Arcturus Vision Camera gives Steam Frame colour passthrough clear enough to read your phone

At a glance

Best for: Steam Frame owners, even those with no interest in mixed reality.

Skip it if: battery life matters most, since UploadVR flagged a battery cost.

Reviewers agree: the colour view beats Valve's stock passthrough and is clear enough to read a phone.

Price: €159 on Arcturus's EU storefront, read 19 October 2026.

Status: Valve's Frame order emails arrive by December or in 2027, per Road to VR.

Can you read your phone through a Steam Frame? Road to VR's Scott Hayden made that his yardstick in his 28 September 2026 review, and he says Valve's stock passthrough has no hope while the Arcturus Vision Camera crosses the gap easily. The Verge's Sean Hollister, after nearly three weeks with a Frame, reached the same result in his 14 September review: the colour view is clear enough for his phone's screen. CNET's Scott Stein, who kept the module on his review unit, calls the headset far better to use with it attached.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Out of the box, the Frame offers monochrome, low-resolution passthrough, which Stein compares to the old Oculus Quest 2. The Arcturus module swaps that for two 32-megapixel Sony colour sensors set 64mm apart, about the average eye spacing, in a body of roughly 10 grams that slots into the expansion port under the nose bridge. Hollister says Valve built in native support, so the view turns colour by itself, and installation takes one thumb pushing upward. UploadVR's David Heaney reports that passthrough uses around a quarter of the sensors' resolution, at up to 72Hz with 60Hz as the default.[3] [2] [5] [1]

The same sensors double as a recorder. Heaney, who had an evaluation unit and tried the feature briefly in September 2026, lists 10-bit HDR capture at 6 megapixels per eye and 60fps. Arcturus also saves the headset's tracked position with each clip, so playback moves the video frame around you to match the original motion, and Heaney ranks that above any other way he has watched first-person 3D footage. Clips convert for other headsets, minus that stabilised playback; splat capture, Hayden notes, still needs command-line tools and a Linux PC with an Nvidia GPU.[5] [1] [3]

UploadVR's Heaney calls the camera an essential addition, even for owners with no interest in mixed reality, because seeing the room from the home screen is something Frame sorely lacked. Hayden finds it easy to recommend, and places the result about level with Quest 3 and well behind Vision Pro, with much of the gain coming from how weak the stock view is. Stein flags the extra spend, and Heaney a battery cost, on a headset Stein found lasting two hours at best. Rock Paper Shotgun's James Archer, writing before launch and without the module, wasn't too fussed about passthrough.[5] [1] [3] [6]

The headset is the slower purchase: Road to VR reported on 12 October that Valve's order emails arrive by December or in 2027. Arcturus's own page, read on 19 October 2026, lists the camera at €159 with free standard shipping on its EU storefront; reviewers quoted $149 to $150 in September. When a Frame does show up, repeat the phone test first, then see how long the battery lasts with the camera on, since that is the trade-off UploadVR flagged.[7] [5] [2] [4]