LiquidAss: Liquid Glass for the Steam Frame's VR interface

LiquidAss re-skins the Steam Frame's whole VR interface in Apple's glass design language: visionOS window glass for the dashboard window, Liquid Glass for everything that floats. That covers:

• the library, game pages and settings
• friends, the dashboard bar and every bar popup
• frame menus, tooltips, the volume HUD, toasts and the keyboard

It is a look only. Every button, menu, route and controller-focus path is Steam's own, untouched.

Install

Run this in a terminal on the headset (Desktop Mode's terminal, or over SSH). It downloads the latest release and adds LiquidAss to + › Launch Program:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/MichaelScottsman/LiquidAss-Frame/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

Run the same command again to update. To install a specific release, put LIQUIDASS_VERSION=v0.1 before sh.

Uninstall

This turns the theme off and removes the launcher entry, the files and your saved glass settings:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/MichaelScottsman/LiquidAss-Frame/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh -s -- uninstall

Turn it on and off (in the headset)

1. On the dashboard bar, press +.
2. Under Launch Program, pick LiquidAss.

A glass toast confirms "LiquidAss · On". Do the same again to turn it off.

Nothing persists

The theme is never written to disk. lgs injects the stylesheet into the running Steam client through its local devtools socket (127.0.0.1:8080; Steam on the Frame runs with -cef-enable-debugging). Any of these brings back the stock UI:

• reboot the headset
• restart Steam
• launch LiquidAss again from +

Nothing starts at boot. There are no systemd units, autostart entries or Steam file patches.

Only two things stay installed, so the toggle is there after a reboot, plus one file of your own:

Path	What it is
~/.local/share/applications/glass-shell.desktop	The "LiquidAss" entry in + › Launch Program
~/.local/share/glass-shell/	The toggle script and the theme files it reads
~/.config/glass-shell/tune.json	Your glass settings from the paintbrush button on the bar (colour, intensity, refraction, frost, highlights). Written only when you change them; Reset to default in that panel deletes it. The one exception to "nothing persists", by request

The uninstall command (or python glass.py uninstall) removes all three. (The install paths keep the project's original glass-shell name, so existing installs carry over.)

From the PC

python glass.py install        # copy this checkout to the headset, set up glassd and add the launcher (for development)
python glass.py on | off | toggle | status
python glass.py dial 0.7       # glass intensity: 0 = clearest, 1 = most opaque (saved with your glass settings)
python glass.py uninstall

On the headset itself, ~/.local/share/glass-shell/device/lgs on|off|toggle|status|dial V does the same.

Native glass works out of the box. Releases ship glassd built for the Frame (native/glassd/prebuilt/glassd), and the installer puts it in place. python glass.py install does the same, then rebuilds glassd from the checkout's sources over it (if that build fails, the shipped binary stays). The daemon also puts the shipped binary in place whenever glassd is missing, so the LiquidAss toggle never starts CSS-only. Native mode is on by default (device/defaults.json).

How it works

Piece	Role
device/lgs_core.js	Runs inside Steam's SharedJSContext. Adds one <style> (and hidden SVG defs) to every gamepadui window through g_PopupManager, follows new popups, and removes everything on off
device/lgs_index.js	Steam's class names are hashed. The theme is written against readable names (%{BarSurface}, %{*GamepadDialogContent>Field}) that are resolved at injection time from Steam's own webpack CSS modules, so the theme survives client updates
theme/*.css	The look, split by area. 00-tokens.nowrap.css holds the materials (window glass, panel glass, Liquid Glass, thick glass), states, radii and motion. See docs/DESIGN.md
lab/ + glass.py	Development tools: navigate, open menus, screenshot any surface (it renders even when nobody wears the headset) and audit stock against themed for hidden, shrunk or unclickable controls and lost contrast. See docs/LAB.md

Releases

sh tools/make_release.sh v0.2 builds dist/LiquidAss-Frame.tar.gz from the committed tree. Publish it with the installer:

gh release create v0.2 dist/LiquidAss-Frame.tar.gz install.sh --title "LiquidAss v0.2"

install.sh always fetches the asset named LiquidAss-Frame.tar.gz from the latest release, so keep that name.

Docs

File	What's in it
docs/DESIGN.md	Materials, states, components, guardrails
docs/LAB.md	Tools, token syntax, rules for working on the live UI
docs/inventory/*.md	Every surface, route and sub-menu, mapped
docs/COVERAGE.md	What was restyled and verified, screen by screen