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A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

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Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#81

Post by jameshart »

Retric wrote: post #77
elementalest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Valve lock out the rift from their games, it just reinforces the exclusivity, lockouts and polarisation. Means less sales through steam, less profit for valve. If they lock out the rift, will they lock out all the other HMD that will surface in the next couple years? That will likely stunt the VR industry given how central the steam platform is to games distribution. Thats not what valve want. Valve want it to gro…

Embrace extend extinguish. Valve is not going to block the rift but they will make it's users second class citizens, until VR hardware goes the way of monitors and sound cards. Facebook adds little to this as they don't know gaming and don't have a history of keep multiple businesses going at the same time. So really it's the same company that originally developed the hardware with access to more capital and the risk…

I think valve would argue that if the Rift delivers a second class experience of the SteamVR platform that that is nobody's fault but Oculus's.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#82

Post by lghh »

gberger wrote: post #75
cleeus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it. I think it's this. That's the problem with hype waves in majority-ruled organizations. Or I'm wrong and people will soon be sitting in the subway with a VR headset on and playing Fruit Ninja in VR.

Valve doesn't make games that you can play sitting in the subway.

Valve also doesn't make Fruit Ninja, but they were just trying to make a point.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#83

Post by usrusr »

kendallpark wrote: post #13

Of all the gaming companies, Valve makes the most sense to be this heavily invested in VR--given their stake in the PC-industry. Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it. (Valve is known for their flat structure http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p... )

I'm quite sure it's a happy overlap of both: strategically, Valve needs to either be on top of VR or it would bet the farm on VR failing. If someone like Oculus managed to become The App Store for VR gaming, it would be "Valve over", just like if Microsoft ever managed to make the Windows app store attractive to gamers (or to anyone, unlikely to happen anywhere this side of 2060).

At the same time, key innovations like the lighthouse position tracking system (which seems to be implemented in the Vive) have all the markings of genuine engineering curiosity. Curiosity of the kind that is unlikely to spring from a top-down "let's assign n man-years to VR" decision.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#84

Post by JibberMeTimbers »

sergiosgc wrote: post #69
empath75 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a rift and I don't get sick and nobody I've shown it to has gotten sick. I think that concern is way overblown.

I own a Vive. Zero motion sickness on room scale games, zero when flying around in Elite:Dangerous. However, get me in something with wheels and it's hell. Rolling in the buggy in Elite is bad, driving in Project Cars is worse. I've learned that, in Elite, if I look at where the buggy is going (it power slides a lot), then I almost avoid motion sickness. Project Cars, though, I can't play. Cornering, at high speed, c…

Does a 1st person view from the driver's seat have any impact?

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#85

Post by VLM »

danso wrote: post #34

The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_... > Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever.…

Seasick yes. This will be an interesting cultural-technical thing to watch evolve, assuming this wave of VR lasts long enough to evolve, perhaps SDKs will make it impossible to make a "real" VR sailing/boating simulator or VR flight simulator, or maybe the SDK will not prevent that, which automatically means at least some shovelware twitch games will mess with the horizon lines making users seasick.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#86

Post by randac »

ksec wrote: post #52

Side observation. So Valve now has an better VR Set then Oculus. And all of a sudden every news on VR seems to flowing in Valve direction. This reminds me a lot of the early days when we move from iD 's Doom to Valve's Half Life. Note: ( John Carmack = CTO of Oculus and Founder of iD )

1) Valve has always had a better VR set than Oculus.

2) id, not iD.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#87

Post by baldfat »

Half-Life 3 on VR would be the killer app. It would be this generations Lotus 1 2 3.

Though I personally feel VR for video games are a lot like Wii its awesome for a while then its collecting dust throughout the world. I really think the future is Augmented Reality and VR will be for mostly media consumption.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#88

Post by spaceisballer »

laksjd wrote: post #40
joezydeco wrote: post #12

Jeri Ellsworth of CastAR (ex-Valve AR/VR hardware guru) did an interview recently* where she mentioned that Valve was kind of "painting themselves in a corner" by gearing their system's performance to play AAA-title games. Now owners of those consoles will expect every game to be an AAA title. * http://embedded.fm/episodes/156 @ 53:20

I don't quite follow her argument there. Valve's push for a powerful platform will just mean that games that don't aim to be VR-Crysis have plenty of performance to work with, making development much easier. The 'office simulator' example doesn't really seem to be about graphics, though, but about game length/most VR experiences being more tech demo than game. I don't think people are going to be surprised by that. T…

If AMD can come through with the RX480 and works with VR for around $199 USD. That makes VR a lot more accessible.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#89

Post by levesque »

baldfat wrote: post #87

Half-Life 3 on VR would be the killer app. It would be this generations Lotus 1 2 3. Though I personally feel VR for video games are a lot like Wii its awesome for a while then its collecting dust throughout the world. I really think the future is Augmented Reality and VR will be for mostly media consumption.

I think the locomotion issues will be the end of this round of VR. Teleporting around the virtual space is not immersive by any means. Direct movement (e.g. with a joystick) with current head mounted displays automatically results in motion sickness for the majority of users. No solution in sight, as far as I know.

Re: A Third of Valve Is Now Working on VR

#90

Post by moron4hire »

levesque wrote: post #89
baldfat wrote: post #87

Half-Life 3 on VR would be the killer app. It would be this generations Lotus 1 2 3. Though I personally feel VR for video games are a lot like Wii its awesome for a while then its collecting dust throughout the world. I really think the future is Augmented Reality and VR will be for mostly media consumption.

I think the locomotion issues will be the end of this round of VR. Teleporting around the virtual space is not immersive by any means. Direct movement (e.g. with a joystick) with current head mounted displays automatically results in motion sickness for the majority of users. No solution in sight, as far as I know.

I've ran hundreds of demos on the DK2 over the last two years and in that time one person took the headset off because they felt weird. It's not "the majority of users" by any stretch. I don't know where you're getting your information from.

And we're not talking about being pitched over, puking your guts out, either. It's a mild discomfort that only persists if the user tries to push through it.

Locomotion is both difficult and overrated. I don't know how many people are going to want to physically run for cover in shooter game. Some will, for sure, but I expect new genres of games to become much more popular.

There is also a huge segment of non-game usage that I expect to be the dominant use case for the tech. VR telepresence blows the pants off of Skype, even with cartoon avatars.

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