Chinese augmented reality company Nreal is releasing a beta version of Steam for its Nreal Light and Nreal Air AR glasses, allowing users to stream games from a computer to a large virtual screen. The company says the beta will launch in late June and will coincide with the June 27 hackathon to attract roughly $100,000 in cash AR developers. The move could expand Nreal’s software ecosystem and offer more surprisingly good deals—still limited—early AR scores.

Nreal admits that it “requires some effort to set up and is not optimized for all Steam games” in a press release, citing that the beta version of Steam can be challenging. It will join the ability to stream Xbox Cloud Gaming games via the Nreal Nebula platform and various video streaming programs. Nreal is promoting the beta in line with the Dirt Rally and Halo series. It promises users will see their games on the equivalent of a 200-inch HD display.

The Nreal Light glasses, which appeared last year in Asia and then in the USA, are designed to connect to a Samsung or OnePlus Android phone. They’re less full-featured than high-end business headsets from companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft, but they’re also much more affordable at $599 and support relatively advanced features like AR tethering and hand tracking.

But there is also a limited amount of content that takes advantage of these features, and in the US the Nebula platform was launched without support for popular streaming apps like Netflix that required users to watch videos with a mirroring system less suitable for Android apps. . The Nreal AR Jam developer competition will encourage the creation and conversion of existing apps to AR in areas such as fitness and the arts. In addition to the cash prizes for the event, the company plans to raise a long-term fund for the development of augmented reality.

Augmented reality glasses are getting more and more attention from big companies like Meta and Apple, and although Nreal is one of the first on the market, it may face an increasingly crowded field. But every company is still trying to figure out what to do with augmented reality glasses, and features like streaming on Steam could help test the situation. Source