SteamVR Home

SteamVR Home
Information
Type	Virtual reality hub and environment viewer
Industry	Virtual reality
Developer	Valve
Written In	Lua (environment scripting)
Operating System	Windows
License	Free, bundled with SteamVR
Supported Devices	Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and other OpenVR-compatible devices
Release Date	May 2017 (beta); evolved from Destinations (June 2016)
Website	https://store.steampowered.com/app/250820/SteamVR/

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SteamVR Home is the customizable virtual reality environment that Valve loads as the default starting space inside SteamVR, the company's PC VR runtime. It is described by Valve as an interactive launch pad for VR experiences, from which a user can start games, adjust settings, decorate a personal space with community-made environments and props, customize an avatar, and meet other users.

SteamVR Home runs on Valve's Source 2 engine. It grew out of an earlier application called Destinations, a free photogrammetry-scene viewer that Valve released in June 2016. Valve folded Destinations into SteamVR as the new home space through a beta program that began in May 2017 and was later turned on by default for all SteamVR users.

Origin: Destinations

Valve released Destinations in June 2016 as a free, early-access application built on the Source 2 engine. (Road to VR dated the launch June 9, 2016; HotHardware reported June 10, 2016.) Its main purpose was to let people walk and teleport through three-dimensional places built with photogrammetry, a technique that reconstructs the size, position, and texture of real-world objects from large sets of photographs.

Destinations shipped in two parts. The Destinations Viewer let users browse and explore scenes published to the Steam Workshop, while the Destinations Workshop Tools provided the Source 2 toolset, example scenes, and a sample map for creators. It worked with headsets supported by OpenVR, including the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, and accepted both motion-tracked controllers and standard gamepads. Building a scene required outside content tools such as Autodesk ReMake, Maya, or Blender; one early example, Adam Foster's "English Church," was assembled from roughly 450 DSLR photographs.

Transition to SteamVR Home

In May 2017 Valve released a beta update that combined the existing default SteamVR environment with the multiplayer, customizable framework from Destinations, naming the result SteamVR Home. Users opted in through the SteamVR Beta branch. Valve said that richer environments, props, tools, multiplayer, and avatars would become available to all players by default, and that once the update left SteamVR Beta the separate Destinations application would no longer be updated.

Valve later moved the SteamVR Home beta out of opt-in and made the new home space the standard experience for every SteamVR user. The default environment that loads when SteamVR starts is a scene called Clifftop House, which a user can replace with another built-in or Workshop environment.

Features

A user picks an avatar and an environment, then treats that environment as a personal VR space. Several built-in tools let the user spawn and arrange props, draw in three dimensions in the manner of Tilt Brush, change the skybox, and interact with objects.

Social features

SteamVR Home is multiplayer. A user can invite Steam friends into a home space or open an environment to friends or to the public, then talk over voice chat and handle the same tools and props together while exploring different environments. These features are the reason Valve described the launcher update as making SteamVR "more social."

Avatars and customization

Players choose a head design from a set of preloaded options and add wearables and accessories. Additional avatars, wearables, and props are unlocked by completing quests inside SteamVR Home environments.

Collectibles

On June 21, 2017, Valve added virtual collectibles to SteamVR Home: unlockable items used to decorate a home space or modify an avatar. The first wave came from about a dozen participating VR titles, with items awarded based on ownership or playtime; the launch partners included Job Simulator, Arizona Sunshine, Onward, and Dota 2. Most early items were static, though some were interactive, such as a toy from Fantastic Contraption. The items tie into Valve's existing Steam Community Market, which already allowed buying and selling of SteamVR Home items. The wiki tracks these items separately under SteamVR Collectibles.

How it works

SteamVR Home environments are made in Source 2 and published to the Steam Workshop, where other users browse and download them in-game. Hammer, Source 2's level editor, is where a creator assembles a scene before publishing.

Interactivity is added through a scripting layer. The VScript API for SteamVR Home uses the Lua language, and scripts run in three forms: game-mode scripts tied to an add-on, map scripts tied to a specific map, and entity scripts attached to individual objects. The environment system includes a player-scalable, recolorable version of the prop_physics object and scriptable tool props; when a player picks up a tool, a script on that entity can intercept controller input and react to it.

Movement defaults to teleportation: a player can teleport to any reasonably flat surface, and a creator can constrain movement by placing teleport meshes and markers so that the player can only teleport to designated spots.

Role in VR

For PC VR built on the SteamVR runtime, SteamVR Home is the space a user sees first and returns to between applications, alongside the SteamVR dashboard that lets a user switch games, browse the Steam store, and view the desktop without removing the headset. Because Valve made it the default home space for every SteamVR user, it functions as the standard out-of-game environment for a large share of PC VR sessions across headsets including the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality models.

Its design also gave Valve an early consumer test of ideas that recur across Social VR: a persistent personal space, user-generated environments distributed through a storefront, customizable avatars, and tradeable virtual goods backed by a real-money market. Valve built SteamVR Home on the same Source 2 toolchain (Hammer plus Lua scripting) that the company uses for its own VR work, which let the community create and share interactive VR spaces without a separate engine license.

Current status

SteamVR Home remains part of SteamVR and is still maintained as of 2026. The SteamVR application on Steam holds a Very Positive review rating, lists Valve as the developer, and presents SteamVR Home as an interactive launch pad whose environments can be customized, quested in, and authored with the SteamVR Workshop Tools. Supported hardware listed on the store page includes the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and others.