HTC + Valve = VR

Exciting news, everyone. HTC just announced that they are making Valves VR headset. What? You might wonder. Yeah, me to. But isn't this partnership pretty exciting? It was a pretty short tease but more to come at GDC, they announced.

So, what do you think?

http://www.htcvr.com/

The most interesting part:

Couple the headset with a pair of Steam VR base stations to track your physical location (in spaces up to 15 feet by 15 feet) – get up and walk around inisde the virtual world!

Fuck, that is some terrible website design.

HTC have made some decent phones... they've also made some of the absolutely worst, sluggish PoS phones I've ever used. This could go either way.

A release this holiday season is exciting, it's going to put a lot of pressure on Oculus Rift and maybe Sony's Project Morpheus. I don't think I ever expected the VR hardware fight to start as early as this year, but it's definitely looking likely.

90fps and 1,200 by 1,000 is a nice surprise too.

THE VR RACE IS ON BOYS

I like my HTC phone. So I guess I'm interested to see where they go with it. Competition is usually a good thing for the consumers, after all.

Well, that came out of nowhere. Interesting partnership, let's see where this goes in the next couple of months.

Their latest handsets -- the One series -- has been great. The One M8 was one of the best phones of last year, by far.

The last time I used an HTC phone was the HTC Legend, and that was 5 years ago. They've come a long way since then. We'll see how this works out for them and Valve, but I'm pretty hopeful.

VR is so close I can taste it, I can't wait for the next Elder Scrolls\Fallout to come out with full support for one or all of these devices, we've all been waiting for the next step...ITS ALMOST HERE!

Yeah, I can't wait to bump into shit and step on my cat!

HTC's budget smartphones were pretty terrible, but the HTC One M8 is by far the best phone I've ever owned. If they're bringing that level of quality to their VR offering, then there's nothing to worry about. I was one of the few people who stuck by Oculus when they were bought by Facebook simply because the people at Oculus are some of the most talented individuals in the field. I definitely still think Oculus is going to be the "winner", but I'm hoping Valve's effort will provide some real competition and lead to better tech for everyone in the end.

Unique controllers for each hand, and working directly with Fireproof Games (the dev behind The Room and The Room 2). Say no more!

I still don't think VR is ever going to take off in a mainstream way, but all of this competition is shaping up to thrust the tech forward and hopefully drive the prices down. That was one thing that the 3D push really lacked. It just sort of existed, but was mainly coming from Sony as a weak attempt to sell TVs. The innovation never backed up the promises.

Hopefully Valve is going to make sure this thing delivers at or above their bar of quality. I was really, really surprised when I read "will be available later this year." HTC doesn't have a bad track record by any means, but they have released some pretty poor hardware in the past, and having it release the same year it's announced screams "rushing to market to compete," which is a bad idea.

We'll have to see what happens, but more hardware competition is always a good thing. Even if it's not so great, it should force Sony and Oculus to not rest on their laurels.

What an exciting time... VR is actually coming to fruition!

Seems like kind of a weird partnership, I wouldn't have expected Valve to partner with a phone manufacturer. I'm curious about the breakdown of who is working on what, like if Valve is focusing on software and HTC covers the hardware or what.

Hopefully it turns out well, at the moment I think I am more inclined towards the Oculus since they kind of pioneered this whole thing and seem to really care about getting the design right before shipping a product. I have a lot of trust in Valve although I'm not the biggest fan of HTC; it just depends which headsets is the best in the end though, if HTC makes a better headset than Oculus then I'll get that one for sure.

''VR base stations'' sounds like something expansive. Something that would have minimal support in actual games.

@pyrodactyl said:

Oh, for sure. I think it's technologically the most interesting thing about Vive, but I'd be very surprised if it ended up having broad software support.

Too bad this is bound to start as a targeted thing for PC gamers with expensive rigs. With the talk about unique controler, high FPS and 3D I can't see the whole package for playing games with this thing being affordable at all.

You'll need to have a machine capable of rendering the game at a high frame rate, twice + that whole headset hand controler thing.

Will this work with my curved 3D TV with motion controls?

Link to the "trailer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTITJSSRUso

@49th: It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Phone manufacturers are in the best position to provide small, power efficient components like screens and accelerometers. It's why Oculus partnered with Samsung, and I'm sure Sony is utilising it's phone division for the development of Morpheus.

I'm so happy I live in a world where Vr is slowly becoming a reality.

@pyrodactyl said:

That's not exclusive to this headset. Sure, you're able to render/display a VR-experience on a smartphone. It's just not optimal.

I feel like I'm going crazy here. For years I've been hearing that the Rift doesn't look like a consumer device, and that it looks like some developer device, and how it looks dumb.

How is no one saying this thing looks like shit? It's covered by a bunch weird looking holes that aren't even symmetrical. I thought the image I saw of it was broken or something.

VR headsets are primarily a single-player experience... why does it matter what you look like while you're wearing one? They're not portable. You're not going to be out in public wearing these headsets. Maybe in 5 years, when phones are powerful enough to render convincing VR graphics, but not much sooner.

Well, it's Valve. So look forward to seeing this in 10 years as they constantly iterate until it becomes irrelevant.

I really hope VR doesn't catch on. A lot of gamers are nearsighted, and you can't wear your glasses when you have a VR helmet on. So the effect doesn't even work.

@csl316: It's HTC, but I see the joke you were going for.

This is good news. The fact that so many huge companies are investing in VR is a big deal for VR and a good sign that it's something that might be here to stay.

The beautiful thing about such headsets is I'm sure you'll be able to change the focus of each individual screen

I'm pretty sure I remember Norm Chan talking about calibrating the screen on original Oculus dev kit to work with his vision. It's obviously a major problem which I'm sure was one of the first things that they had to create a solution for in order to become commercially viable.

@medacris: Innovation shouldn't be held back just because some might not be able to enjoy it.

VR is not mass market, will not be mass market in the current state. These headsets are just stepping stones.

You can use different lenses to compensate for your nearsightedness, the screen stays the same.

I am just going to say it. Half Life 3 confirmed.

@daddycabinet said:

Valve have a GDC talk scheduled for 3PM on the 3rd of March. If they're going to announce Half Life 3, that would be an amazing time to do it.

Ah, the VR bubble is growing. So tell my why I should be exited for Valve's take on VR and not Morpheus or Oculus?

@trafalgarlaw: More competition can't be a bad thing.

@pcorb: I only worry for fragmentation of VR. What if Valve decided that Oculus will be unsupported on Steam? Having to own a specific VR-headset for each platform or maybe even for each digital platform would be a nightmare. Competition is fine but I'm already annoyed at Steam/Origin/UPlay fragmentation on the PC.

A 1,200 by 1,080 pixel screen in front of each eye,

If this isn't blatant lying then that is a HUGE improvement over the current Rift DevKits. I've used both DK1 and DK2 and both have been really hamstrung by resolution.

@trafalgarlaw: it has a release date, it's being promoted by valve, it's being built by HTC. All good signs, I think the valve/releae date is the key to the hype train though

That is why Valve is developing SteamVR. For all intents and purposes it is an API designed to abstract away the headsets.

I would rather take a first party headset over a third party one, so long as it doesn't perform worse than the others.

Half Life 3, VR exclusive!

Fuck.

I'm really excited to see what they show at GDC for this thing, can't wait to get a god damn VR set.

that would be horrible.

But we're talking about Valve here, not EA.

Some kind of standard for HMD's will probably be devised in the future.

but like when processors and graphics cards were new, we get a shittone of upcommers, after a few years, just a couple will be around, probably.