Valve to display VR headset, Steam integration in 2014

Valve is getting really busy lately, with their work on Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam controller running at full steam for a launch in 2014. But the company doesn’t want developers and consumers to overlook their endeavors in head-mounted virtual reality displays.

During the developer and publisher-only Steam Dev Days event in January 2014, Valve will show off VR hardware and reveal how it plans to change Steam to support it.

Valve’s Mike Abrash will host a lecture titled: What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years. “We’ve figured out what affordable Virtual Reality (VR) 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. This type of hardware is almost certainly going to appear in short order, and the time to start developing for it is now,” the company writes in their introduction for the talk.

Following Abrash’s lecture Valve’s VR enthusiast, Joe Ludwig, will have his own lecture about Steam’s integration with VR headsets, with a live demonstration of the Steam client and SteamOS integration. Note that Valve isn’t the only company working on VR hardware for the PC, but they are the only one currently working on integrating it properly with a software ecosystem.

Finally, Oculus Rift’s Palmer Luckey will be hosting a lecture discussing porting traditional titles to a VR environment. This particular section applies not just to Valve, but the rest of the industry as well because of the enormous interest in the Oculus Rift and how much work developers would have to do to get their titles running properly.