Valve took its VR headset to a recent virtual reality jam in Boston where attendees were given time to test it out. One developer has posted his impressions of the device along with some photos. What a hero.
It follows the revelation that Valve won’t be bringing the VR headset to market as a product you can by, but rather, it wants to fully understand the medium so it can better sell virtual reality games on Steam and so forth. Will the company u-turn on this stance or not? That remains to be seen.
Either way, Reddit user jonomf has posted his account of Valve’s hardware along with the photo above. Look at him there, in his wee virtual world.
In his write-up he touched upon the device’s head-tracking tech, which is said to allow for greater interaction through movements and reduce motion sickness. “After I tried the demos, I was asking about The Room (Valve’s Holodeck setup with AR trackers on the walls), and asked if it would be viable to do edge detection in an arbitrary space to get inside-out (cameras on the HMD looking out) positional tracking, and the guy from Valve said “no, that’s not fast enough; we have a different solution already.”
“My speculation has run dry — what do you guys think it could be that doesn’t involve trackers on the wall, edge detection, or external cameras? And I’m assuming not STEM or a similar sensor, since they’re not as accurate as cameras, and Valve & Oculus are looking for the least-cumbersome experience.”
Obviously, you couldn’t build a Valve AR room in your own home because that’s not practical at all, so it’s still unclear how Valve views the future of commercial VR. We’re guessing it must have an idea, even if it’s not making a device for market.
On Valve’s demos, he added, “Talking with the Valve guys about that Portal office experience, they mentioned offhandedly that they have a Dota 2 VR experience where you see the entire game arena sitting on a table in front of you and can bend down to inspect any piece of the action. I really, really want to see that. They also mentioned a life-size Dota 2 VR experience where you’re hanging out in a lane watching the heroes fight; they said it was very scary.”
“Needless to say, the experience in the HMD is amazing,” he went on, “low persistence, perfect tracking (within the camera of course), very high frame rate. I don’t get sim sickness with the DK1 as it is, but nonetheless felt much more comfortable in the Valve units.
“However, I did consistently have major disorientation after leaving the HMD: I felt a little fuzzy and distant, and once felt like I was going to fall over. I felt something similar the very first time I came out of the DK1, never since, but every time after leaving the Valve units (4 or 5 times).”
Hit up the Reddit post above for more details, but for now, what do you think?
Via Eurogamer.
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