Release notes

Every vrOS release gets notes. They are written once and published in two places: as an announcement on the Steam page, and here, newest version first. The Steam announcement goes out in all nine app languages; this page is English.

Each entry is one version, headed by its version number and the date it went out, newest at the top. Within a version the changes are grouped, and only the groups that have something in them appear:

• New features — things that were not there before.
• Fixes — things that were broken.
• Improvements — things that got faster, quieter, or less annoying.
• Known issues — what is known to be still wrong at the time of the release. This group exists so that it gets used.

Bullets are written for the person wearing the headset, not for the person reading the commit log. Where a change lands on a setting, the note names the setting’s path so you can go and look at it.

Version numbers are semantic: the patch digit moves for fixes, the minor digit for new features that break nothing, and the major digit for changes that do. Pre-release builds carry a suffix — 2.0.0-beta.1 and so on — until the version they lead to ships.

Note

Running a playtest or beta build? Pre-release notes go out as a Steam announcement when that build ships. They arrive on this page once the version they lead to is published.

2.2.0

Released 15 October 2026.

New features

• Tracker alignment by walking (Steam Frame): optical alignment is rebuilt around a short walk with a tracker held against a controller.
  • Hold a Lighthouse tracker firmly against a Frame controller, press Start and turn them together for a few seconds. Then walk slowly past each base station with the pair until the reading shows ±2 cm or better. That locks your room, and the page reads ALIGNED · ROOM LOCKED.
  • The reading is measured from your walk every few seconds, so it can rise when a new part of the room disagrees with the rest. Done locks exactly what it last showed. The walk also allows for the small timing gap between tracker and controller, so a normal walking pace stays accurate.
  • Re-check: hold the pair for 3 seconds, and vrOS checks the lock where you stand and corrects it there.
  • The room lock carries over to your next session. Press Re-check to confirm it.
  • While you stand, your feet keep the floor height. Base station changes and restarts are followed for you.
  • Alignment no longer uses the headset cameras: the walk replaces the camera search and its guidance.
• Easier first run (see First run):
  • The vrOS SteamVR driver installs by itself, once per PC, while SteamVR is closed. vrOS never closes or starts SteamVR to do it. Existing installs without the driver get it too; if you reverted the driver setup or turned vrOS off in SteamVR’s add-ons, that choice is kept. The guide’s first step shows the driver and offers Restart SteamVR now.
  • A new step asks Do you play VRChat? Yes turns on VRChat OSC, opens VRChat’s chatbox on your left wrist and shares your face tracking with VRChat. Steam Link Face turns on too once vrOS sees a Steam Frame (eyes) or a Quest Pro (eyes and mouth). On a Steam Frame you can also choose to have a long press of the aux button toggle your VRChat mic. You can change all of it later in Settings → Extensions.
  • Settings is now a cog icon at the bottom of the dashboard’s left rail, instead of the word SET.
• RESTART STEAMVR asks first: every button that restarts SteamVR now shows a confirmation saying it quits VRChat or any VR game that is running, and says so when one is. A restart also works while a game is running: before, it was only offered with no VR app open at all, SteamVR Home included.
• Steam Frame battery: the PERF tab’s HEADSET view and the performance panel show how fast the battery is charging or draining, in watts (CHARGING +0.6 W, or -9.6 W on battery). New states: PLUGGED IN BUT DRAINING, CHARGING SLOWLY, DISCHARGING and FULL. The DEVICES band shows the headset’s state and rate, marks the headset while it’s plugged in, and warns when it’s plugged in but draining or charging slowly. Those warnings are judged over two minutes, so they don’t flicker.
• CONTROL tile: the indicator that shows whether VR clicks or your mouse has control moved from the dashboard’s left rail, where it looked like a tab, to the first tile of the DEVICES band. It reads VR, MOUSE or HANDOFF; point at it for an explanation. Without a DEVICES band, a small status stays in the rail. The desktop window no longer shows it.
• The About window has a new LICENSE section: you may install vrOS on as many computers as you like, it doesn’t need Steam to run (copying the folder works), and every file is signed by catnet systems. The certificate to verify the signature is at vros.cat.

