The best way to experience Half-Life: Alyx is to play it yourself. But we know that watching someone play a game in VR is an entertaining experience on its own, and many of you will want to share the game with others — whether in the same room or over a livestream. Half-Life: Alyx has a number of settings dedicated to improving the experience of watching the game being played on a TV or monitor. They can be found in the game's menu under Options > Spectator.

Spectator HUD: Off, Small, Medium, Large

Choose whether to enable the spectator-specific HUD, and its relative size. Half-Life: Alyx comes with a HUD just for the people watching on the secondary monitor. It shows the player's health, ammo, resin count, and what items they're carrying. We've found this makes watching someone play Half-Life: Alyx more comprehensible and fun, because it ensures spectators have full view of information about the player's state, which in some circumstances may otherwise only be visible to the player. For example, players often check their health by raising their hand a little bit and looking down with their eyes instead of raising their hand up to their face or looking directly down at it. If you're watching on a monitor you wouldn't see that health check because it's so far out of view.

Spectator Camera Smoothing: Off, Low, Medium, High

Choose how much you'd like to smooth out or remove the rotational jitter that come from playing a game in VR. Enabling smoothing makes the experience of spectating the game far cleaner. It is a realtime effect that is only applied to the spectator view (not inside the headset) and has minimal to no impact on graphical performance. We recommend setting it to low or medium, but if you find you prefer how the spectator view looks with no camera roll at all, you can set it to high. Try the different settings and see what you prefer.

Spectator Eye: Left, Right

Choose whether the spectator view displays the output from your left or right eye. We recommend setting it to whichever eye you usually aim down, so people watching you play will be able to look down weapon sights with you.