Valve to reveal VR prototype headset!

Lucid Rifter

Lucid Rifter

VR Master Race
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Sep 11, 2013
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http://www.steamdevdays.com/?p=sessions

"We’ve figured out what affordable Virtual Reality (VR) hardware will be capable of within a couple of years, and assembled a prototype which demonstrates that such VR hardware is capable of stunning experiences."

"Come and hear what Valve is working on in Steam to support and promote Virtual Reality (VR) games. This includes a discussion of the Steam Overlay in VR, Steam store changes for VR, and our VR plan for Steamworks."

What's interesting is that Palmer luckey will be giving a presentation on best practices for VR development. I wonder if there's some kind of partnership in the works. Valve has been working with oculus since day one trying to figure VR out. Not sure what's really going on there.

I wonder if they'll have plans for an actual commercial version rather than just a prototype. Maybe it's super high-end to show what is going to be affordable in a couple years? Who knows. Anyways, this is excellent news and having valve jump on board the VR train is awesome.

Also to be talked about is steam machines, controller and linux development.

I think this VR competition is great for VR and valve creating their own would only help legitimize the industry.

Discuss! :)
 
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I'm dead keen. I'm loving the VR buzz in the industry right now. 3D was never going to add much to games, but VR could really change the paradigm of how a game is designed and what mechanics we will use to play. One thing I'm hoping for is an end to look-behind-you buttons.
 
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Soldier Gryphon said:
Congratulations to them for their theft of the Oculus Rift.

Good guy Valve.
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It's an interesting relationship valve and Oculus have. They work closely and actually offer up ideas for each other to use. The newest prototype(has not been showed yet) has positional tracking in it. Oculus actually got the tech from Valve's latest prototype for it. Valve gave it to them. Just like Oculus gave them the keys to their hardware when TF2 was developed for VR in the beginning.

I think they both just want VR to work. I'm assuming they want to go into the market together and really try to legitimatize the industry. Plus, competition is always good.

Who knows though. This may just be an internal project they are doing to experiment with VR tech in order to help out the guys at Oculus. Sort of like Oculus outsourced some tech development (like the positional tracking) to valve in order to use as many resources as possible. Then a valve VR headset never really gets released. They're just farming the tech.
 
A7MAD said:
PC is 1-2 generations ahead.
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well, yah, no argument there lol. they will be 3-4 generations ahead of consoles next year or the year after when the fab process shrinks lol.

But in terms of consoles, they aren't very next gen other then being new hardware. VR though would actually bring something new to the table. But then again, are the consoles powerful enough to do VR with awesome graphics/image quality? Doesn't VR require two images to be rendered?
 
Oculus Rift ain't coming to console, and I doubt this Valve device would ever either but Sony is rumored to be working on something, not sure what MS is doing behind the scenes...
 
I'm not ready for this. I am not even sure the world is ready for the Steam Haptic feedback controller. People are freaking out over no analog sticks, but seeing a guy play first person shooters with insane accuracy. We live in crazy times. Drones in the sky, and now haptic feedback, in our controllers.
 
The precision of a steam controller with a vr headset would be great. Using a kb/m with a headset on is very difficult. VR on next gen consoles is not too viable imo. VR needs to run at a higher resolution than 1080p, constant 60 fps, and in stereoscopic 3D.
 
Another thing to consider, now that VR is delivering specialised images to each eye and tracking head movement, this could be used in some interesting gaming and non gaming ways.

For example, birds have almost 360 degree fields of view, but fairly shoddy depth perception. VR could potentially simulate that simply by positioning the in game camera on either side of a player's head, or in real life, actually putting 2 cameras on either side of a helmet and feeding them to each eye.

It would be very disorienting at first, but that s*** isn't hard wired, it's all in the brain. I read a study where people who went around for days with a mirror/lens device that turned their view upside down. After a while the brain figured it out and readjusted what they saw as it should be. After they took the device off and were seeing with their normal eyes, everything appeared upside down, until their brain readjusted to interpret the images that it was being sent.
 
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