Fixes

• Steam Frame updates: when a vrOS update brought a new headset driver, the Steam Frame needed two restarts to load it. One restart is now enough, and the headset tells you so: an UPDATED · Restart the headset card in view and a notice in the dashboard. On the PC, the DRIVER card now says when the headset needs that restart, when the headset’s vrOS is older than the PC’s, or when to press Play on the headset to install its driver.
• QUIT VROS (Settings → General) on the Steam Frame no longer comes straight back. vrOS stays closed until you press Play.
• Per-eye blinking in VRChat: VRChat now gets separate left and right eyelid values on any avatar that has the standard VRCFaceTracking eyelid parameters, FT/v2 avatars included. Before, only the avatar whose ID was entered as FACE PROFILE AVATAR ID got them, and every other avatar closed both eyes from one value. O·VR → FACE TRACKING → LOCAL PREVIEW now has a LEFT EYE and a RIGHT EYE row, each with that eye’s closure and gaze.
• VRChat face tracking no longer hiccups every 5 seconds: each re-read of the avatar’s parameters briefly switched eye tracking off and reset the mouth.
• Tracker alignment:
  • Moving your playspace no longer drops the alignment and freezes your trackers.
  • With several trackers, a tracker could jump briefly each time the alignment adjusted, or flip between two base stations’ corrections. Both are fixed.
  • The reading during a walk could show under 2 cm while the walk then failed to lock. It now shows the real measurement.
• The DEVICES band showed a Steam Frame’s battery at 100 % until it fell to about 90 %. It now reads the headset’s own battery gauge.

Improvements

• vrOS’s tab in the SteamVR dashboard shows the vrOS logo in violet, matching Steam Link’s tab, when you play PC VR, and in white when vrOS runs on the Steam Frame by itself.

Known issues

• Tracker alignment is still in development. We’re still working on how reliably the room lock holds through a long session.

2.1.0

Released 12 October 2026. Optical alignment for trackers is the main work in this release, and we’re still iterating on it. Alongside it come quite a few smaller quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes.

New features

• Optical alignment for trackers (Steam Frame):
  • The fastest way to align now comes first: hold a tracker against a controller and press Start. It applies at once. Searching with the headset cameras is still there as the hands-free way.
  • FINE-TUNE: if your trackers sit a little off after aligning, nudge them into place, or measure the offset by holding a tracker against a controller. A fine-tune belongs to the alignment it was made with and is dropped when a new alignment replaces it.
  • While the cameras search, the room map shows where the base stations probably are and which way to turn to see the next one. The guidance holds steady instead of changing every few seconds, and names a base station the cameras can’t see.
  • The room map now also draws your playspace boundary and what each headset camera can see.
  • O·VR → CALIBRATE is split into AUTOMATIC · MANUAL · BODY. AUTOMATIC only appears on headsets that can use optical alignment.
• SteamOS settings: a new Settings → SteamOS pane appears while a Steam Frame is paired or connected, and on the headset itself. The proximity sensor and boundary settings moved there from O·VR → DRIVER.
• Aux button shortcuts: Settings → SteamOS → BUTTON lets vrOS take over the Steam Frame’s aux button. One to five presses, a long press, and tap-then-hold can each run an action: the SteamVR dashboard, passthrough, the next brightness step, a screenshot, muting the microphone or speakers, your VRChat microphone on the PC, the headset performance panel, or displays off and on. One and two presses start out doing what SteamVR’s did, and a short note in view shows what each press did.
• Mic tuning: Settings → SteamOS → MICROPHONE tunes the Steam Frame’s microphone live: presets for earphones or speakers, echo cancellation, noise suppression, the noise gate and mic gain. Nothing is written to the headset, and turning it off gives SteamOS its own settings back.
• Headset performance: with a Steam Frame, the PERF tab can show the headset’s own readings: GPU and CPU load, temperatures, throttling, battery, power, fan, memory, and the Steam Link and Wi-Fi connection. A PC | HEADSET switch picks what it shows. The same readings can float in view as a performance panel: turn it on in Settings → General → PERFORMANCE AREA → Performance panel, or with the aux button.
• Keyboard hover feedback: your controller gives a light tick as the pointer moves onto a new key.

