It is no secret that Valve is working on the VR (virtual reality) support (http://pixeljudge.com/en/news/valve-to-demo-vr-at-devs-conference/). While Valve already supports VR in some of their games, the client itself was not geared for VR. However, the latest update to Steam Beta added the support for VR mode. So, if you have Oculus Rift devkit, you can try Steam’s new look. The SteamVR SDK has also been released for developers, so we can expect more support for VR in the future.

There is also another feature hidden in this update. The last time we have seen the streaming functionality in Steam was just an empty shell. However, this time the actual streaming support is provided in the beta for those who were selected. Currently it is in a closed beta, but SteamDB found some details already. There is a support for a several compression algorithms, Raw (no compression), popular h.264 codec and an open VP8 codec. Some other codecs are referenced as well, but there is no mention if they are supported right now. The support for uncompressed video is a curious thing, considering that 1080p 60 FPS uses ~3 Gbps this way, well beyond most home networks. Stay tuned for more news in the near future.