moves as you look around. As a result, familiar scenes on a flat screen take on a real physical presence, allowing you to peer, lean in and occupy the game world rather than just watching it. For many of these games, UEVR also provides support for motion controllers, which remap in-game actions to VR input.
So, instead of projecting a flat frame onto a virtual cinema display, UEVR essentially reprograms the game to think and act as if it were always a VR game—assuming the game is built in Unreal Engine. To understand why this is so important, you need to look at how games play in Theater mode compared to UEVR.
The Outer Worlds this is a really good example of how UEVR works. In 2D cinema mode, the game is another sci-fi RPG set in a large virtual rectangle. Sure, it looks nice and the scale of the planets is a little larger, but every cutscene and camera movement is still designed for a TV or PC monitor. You can't lean around a corner or hallway to check if a marauder is hiding; you are tied to what the developers have created.
All of this changes as soon as you launch the game through UEVR, because the position of your headset controls the in-game camera, so you can physically lean over railings to look at things, or duck behind crates while you line up your shot. It really feels like you're in the thick of the action, taking out raiders and making your way through space stations.
All this is impossible without careful modification of the engine. Under the hood, UEVR enables native stereo where possible, relying on each Unreal eye's native VR viewing path, and falls back to alternative methods such as synchronized sequential rendering if engine objects and native stereo are not working correctly. It also rebinds the camera and inputs, so your headset and controller effectively become the “player” from the engine's perspective.
The scale of what the UEVR developers (and the relatively hands-on community) have managed to implement and unlock is truly hard to overstate, especially considering that thousands of games running on the Unreal Engine have been tested with the mod to some degree; Here only one partial list of compatible games at the time of writing, this has reached 667. Of the games I've played, The Outer Worlds is definitely among the most successful and strikingly natural implementations, and the game's open areas take on a special charm when explored in 3D VR. Walking through a dusty frontier community and craning your neck to read a neon sign suddenly feels less like panning a camera and more like space tourism.
Borderland 3 another great example. On a monitor or in theater mode, its footage and visuals are already loud and intense. But with a headset, it's a complete sensory overload, with loot falling at your feet, bullets flying around your head, and NPCs barging into your personal space. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice changes the looming fear of chaos, but is no less fun in virtual reality, especially when you're crawling through dungeons by torchlight and looking for environmental clues that match the runes you see. Oh, and the whisper that bothers Senua in the flat version? They rotate around your head while playing UEVR. It's even more unpleasantly intimate and much scarier.
Then there is Dead by daylight, which, frankly, already becomes quite stressful when played back on a monitor. However, in VR this is even more true as you hear the killer's footsteps approaching and see his shadow stretch across the ground in front of you. Not your character – You. I found myself instinctively cringing, reminding myself that this was just a game.
As difficult as UEVR may find it to handle flat games, some new releases can gain support at a surprisingly fast pace. Oblivion updatedfor example, got virtual reality up and running within a few hours of it (for the most part) unexpected launch. In other words, this isn't just a catalog of old games that would otherwise never get an official remastered VR port. New products are constantly expanding the range of compatible games.
On the user side, UEVR is also surprisingly easy to set up, and there's no shortage of how-to guides. surfing YouTube if you get stuck. There are also some downsides: you need a powerful computer, since you're essentially asking the game to render twice (one for each eye) on top of the game's normal hardware requirements. However, the mod works with any OpenVR or OpenXR compatible headset, starting with Valve index and the Meta Quest family for the HP Reverb and Pimax series. It will likely work with Steam Frame when streaming from your desktop in PCVR mode.
It's clear that Frame and UEVR aren't really rivals. If anything, they're allies because they're solving different halves of the same problem: Frame aims to push virtual reality hardware away from the constraints of base stations and high-end PCs, while UEVR deals with the content shortage by simply VR-modifying existing Unreal games.
But while hardware comes and goes, VR will always need games, and UEVR has proven itself to be a very clever engine hack that helps provide more reasons than ever to strap on a headset.