Fixes

• Playspace flicker (Steam Frame): vrOS could reset SteamVR’s standing origin over and over (hundreds of times in an evening, and in bursts each time you put the headset on), which made the playspace flicker in VRChat and other apps. It now answers once.
• Optical alignment:
  • Trackers stay aligned when SteamVR moves its base stations or switches which base station it tracks a tracker from. Before, a tracker could end up about 12 cm off in parts of the room.
  • The alignment is kept through stream stalls, reconnects and short gaps in head tracking instead of starting over, and it follows slow drift.
  • An alignment that would turn the room the wrong way is no longer applied: when a base station the cameras should see doesn’t match, vrOS waits and tells you which one.
  • The headset camera reader no longer stops every few minutes.
  • An old fine-tune no longer stacks on top of a fresh alignment.
• The PERF tab’s APP time shows “—” when no game is running, instead of a misleading number.
• The O·VR page menu button now shows its list marker on Windows.
• Twitch: the pre-roll countdown no longer occasionally skips a minute, and the ADD-ONS page has its normal row spacing back.

Improvements

• vrOS uses much less CPU while idle: a background check that looked through every running process four times a second now does it once every 5 seconds.
• Optical alignment uses less of the Steam Frame’s CPU when copying camera frames.
• O·VR → DIAGNOSTICS lays its readings out as a table, with units in their own column, and lists only the devices that are actually present.

Known issues

• Optical alignment for trackers is still in development. We’re still working on how quickly it locks on and how reliably it stays aligned.

2.0.2

Released 8 October 2026.

New features

• Quit vrOS from inside VR: Settings → General now has a QUIT VROS button, right under “Quit with SteamVR”. Press it, then CONFIRM (it cancels itself after 5 seconds). It works from the World Dash, the vrOS tab in the SteamVR dashboard, the Steam Frame and the desktop window. Before this, only the tray icon or closing the desktop window could quit vrOS.
• Playspace tip: the first time you open O·VR → PLAYSPACE, a short tip explains how to turn on drag and rotate for each hand. GOT IT, or turning on either hand, dismisses it for good.

Fixes

• Optical alignment (Steam Frame):
  • Finds an alignment sooner: vrOS accepts one as soon as enough base station sightings agree, instead of waiting for more head movement. It’s only saved for next time once it has been confirmed.
  • Base stations more than about two metres away are now found: their faint spots count toward alignment, and large bright spots such as room lamps are less likely to be mistaken for a base station.
  • Fewer sightings are thrown away when you turn your head before the headset’s camera timing has been measured.
  • The alignment is kept when SteamVR briefly loses a base station, when the headset cameras restart, or when camera timing is re-measured, instead of starting over.
  • When SteamVR shifts its whole base station layout by a few centimetres (it does this on its own from time to time), vrOS now follows the shift instead of losing alignment.
  • A brief slowdown on the streaming connection no longer pauses alignment while you stream.
• First-time setup: step 3 no longer opens with a sentence meant only for Steam Frame, and no longer says your playspace is ready on headsets where vrOS can’t move the playspace.

Improvements

• Optical alignment uses less processing power on the Steam Frame: camera frames are only copied when they’re needed, and vrOS checks base station details less often.

Known issues

• Optical alignment is still in development. We’re still working on how quickly it locks on and how reliably it stays aligned.

2.0.0

Released 1 October 2026. The first vrOS 2 release on Steam’s main branch (vrOS is still in Early Access). vrOS 2 is rebuilt from the ground up and replaces vrOS 1, which stays available on the legacy branch for now. The three things vrOS 1 owners notice first:

• A laser you can actually see. vrOS 1 only ever drew the dot. vrOS 2 draws a real beam from your controller to whatever you are pointing at, on by default; change its look or turn it off in Settings → Themes → Laser beam.
• Panels follow your laser. Grab a panel and push or pull it with the stick, and it slides straight along your pointer, so the spot you grabbed stays under your dot instead of drifting up and away.
• Everything else is new too — the dash, the keyboard, the playspace tools and the extensions. The groups below cover it.

