Valve working on “wearable computing”

While we’re all sitting around waiting for Episode 3 to appear, Valve has been doing R&D for “wearable computing”, which sounds suspiciously like Bat-gear to me.

According to Valve developer Michael Abrash, Valve has been picking up hardware engineers to do some serious research on these kinds of products.

“The logical endpoint is computing everywhere, all the time – that is, wearable computing – and I have no doubt that 20 years from now that will be standard, probably through glasses or contacts, but for all I know through some kind of more direct neural connection. And I’m pretty confident that platform shift will happen a lot sooner than 20 years – almost certainly within 10, but quite likely as little as 3-5, because the key areas – input, processing/power/size, and output – that need to evolve to enable wearable computing are shaping up nicely, although there’s a lot still to be figured out,” Abrash wrote in a recent post.

He does however make a point of saying this is in the early research stages, we’re not going to actually see anything for a very long time.

“To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It’s an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn – failure is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on – and then apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we’re just at the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn,” he explained.

I’m pretty sure if you can make the freaking Batmobile, you can make me my Episode 3. Get to it, Valve.

Tags: episode 3, headline, michael abrash, Valve, wearable computing