Since Oculus was acquired by Facebook it would seem Valve have stepped in and began working on its own VR unit, first seen in 2012 but then put on hold when steam decided to focus their time on supporting projects like Oculus. It’s come a long way since 2012.
It is back in its new shiny form and pictures have emerged from a recent event in Boston, where a few lucky developers got to try it out on a range of experimental demo software. Valve regularly holds these dev days and this isn’t the first time they showed it off recently.
The general consensus suggests that everyone attending the day was impressed with the hardware and performance of Valve’s headset, what appears to have impressed them more is some of the stuff they reported Valve is working on outside of direct gameplay.
Jonomf took to reddit to write: “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”.
See Also: Oculus Rift demoed with walk-through of Star Trek Voyager
Some of the more technical spec has also emerged but bear in mind this is not a finished project, its not even close so details can and will change.
The HMD’s are dual vertical S4 screens, running a total of 2160×1280, with white IR-reflective dots on the shell.
It used a Unity plugin from Valve which is interoperable with DK1, DK2, and the Valve hardware.
That’s all the info they could gleam for now.