Technology constantly reshapes the rooms in our homes. A few centuries ago, our living rooms were filled with fine artwork, musical instruments, and other worldly trinkets designed to impress and entertain dinner guests. But when the radio showed up – promising a steady stream of news and gossip from the outside world – we made room for it. When the television provided the opportunity to bring the cinema into our homes, we made room for it. When the personal computer promised to streamline our workload and plug us into a larger, connected world, we made room for it. Valve and HTC are banking on the idea that we’re ready to make room in our homes virtual reality as well.
For years, the creators of Half-Life and Portal have been developing a virtual reality system that is a little different than the technology Oculus and Sony have created. Valve’s VR technology asks users to open up a five-meter square of space in their home. In return it offers unparalleled head tracking and immerses users in unique virtual worlds. The technology is impressive, but will Valve be able to trade new worlds for a section of their users’ homes?
[This is an expanded version of an article that originally appeared in Game Informer issue 273]
Learning To Love VR
In early 2012, Valve established a hardware research group with the goal of developing projects such as the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. The team was also excited to work with augmented reality technology, but quickly came to the conclusion that virtual reality was a more exciting project. All the pieces for a great virtual reality headset were out there, but nobody was putting them together into a single headset.
The team spent 18 months buying pre-existing virtual reality technology off eBay and hacking them into a new patchwork VR headset. However, not everyone at Valve was convinced the project was worth the company’s time.
Ken Birdwell was one of the naysayers. A Valve lifer, Birdwell worked with Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell at Microsoft in the mid-‘90s, and was part of the initial team that founded the company. Birdwell created Valve's proprietary skeletal animation system, which allowed the characters in the original Half-Life to perform fluid yet complex animations, and then helped design the character Alyx for Half-Life 2. During his tenure at the company, Birdwell has had a hand in everything from Half-Life to Left 4 Dead to Portal 2. But he hated VR.
“I tried my first VR headset in 1985 at [the computer graphics conference] SIGGRAPH,” Birdwell recalls. “I waited in line for 45 minutes to put on that headset, and it totally sucked. It was a horrible experience. I got sick almost instantly. After that, I tried VR headsets every year or two for about 10 years, and then finally gave up on it in the mid ‘90s.”
Despite his inclinations Valve wasn’t giving up on VR, so Birdwell decided he should at least find out what his company was working on. Once Valve’s experimental hardware group had a working prototype, Birdwell walked into their office and demanded a demo.
“I was ready to say a bunch of blandly polite things and not discourage them too badly, but when I put on the headset it was just amazing,” Birdwell says. “I was standing in a badly textured room, on a badly textured box floating up in space. I could feel this heavy wired contraption on my head, and I could hear people talking behind me. Everything about it was wrong from a technical point of view, but when someone said, ‘Step off the ledge,’ I couldn’t. My leg wouldn’t move. I started laughing, because weird parts of my brain said, ‘No, it’s real!’”
That moment was a revelation for Birdwell. Not only did VR finally work; it was incredible. He knew he had to be involved with this project. Valve famously doesn’t have job titles, but Birdwell is now the closest thing the company has to a VR project manager. For the last three years, Birdwell has helped shaped the company’s vision for the future of virtual reality: a completely immersive world that players could physically walk around and even touch.
VR Evangelists
The word ‘immersive’ has been drained of much of its power in the gaming industry, but it’s hard to describe Valve’s vision for VR any other way. The company wasn’t content to allow users to simply look into virtual worlds. Unlike the Oculus Rift or PlayStation VR sets – which offer largely stationary experiences – Valve wants users to to stand up and walk around their virtual landscapes. Of course, this vision requires users to create a five-meter square of empty space somewhere in their home and then place at least two sensors on opposite corners of that room.
Walking through virtual worlds is only part of what makes Valve’s technology so immersive. The other half is an input system that allows users to reach into the digital world and manipulate its environment. To allow for this, Valve developed two motion sensing wands, complete with triggers and circular touchpads, which allow the developers to simulate everything from using a paint brush to firing a gun.
Valve wasn’t shy about sharing its VR technology, either. Early on, the company hosted a virtual reality day where it invited developers from across the country to come to its office and experiment with its new technology. To further help proselytize its vision for VR, Valve built several VR rooms across the country, which it used to demo the technology for companies like Starbreeze and Oculus.
“We demoed for everybody: senior executives, industry insiders, your grandparents,” Birdwell says. “We spent thousands of hours showing our VR setup to anybody who showed up. After the demo, most people say, “This is amazing!” But after HTC had done it, they said, ‘We want to build one.’”
A week after HTC’s CEO and president, Cher Wang, received Valve’s demo, the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer sent 10 engineers from its Taipei headquarters to Seattle to work alongside Valve’s VR team. Six months later, HTC had early prototypes of a headset it was now calling the Vive to send to developers and game makers.
“They work with materials that we have never been able to solve,” Birdwell says. “They figured out how to make the headset adjustable. Ours was always rigid and the straps were really uncomfortable. They have a tremendous background in material science, so they can casually do things that we would never even attempt.”
However, as HTC’s production pipeline ramped up and both companies looked forward to a 2016 release, it became clear that Valve wasn’t done selling its vision. If the Vive was going to set itself apart from the Oculus Rifts and Sony VRs of the world, Valve would have to convince several developers to make use of the Vive’s unique technology. Valve seems pretty happy with the Vive’s upcoming slate of software, but most of these upcoming titles are indie projects or ports of non-VR games like Team Fortress 2, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2015.
Fortunately, earlier this year Epic Games announced support for Valve's SteamVR software, meaning it will be easy for developers to create games for the Vive using Unreal Engine 4. Valve also says that it’s fairly easy for developers to port projects designed for the Oculus Rift over to the Vive, and the company plans to support Linux and Mac OS as well as Windows. All of this should make it easier for developers to get their games on Valve’s hardware, and hopefully attract new developers to the system, but only time will tell if developers actually make use of the extra room Valve has given them.
from www.GameInformer.com - Top Five http://bit.ly/1Ufv3C6
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