Valve Index VR Kit

Your hands, in VR

Designed from the ground up to enable natural interactions, high-fidelity hand presence, and long-term comfort.

Natural, direct input

Valve Index Controllers let you reach out and grab an object directly, rather than relying on abstractions like triggers. Hold up two fingers to make the peace sign, or drop objects by just opening your hand - just like in real life.

Sensor fusion

Each controller uses 87 sensors to track hand position, finger position, motion, and pressure to determine user intent. All of these signals, combined with fine-tuned software and algorithms, give us a better understanding of how a player is holding and using the controllers.

Throwing

Enabling natural and accurate open-handed throwing was a high priority for the team, and we used every sensor at our disposal. Optical and motion sensors provide velocity and trajectory, capacitive and force sensors help determine the intended release point, and our fine-tuned algorithms and software bring it all together into a usable input / output. The end result is an intuitive and natural-feeling throw.

Open-hand interactions

The hand strap allows you to open your whole hand to drop or throw an object. This strap is easy to secure, and it adjusts at three points to fit a wide variety of hands - so you can focus on the game, and not hanging onto your controller.

Long-term comfort

Since these controllers are worn instead of held, during a play session you can take breaks - fully relaxing your hands because they don't need to constantly grip the controllers. As with all Valve Index hardware, the controller straps are made with an anti-microbial, moisture-wicking, and easy to clean fabric.

Standard gaming inputs

With a full complement of buttons, triggers, and thumbsticks, all of your favorite Steam titles will just work. With the new SteamVR Input System, developers and players can re-bind and customize controls for any controller with any game.

Squeeze-ability

The main body of each controller is your grip input, with built-in force sensors tuned to detect a wide range of forces from a light touch to a firm squeeze. This not only improves natural actions like grabbing and throwing objects, but introduces new interactions like squeezing and crushing. If a developer or player prefers the grip to behave like a binary button, they can do so with haptic output.

Track button

The oval button on the face has force and capacitive sensors so it can be used as a trackpad, a scroll wheel, or as a simple big binary button with haptics. The force sensor enables analog actions such as pinching or pressing.

Best-in-industry room-scale tracking

The highest quality tracking has gotten even better with Base Station 2.0, now with amazing range, field of view, and scalability.

Increased range and FOV

The single-rotor provides a wider FOV and increased range. Now with two base stations you can enjoy a 400 perecent larger play space.

Laser tracking

Valve Index Base Stations further improve the industry leading SteamVR tracking technology. Fixed lasers sweep 100 times a second to track photonic sensors on the headset and controllers. This ensures the highest resolution (sub-millimeter) experiences across all postures and actions without fear of occlusion.

More compatible

Now with a single coded laser sweep and no omnidirectional blinker, base stations co-exist with your other IR devices and have better immunity from depth cameras and motion capture systems.

Optimized pixel layout

The headset's dual 1440x1600 RGB LCDs provide 50 percent more subpixels than OLED, resulting in greater sharpness for the same rendering cost. In addition, the fill-factor is three times better than OLED, greatly reducing "screen door" effect.

Higher frame rates

The Valve Index Headset runs at 120Hz with full back-compatibility to 90Hz, as well as an experimental 144Hz mode. Higher framerates improve realism and optical comfort, allowing longer and more comfortable play sessions.

Extremely low persistence

Valve Index displays have a reduced illumination period of 0.330ms to 0.530ms (framerate dependent), allowing imagery to remain just as sharp when your head is in motion as when you're standing still. This is a 5x improvement over first-generation PC VR HMDs.

Optimized for FOV

The best way to improve field of view is to position the optics as close as possible to the eyes. Physically adjustable IPD (distance between eyes) and eye relief (distance from lens to eye) lets you optimize the field of view for your face. With these features, as well as the dual-element lens and canted optics, this headset provides 20 degree more FOV than the HTC Vive for typical users.

Dual-element lens

The custom lenses built into the Valve Index Headset maximize field of view without sacrificing edge-to-edge clarity. High geometric stability allows you to look around the scene by moving your eyes (not just your head) with minimal shape distortion.

Canted optics

Instead of a mount perpendicular to the user's eyes, the headset's displays cant outward by 5 degrees. This improves outer FOV while balancing the inner FOV.

Off-ear immersion

Designed to provide a more natural way to experience audio, Index Speakers do not touch the ears, allowing sound to freely flow and interact with the geometry of your own head and ears. With this earspeaker design audio feels greatly externalized - virtual sound sources appear to come from the environment around you, rather than from inside your head.

Long-session comfort

No physical contact means cooler temperatures and a huge improvement in comfort, no matter how long you play. Each speaker's position is also adjustable and can be moved to the audio sweet-spot for all heads.

Ultra-nearfield flat panel speakers

The composite honeycomb-panel speaker drivers in the Valve Index provide their full-frequency range across a nearly 180-degree dispersion pattern. This allows us to accommodate the widest possible diversity of ear and head shapes without sacrificing sound quality.

Adjustments for every head

You can adjust Valve Index for your head size, face angle, and ear position. Then fine-tune your visual experience with IPD and eye relief adjustments.

Cameras

The Valve Index HMD includes stereo, global-shutter RGB cameras made for computer vision, enabling applications like high-quality stereo pass-through. We are excited to see what the computer vision community creates.

Controller:

• USB Type C
• 2.4GHz Wireless
• HD LRA haptics
• SteamVR 2.0 sensor
• Compatible with SteamVR 1.0 and 2.0 Base Stations

Base station:

• 7m range
• 160 x 115 degree field of view

Headset:

• Dual 1440 x 1600 pixel LCD
• RGB per pixel
• Ultra-low persistence global backlight illumination
• 144Hz refresh rate
• Double element, canted lens design
• 58mm - 70mm range inter-pupillary distance
• 5m tether port
• 1m breakaway trident connector
• USB 3.0
• DisplayPort 1.2
• SteamVR 2.0 sensor
• Compatible with SteamVR 1.0 and 2.0 base stations
• 40Hz - 24KHz audio frequency response
• 3.5mm aux headphone out
• Dual microphone array
• 20Hz – 24kHz microphone frequency response
• Stereo 960 x 960 pixel, global shutter, RGB (Bayer) camera