Upgrading from vrOS 1

• Fresh start. vrOS 2 does not import vrOS 1’s settings, layouts or sign-ins. vrOS 1’s data is left exactly where it was, so switching back and forth is safe. Sign in to Twitch and OBS again in their extensions.
• Getting vrOS 1 back. In Steam, right-click vrOS → Properties → Betas and choose legacy. Choose “None” to return to vrOS 2.
• Driver setup on first launch. vrOS asks to SET UP THE VROS DRIVER, which powers playspace movement, calibration and virtual trackers. Setting it up backs up your SteamVR setup, then turns off tools that fight over the same things — OVR Advanced Settings and the Space Calibrator family (the apps stay installed). SteamVR has to restart to finish. NOT NOW skips it; windows, the dash, the keyboard and extensions all work without the driver. Virtual trackers, calibration, virtual IK and pose replay also wait for two switches on the new O·VR → DRIVER page, VIRTUAL TRACKERS and VIRTUAL IK, which start off on a fresh install. To undo it, Settings → General → SteamVR Driver → Setup / Revert → REVERT puts your previous setup back.
• Controller bindings. If you customized vrOS 1’s bindings in SteamVR, your pointer, click, grab, scroll, right-click and keyboard bindings carry over, but the playspace buttons and the new vrOS 2 actions will not be in your custom binding. In SteamVR → Settings → Controllers → Manage Controller Bindings, pick vrOS, switch to the default binding, then re-customize from there.
• Default controls. Double-tap right A (Vive: right menu) to show or hide all your overlays; hold the finger-gun pose while you do it to toggle just the dash. Double-tap left A/X (Vive: left menu) to summon the keyboard. Input has the full map.

New features

• A new dash, three ways: a World Dash floating in VR, a vrOS tab inside the SteamVR dashboard, and the same dash as a desktop window. Tabs for Overlays, Add, Performance, Settings and O·VR, plus one for each extension you turn on.
• Laser pointer: Dot, Cross, Open or Ring pointer at 25–150 % size; a beam with adjustable width and fades, on by default and yours to turn off; pointer and beam colors follow your theme or your own pick. Rotate or offset the laser to suit your grip (Settings → Themes → Laser alignment) and save up to 32 pointer presets.
• Clicking that behaves: trigger to click, hold and move to drag, stick to scroll. Right-click with a thumbstick click, by holding the point pose while the other hand’s trigger clicks, or with an opt-in long press (Settings → Accessibility → Right-click). The first click on an inactive window acts instead of only focusing it. Tune the drag threshold in Settings → Accessibility → Click tuning.
• Your mouse always wins: touch your real mouse or keyboard and vrOS stops sending input instantly; a deliberate VR click takes it back.
• Grab and place: grip to grab any panel, stick to push, pull or resize it, and an optional “Face me on grab” (Settings → Controls).
• Overlays: capture any window or a whole display. Popups and menus open as their own panels, and a panel’s name follows its window title. Set opacity, size and curve per panel, anchor it to the world, your head, either hand or the dashboard, and pin or lock it in place.
• Layout presets: save and recall your whole setup, including where the dash sits, and rename or delete presets.
• Re-center on show: showing your overlays brings them to where you are standing now (Settings → General → Placement).
• New VR keyboard: six boards — English 70 / 80 / 100 %, Korean Dubeolsik, Japanese romaji and Japanese flick — plus a four-layer layout editor (Settings → Keyboard → Edit layouts). It pops up when you click into a text field and hides when you click away, switches the window’s input language to match, and supports the Windows clipboard and Ctrl shortcuts on every board. See Keyboard.
• O·VR — your playspace tools in one tab: it opens on DRIVER, which shows the vrOS driver’s state and its switches. Drag and rotate your playspace, hold to reset, Recenter to me, Fix floor and gravity. Plus tracker roles and virtual trackers, calibration for a second tracking system, virtual IK with posture modes, pose recording and replay with BVH / Unity export, and face and eye tracking to VRChat. These need the vrOS driver.
• Trackers, the simple way: O·VR → TRACKERS opens on a body map. Pick a spot and pick a tracker, or let AUTO-ASSIGN · T-POSE and FILL EMPTY JOINTS do it for you; your headset can hold a role too. ADVANCED keeps every control.
• Face tracking alerts: a card, a sound, or both when eye or mouth tracking drops out, seems frozen, or comes back (O·VR → FACE TRACKING → ALERT WHEN TRACKING CHANGES; off by default).
• Steam Frame eye tracking: when you stream from your PC, the Frame’s eye tracking works with O·VR’s face tracking, with default bindings for the Frame headset.
• Bundled extensions (Settings → Extensions; each is off until you turn it on — see Extensions):
  • VRChat OSC: chatbox, avatar parameters, camera and OSC trackers, with automatic discovery. Works with SteamVR closed.
  • OBS Control: up to 16 OBS instances at once, plus an OBS Director panel.
  • Soundboard: pads, categories, gain, loop, split pads, and per-pad routing to your headset and/or mic.
  • Twitch: chat with 7TV emotes, an ad manager with an in-VR ad HUD, and up to four live stream players in VR. Streams play about 5 seconds behind live, and a catch-up button takes you back to live after a pause.
• Audio routing: Settings → Audio sends the soundboard, mic feed and interface sounds to separate devices, each with its own volume and a test button.
• Performance tab: frame timing, hitches, CPU / GPU / RAM / VRAM and controller and tracker batteries, in four layouts.
• Make it yours: 12 themes plus an OLED mode, UI scale from 85 to 150 %, reduced motion and high contrast, in all nine languages.
• Launch with SteamVR (Settings → General → Startup) is on by default. vrOS never starts or quits SteamVR unless you turn that on.

