Valve Announces Plans For Own VR Headset This January

VR technologies have always been one of the biggest dreams of gamer’s growing up, the idea of fully immersing yourself beyond just staring at a regular screen, an ultimate form of temporary escapism.

In recent years this dream has been getting closer and closer to getting realized thanks to the Oculus Rift, a VR headset planned for distribution next year that will support new games and have some older ones ported over to it.

Among the companies working to port their games over is Valve, using big hit titles like Team Fortress 2 and the legendary Half-Life 2, but their support of the technology doesn’t end there.

Valve has announced today their own intention of releasing a VR headset designed to work specifically with Steam, and during next January’s Steam Dev Days, they plan to show off some of the technology, what plans they currently have for it, and its implications. Talking about the future show, Valve said “We’ve figured out what affordable Virtual Reality 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”.

Along with the obvious benefits of a full virtual reality headset, Steam is set to talk about special features and interactivity between their own headset and steam, including making use of Steam Overlay in VR, and how VR will affect the Steam Store and Steamworks. This is just one more announcement to add to the recent landslide of technologies and plans to come out of Valve, alongside the Steam Machine and its new controller design. All of this together is going to make 2014 a big year for Valve, and it’ll be quite interesting to see how all of it turns out as we start to get our hands on these new technologies. Let us know your thoughts on Valve jumping into the VR realm, and as always thanks for reading Tech of Tomorrow!

Via: PC World