Bigscreen Beyond 2 orders now ship within 1-3 days, and in December Beyond 2e got support for eye-tracked foveated rendering in select VR titles.
What Are Bigscreen Beyond 2 & 2e?
Like the original Beyond, Bigscreen Beyond 2 and 2e are tethered PC VR headsets that use SteamVR Tracking, so you’ll need a PC with a powerful graphics card and at least one (ideally at least two) tracking base stations from Valve or HTC. You also need to provide your own input, such as Valve Index controllers or a steering wheel or HOTAS setup.
Compared to the original, Beyond 2 adds clearer, wider lenses with independent IPD adjustment, all while actually weighing 20 grams less, and Beyond 2e also adds eye tracking via just 1.05 grams of tiny sensors.
You can read more about the features and specifications of Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e here, and you can read our hands-on impressions of Beyond 2 from GDC 2025 here.
Bigscreen headsets have steadily risen in popularity on Steam over the past year, in February 2026 accounting for 1% of SteamVR usage.
Shipping In Days, Not Weeks Or Months
Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e were announced almost exactly a year ago, with preorders opening immediately. Originally it was set to ship in April 2025, but a PCB design flaw led to a roughly 3 month delay, with shipping finally beginning in late June.
The startup has spent the 9 months since then fulfilling the backlog of preorders, with new orders taking months and then weeks to ship. Now, Bigscreen says it has completed this phase, with new Beyond 2 shipping within days. The exact shipping time depends on which facial interface you opt for.
The fastest option, Bigscreen says, is ordering with the Halo Mount and Universal-Fit Cushion.
Priced $60 higher than the Custom-Fit Cushion, this option gives you a halo strap and a cushion designed to suit anyone’s face. Bigscreen says it now ships within 1-2 days, and sometimes even on the same day.
If you want the Bigscreen signature Custom-Fit Cushion instead, customized for your face based on an iPhone TrueDepth face scan you provide, that should take slightly longer, 2-3 days on average.
“In some cases due to SKU, color, accessory, or regional variability, orders may take a week to ship”, the startup notes, and orders with prescription lens inserts will still take multiple weeks.
Ian Hamilton
Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering For Beyond 2e
In late December, Bigscreen launched an early-access feature unlocking a critical capability of Beyond 2e – eye tracked foveated rendering.
It’s a story we missed at the time due to illness and the holiday season, but with Beyond 2e now so readily available we want to highlight it.
The primary use case for Beyond 2e’s eye tracking so far has been to drive the eyes of your avatar in social VR platforms like VRChat. But in December Bigscreen released an early access feature letting the eye tracking be used for eye-tracked foveated rendering in OpenXR 1.1 titles that support this.
Currently, this includes:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
- DCS
- iRacing
- Pavlov VR
- Kayak VR: Mirage
For a few of these titles, you’ll need to install Matthieu Bucchianeri’s Quad-Views-Foveated from GitHub, but in most foveated rendering should work out of the box, after enabling it in the Bigscreen Beyond Utility.
Bigscreen says eye-tracked foveated rendering offers “massive performance gains” in supported titles. If you’re a Beyond 2e owner who hasn’t already enabled the early access, you definitely should give it a try. You can find instructions here.
