Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

SilentPanda

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Oct 8, 2002
9,992
31
The Bamboo Forest
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/15/3880790/valve-virtual-reality-game-developers-conference-2013

We just gave the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, our Best of CES award. Guess who else is experimenting with virtual reality? Valve Software. At the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, the same renowned video game publisher that's hard at work on the Steambox will also share its thoughts on VR, after spending a full year prototyping ways to create virtual reality hardware and software. Valve will host two 25-minute lectures entitled "Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going)" and "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality" at the conference.

The former is hosted by Michael Abrash, the man behind Valve's mystery wearable computing hardware project... and the latter obviously features Team Fortress 2, a game that we had no idea was being ported to VR. Before you get your hopes up, it's not yet clear whether TF2 will actually be a title you can download and play on a VR headset. In fact, it's actually rather unlikely given what we've heard.

I think it'll be interesting to see what they found out. Valve adding SteamPlay (Mac+PC) to their store was likely responsible for getting more games on the Mac (and soon Linux) so if they adopt something like the Rift maybe it'll push VR into the mainstream.
 

irishgrizzly

macrumors 65816
May 15, 2006
1,461
2
At 640x480 resolution I'd be holding off for a little while I think. Definitely something to be excited about in the future though.
 

Nermal

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,627
3,987
New Zealand
Virtual reality is 640x480? Fry's comments about HDTV having better resolution than the real world suddenly make a lot more sense!

 

SilentPanda

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Oct 8, 2002
9,992
31
The Bamboo Forest
At 640x480 resolution I'd be holding off for a little while I think. Definitely something to be excited about in the future though.

From what I've read it will be 640x800 per eye. Some are saying that is 1280x800. Also this is only for the dev kit. They hope to have the consumer version at 1920x1080 (not sure if that is per eye). Of course it's still a ways off so only time will tell.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.