Project Beyondex is a mod kit from Fluid that will let you affix your Valve Index’s strap and speakers to a Bigscreen Beyond or Beyond 2.
Valve Index is now well over six years old, and its displays and form factor are inarguably outdated given its price. Its audio, on the other hand, remains in a class of its own, matched only by the discontinued HP Reverb G2, which Valve provided Index’s drivers for. While Bigscreen sells an official Audio Strap, it just doesn’t hold up to the Valve Index speakers.
Like many VR enthusiasts, the team behind the Quest spatial computing app Fluid wished that they had a PC headset with the pancake optics, micro-OLED displays, and comfort of Bigscreen’s Beyond headsets but with the speakers of Valve Index. So they built a kit to make that happen, which they call Project Beyondex.
Of course, this is not exactly a cheap option. Valve doesn’t sell the Index strap separately, so you’ll need the $500 headset, if you don’t own it already. And while it’s on your Beyond, you won’t really be able to use your Index. But the Fluid team thinks the result is worth it.
“It’s our favorite way to experience PC VR that we have experienced so far in our careers as VR devs”, they promise.
To install Project Beyondex, you start by detaching the strap from your Valve Index. You then attach it upside-down to the Beyond headset using Project Beyondex’s 3D printed side adapters, which Fluid was able to design thanks to Bigscreen releasing the CAD files for its Audio Strap connector last year, using a single M6 screw on each side. The upside-down approach turns what used to be rear cradle support into top support, suitable for using on Beyond without a top strap.
The key electronic components of the kit are a custom DAC, based on the open-source project Picoamp, and a tiny uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with a lithium-ion battery, all housed in a plastic enclosure that clips on to the back of the strap. The DAC passes the audio from the Beyond to the Index’s speakers, via thin wires you tuck under the strap which connect to pogo pins in the side adapters, and the UPS is needed because to play very loud sounds, the Valve Index drivers draw more power than Beyond provides via its USB-C port.
Fluid says this quirk was discovered by Matt Gaines from MMI Modular, who provided “tons of tips and advice” for Project Beyondex.
The “only tricky part” of the installation, Fluid says, is tucking the thin audio cables on each side.
You can preorder the ready-to-use Project Beyondex mod kit for $109, and Fluid expects to start shipping before November.
Alternatively, Fluid will sell you everything except for the 3D printed brackets and enclosures for $89, and provide the STL files so you can print those yourself. Note that this means you’ll have to solder the wiring yourself.
Project Beyondex orders are currently limited to the US, UK, Canada, and Japan, but Fluid encourages interested enthusiasts from outside these four countries to contact them if they’re interested.
Fluid is also working on making the entire schematics for Project Beyondex freely available, including the PCB for the DAC+UPS module, so that hardware hackers can DIY the entire thing themselves.
‘Steam Frame’ Trademark Registered By Valve: Is This Deckard?
Valve applied for a trademark on the term ‘Steam Frame’. Is this its new headset, codenamed Deckard?
Of course, we’re aware that this is not the Valve headset news many of you are hoping to see this week. Over the past four years Valve has repeatedly confirmed that it’s working on a new headset, strongly hinting that it will have a focus on wireless streaming from your PC. In this time, many references to a Valve headset called “Deckard” have been found in the code of SteamVR, and “Roy” controller models were discovered late last year.
Two weeks ago Valve applied for a trademark on the term ‘Steam Frame’, and both SteamVR datamining and Valve leakers suggest this could be the product name for Deckard. This has led many VR enthusiasts to wonder if Valve might repeat the same launch tactic it did for Index, where, just as Mark Zuckerberg opened preorders for Rift S and Oculus Quest, Valve’s embargo for first impressions expired, and it opened preorders the next day.
We’ll keep a close eye on Bellevue in the coming days to see if that in fact does happen. But if it doesn’t, and perhaps even if it does, Project Beyondex might be the ideal PC VR experience.