Fixes

• Grabbed panels no longer creep upward or slide off your laser when you push or pull them.
• Virtual Desktop controllers get their own default bindings, so every vrOS action works over Virtual Desktop.

Improvements

• Crash-proof by design: the VR side of vrOS runs in its own process. If SteamVR or a window capture falls over, vrOS keeps running, reconnects and puts your panels back.
• Lighter on your GPU: panels only upload the pixels that actually changed, and panels behind you pause until you look at them again.

Not in 2.0.0 yet

These vrOS 1 features are not in 2.0.0. If you rely on one of them, vrOS 1 is still available on the legacy branch.

• The Time tab (alarms, timers, stopwatch and calendar)
• The media controls widget
• VRChat account features (sign-in, friends, world info)
• XSOverlay / OVR Toolkit-compatible notifications
• Twitch chat commands and channel-point actions
• Administrator mode — vrOS 2 always runs unelevated, so administrator windows show up but cannot be clicked or typed into
• The custom theme builder, settings search, the Haptics settings page and the full-trigger click mode
• Presets that launch an app or a web page
• Sense (speech-to-text, translation and OCR) from the vrOS 1 beta branch

Known issues

• In the vrOS tab inside the SteamVR dashboard, the thumbstick does not scroll — hold the trigger and drag instead. vrOS double-tap shortcuts do not work there, and your world panels hide while the SteamVR dashboard is open.
• Uninstalling vrOS removes its driver but does not turn OVR Advanced Settings or Space Calibrator back on. Use REVERT (Settings → General → SteamVR Driver) before you uninstall.
• Tracker role changes apply after SteamVR restarts.
• On Steam Frame (streaming from a PC), after you drag or rotate your playspace the SteamVR dashboard’s click positions can drift from what you see. Holding RESET SPACE on O·VR → PLAYSPACE puts it back in line.

Older versions

vrOS 1 was a different application with a different architecture, and its release history is not carried over here. This page starts at 2.0.0.

vrOS 1 itself is still available for now: in Steam, right-click vrOS → Properties → Betas and choose legacy. It keeps its settings separately from vrOS 2, so you can switch back and forth.

If something changed in a way you did not expect, Troubleshooting is usually faster than a changelog, and Discord is faster than both.