Smarter than the Steam Frame: inside the VR mod that’s brought virtual reality to hundreds of games

Laying eyes and lenses on UEVR

Valve’s recently announced Steam Frame is promising a unique twist on VR headsets. On top of being a Quest 3-style standalone headset that can both stream games from a powerful PC and run less demanding games on its own internals, the latter won’t be limited to VR titles – by using SteamOS as its operating system, the Frame can locally run any Steam game in your library, provided it can perform on the hardware.

That’s all fine, especially in how it bypasses classic VR issues like the need for base stations or an expensive desktop. But the smartest thing in VR right now is not the Steam Frame. It isn’t even hardware. It’s a mod. Enter Praydog's UEVR, or Universal Unreal Engine VR: a mod that’s quietly turned hundreds (potentially thousands) of Unreal Engine games into playable, room-scale VR experiences since its release.

The Frame’s ability to locally run your Steam library – enabled by SteamOS, the same operating system as the Steam Deck – might be new, but ultimately it’s still about running flat games in a 2D theatre view, and that’s something that Valve’s own SteamVR platform has been doing for years. UEVR actually changes the games, not just the screen you’re using to display them.

This free, open-source tool injects VR support into Unreal Engine games (currently those on UE versions between 4.8 and 5.4) by hooking into Unreal's own, built-in stereo rendering pipeline. It allows for true stereoscopic 3D rendering using Unreal's native VR path, as well as 6DOF head tracking, so the in-game camera is actually your head, and moves as you look around. The result is that familiar flat-screen scenes gain real physical presence, letting you peer, lean, and occupy the game world rather than simply watch it. For many of these games, UEVR also provides support for motion controllers, which remaps in-game actions for VR input.

So, instead of projecting a flat frame onto a virtual cinema display, UEVR basically rewires the game to think and behave like it's always been a VR title - just so long as the game is made in Unreal Engine. To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to look at how the games are played using theatre mode vs UEVR.

The Outer Worlds is a really good example of how UEVR works. In a 2D theatre mode, the game is just another sci-fi RPG playing on a big virtual rectangle. Sure, it looks nice, and the scale of the planets pops a bit more, but every cutscene and camera move is still staged for a TV or a PC monitor. You can't lean around the corner or a corridor to check whether a marauder is hiding; you're locked to whatever the developers framed.

All of that changes once you fire the game up through UEVR, because your headset position drives the in-game camera, so you can physically lean over railings to stare down at stuff, or duck behind crates while you line up a shot. It really starts feeling like you're there in the thick of it, blasting raiders and sneaking through space stations.

None of this is possible without some meticulous engine tinkering. Under the hood, UEVR enables native stereo where possible while relying on Unreal's own VR view path of each eye, and falls back to alternative methods, like synchronized sequential rendering, if the engine objects and native stereo misbehaves. 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 UEVR's developers (and relatively hands-on community) managed to pull off and unlock is really hard to overstate, especially since thousands of titles running on Unreal Engine have been tested with the mod to some extent; here's just one, partial list of compatible games that's hit 667 at the time of writing. Of the games I’ve played, The Outer Worlds definitely ranks among the most successful, shockingly natural-feeling implementations, with the open hub areas gaining a particular charm when exploring them in 3D VR. Walking through a dusty frontier settlement and turning your neck to read a neon sign suddenly feels less like moving a camera and more like space tourism.

Borderlands 3 is another great example. On a monitor or in theatre mode, its shooting and visuals are already loud and busy. But with a headset, it’s complete sensory overload, with loot dropping at your feet, bullets hailing around your head, and NPCs barrelling into your personal space. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice swaps the chaos creeping dread but is no less involving in VR, especially when you're creeping around dungeons by torchlight and looking for environmental cues to match the runes you're seeing. Oh, and the whispers that nag at Senua in the flat version? They orbit your head when playing in UEVR. It’s even more uncomfortably intimate, and an awful lot scarier.

Then there's Dead by Daylight, which, in fairness, already gets pretty intense when played on a monitor. It's even more so in VR, though, as you can hear the killer's footsteps getting closer and see their shadow stretching across the ground in front of you. Not your character - you. I found myself instinctively shrinking down, having to remind myself it was just a game.

As complicated as it seems for UEVR to do its thing with flat games, some new releases can get support with surprisingly quick turnarounds. Oblivion Remastered, for instance, got VR up and running within hours of its (mostly) surprise launch. In other words, it’s not just a back catalogue of older games that would otherwise never receive an official VR port being retrofitted. Newer stuff is expanding the range of compatible games all the time.

On the user’s end, UEVR is also surprisingly easy to set up, and there's no shortage of how-to guides floating around YouTube if you get stuck. There are some drawbacks: you do need a strong PC, since you're basically asking the game to render twice (once for each eye) on top of the game’s usual hardware demands. Still, the mod works with any OpenVR- or OpenXR-compatible headset, from the Valve Index and Meta Quest family to the HP Reverb and Pimax series. It will, most probably, work with the Steam Frame as well, when it’s streaming from a desktop in PCVR mode.

Obviously, the Frame and the UEVR aren’t actually rivals. If anything, they’re allies, as they solve different halves of the same problem: the Frame seeks to move VR hardware further away from shackling base stations and high-end PCs, while UEVR handles content scarcity by simply VR-ifying existing Unreal games.

But while the hardware will come and go, VR will always need games, and UEVR is proving itself a very clever engine hack that’s helping provide more reasons than ever to put a headset on.