Overlays

An overlay is one captured source on a floating panel. A source is either a single window or a whole display — displays are first-class here, not a special case. The Overlays area of the Dash lists everything you have placed, gives each panel its own controls, and holds your saved layouts.

Adding a source

Creation lives on its own rail tab, ADD, directly below OVRL. The list is sectioned into WINDOWS and DISPLAYS, with a search field above it.

• QUALITY is picked once for the whole list, not per row. It caps the long edge of the submitted texture at 1280 or 2560 pixels. A 3840 option appears only when you turn on 4K quality in Settings → General and the source is actually 3840 pixels or wider.
• REFRESH re-enumerates. Nothing polls in the background; vrOS looks when the area opens and when you press REFRESH.
• A minimized window carries a MINIMIZED badge and a RESTORE button beside it.
• A window running with higher privileges than vrOS carries the note Input may not reach this window. It still captures; your clicks and keystrokes may not land in it.

Press ADD on a row and the panel spawns in front of where you are looking. It is an ordinary saved overlay from that moment on. Defaults for new panels — opacity, width in metres, distance from the headset — live in Settings → General under NEW OVERLAYS.

The list and the quick cluster

Each row is one overlay: its icon, its name, and a status line that spells out every toggle in words. At rest the row’s controls collapse to a single cog; hovering the row, or focusing it, reveals the cluster. It is always in the same order.

Control	What it does
Show / hide	Takes the panel out of the world without deleting it.
Pin	The panel survives HIDE / SHOW ALL, and is left where you put it when overlays are re-centered on show.
Lock	Holds the panel in place. The grab engine refuses it as a target and your ray grabs through to whatever is behind it.
Passthrough	The laser ignores the panel entirely. Useful for something you want to read but never click.
Remove	Deletes the overlay. Two steps — see below.

Note

Pin and lock do different jobs. Lock freezes where a panel sits. Pin decides whether it survives when you hide everything.

The detail card

Selecting a row opens a card underneath it with the panel’s values.

Control	Range
OPACITY	40 to 100%
SIZE	Panel width, 10 to 1000 cm
CURVE	0 to 100%
RECENTER	Brings the panel back in front of you, the same placement a new one gets
ANCHOR	WORLD, HEAD, L HAND, R HAND
CAPTURE	The resolution cap, as on the ADD tab

SIZE and CURVE are hidden by default — turn them on in Settings → General under DASH CONTROLS. RECENTER, ANCHOR and CAPTURE rest behind a … strip at the bottom of the card and open when you move onto it.

Dragging a slider previews live on the panel itself; the value commits when you let go. A control the overlay cannot accept stays visible and disabled rather than silently doing nothing — a vrOS surface has no capture to cap, and RECENTER on a hand-anchored panel is skipped rather than guessed at.

Moving a panel

Grab a panel with the grip input and move it with your hand. Settings → Controls adds the rest if you want them: the other thumbstick to push it away or pull it closer, stick resize, grip plus trigger for hand-depth resize, and whether a grabbed panel turns to face you or your free hand.

Locked panels refuse the grab. Exact bindings are set in SteamVR under Controller Bindings; Settings → Controls shows the live readout and an EDIT IN STEAMVR button.

Removing a panel

Remove is a two-step action. Pressing it arms the row: the border turns red, the row reads REMOVE OVERLAY? with CONFIRM and CANCEL, and it says AUTO-CANCEL 5S. Focus lands on CANCEL, never CONFIRM. Escape disarms it, and if you do nothing it disarms itself after 5 seconds.

The Dash itself appears in this list, because that is how you recover a Dash you have lost. It can never be removed and never be made passthrough — both controls render dimmed with PROTECTED in the row’s status line, rather than looking pressable and doing nothing.

Minimized and missing sources

If you minimize a captured window at the OS level, its row swaps the cluster for an amber MINIMIZED badge and a RESTORE button. The panel costs zero repaints while it is minimized — there is nothing to draw.

If the source goes away entirely, the panel becomes a placeholder reading Source not found — waiting for it to return. Nothing is deleted; when the window comes back, so does the picture.

Layouts

Saved layouts, listed as PRESETS in a drawer on the right edge, bring a whole arrangement back at once.

• SAVE CURRENT AS PRESET snapshots every overlay you have placed, with all of its state — position, size, opacity, curve, anchor, visibility, capture identity and quality cap — plus whether its source was minimized at the time. WITH DASH is an opt-in that also stores your Dash placement.
• A preset is a snapshot, not a reference. Editing or deleting a live overlay afterwards never changes what the preset will restore.
• RECALL restores minimized sources first, then materializes the members in their saved stacking order. A member that matches a panel you already have is updated in place instead of duplicated. A member whose window is gone comes back as a source-lost placeholder rather than being silently dropped. The header names the layout you restored.
• RENAME needs a name nothing else is using; a collision is refused visibly rather than overwriting. New presets name themselves Layout 1, Layout 2, and so on until you change them.
• DELETE is the same two-step armed action as removing an overlay, and it only removes the preset — never the live panels.

A save takes everything you have placed at that moment. There is no way to save a subset, so arrange the set you want before you save it.

Whether your panels come back on their own at launch is Settings → General → STARTUP → Restore overlays on launch. Whether showing them brings them to where you are standing now is under PLACEMENT.

Not shipped yet

Crop — trimming a captured source down to a region — is in the design and is not in the product. There is no way to crop a panel today.