Does Valve have a major role to play for HMD ?

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/team-fortress-2-virtual-reality/

Valve is trying to port Team Forteress 2, an online game, on 3D glasses. What has to be known about TF2 is that game is used by Valve as a laboratory. For example, this is the first game of the company that implement micro-transaction (paying with real money for virtual items).

So, if the experience is a success, and in a dream word, the SDK and the source engine (the graphic engine) will be update and then, most of the companies that use that tools will be able to offer more immersive games.

I think video games is a good way to decrease the price of a technology and be making it more popular. A recent (or not so recent) example is the PS3 which make the BlueRay winner of the contest for HD storage.

One Response to “Does Valve have a major role to play for HMD ?”

  1. I agree that getting Valve to embed support for commodity HMDs and trackers into their software would help push the hardware along.

    The real question is the quality of the devices and how they are supported: lots of very popular games (and their underlying engines, like Unreal Tournament) have supported HMDs (we use to try them out in the lab when I was a grad student at Columbia, in the mid-1990’s). The problem was the tech (displays and trackers) sucked, and so no sane person would choose to play these games that way. Also, the way they used the orientation sensors was really bad.

    We’ll see what the Occulus is like: they say they are shipping next month, so we’ll hopefully get some before the end of the semester! I personally think the HMD has to be REALLY good to convince someone to wear it, vs using their nice big flat-screen TV.