SteamVR Home Still Exists

My favourite thing to do in VR is to explore and create virtual environments of real world locations. This form of virtual tourism is something I have fallen in love with over the past ten years, and the medium I have used most has been SteamVR Home.

 

However, recently, when you load up SteamVR in a headset, you are met with something that looks like this. 

Looking at this, some might think that SteamVR Home has been removed, or they may not know it exists at all. As someone whose hobby exists within this niche ecosystem, I thought I would clarify the current state of SteamVR Home. 

This is the new Aurora environment created for the Steam Frame launch. It is kind of nice. It feels like you're standing in this giant, glossy holodeck space, and you can use this nice little iris selector to change the colours, along with a few other effects within the environment. This was added to SteamVR during version 2.18.1, released the 24th of September 2026 and now the default environment.

 

The previous branch of SteamVR didn't have this, and instead would load SteamVR Home by default.

In the SteamVR settings, you can see that SteamVR Home used to be set to on by default. 

Now, if you are on the current branch of SteamVR, it is selected to off by default. It is also higher up on the list, though I don't think that means anything. 
So, it is not gone. It is just disabled by default. This is most likely because SteamVR Home was running on an old version of Source 2 originally made for Destinations and wasn't particularly well optimised in the first place. Valve would presumably want the startup experience on the Steam Frame's standalone hardware to run well, and an environment like Aurora is nice and impressive while also being very compute-light compared to SteamVR Home.

However, when you turn SteamVR Home on in the current branch, it loads up like this, as usual. You can still access it, and you can still make it load by default. 
One little caveat is that the SteamVR Dashboard now appears straight away. This actually happened a while ago, during version 2.17.4, when Valve updated SteamVR's UI. Personally, I don't like this. I have always seen SteamVR Home as sort of my desktop background for Virtual Reality. When I put on my VR headset, I want to be transported somewhere. I want to feel like I am physically standing somewhere else. Instead, I am looking at a store page or library, and I have to press the Steam button before I can properly see and be immersed in the environment. I preferred how it worked previously. That aside, as you can see, SteamVR Home is still there and is still something you can enable by default.

 

Whether this is a slow way of sunsetting SteamVR Home, I don't know. It's a bit confusing but it is at least benefiting from wider the updates to Steam.

For example, in SteamVR's properties there is a Workshop tab where you can easily sort your Workshop items and see what environments you have downloaded. They do have a nice setup there, although this Workshop tab is part of Steam's general application properties system rather than something specifically created for SteamVR Home. (It is also important to note that this is separate from the SteamVR settings and I wish Valve would consolidate this somewhat).

Like a lot of Valve software, I don't think they're ever going to fully delete SteamVR Home. But I also don't see it being updated unless it is entirely overhauled. And, if the launch of the Steam Frame wasn't a reason to entirely overhaul SteamVR Home, re-enable its social features and bring it back into focus, then I think it's unlikely to happen. 
Perhaps the Steam Frame's ability to play flatscreen games on virtual displays could provide a reason for Valve to work on environments again. People may want to sit inside an immersive space, somewhat like the Bigscreen application, while playing their games. I could see that being developed further. Whether that would actually be SteamVR Home or something else, I'm not sure. 

I just wanted to write this mainly to clarify the current state of SteamVR Home from a software and interface perspective, that is hasn't been removed and how you now access it. The experience itself is still just as good as it ever was. There are still creators making beautiful and amazing environments, and it can still be a really nice virtual tourism experience worth your time. 

SteamVR Home is still here. It’s just no longer the place to call home by default.

 

Ker Blam,

--Puffy