Valve Reveals Gaming Headset, Teases Big Picture 151
dotarray writes with a bit from Player Attack: "Gaming is big business, says Valve, as the developer takes the time to show off its brand new gaming headset and TV-based Big Picture. Rather than inviting the games media masses who have been clamouring for any details on the Seattle company's 'wearable computing' initiative, Gabe Newell and his team instead went right to the top, with an in-depth interview published in The New York Times."
The New York Times article on which this report is based is worth reading, too: Valve's corporate non-structure sounds hard to believe. It seems Valve is also looking for hardware designers.
I got 99 problems but citing aint one. (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon [amazon.com]
Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court
EA [ea.com]
YOU UNDERSTAND THAT BY THIS PROVISION, YOU AND EA ARE FOREGOING THE RIGHT TO SUE IN COURT AND HAVE A JURY TRIAL.
Ebay [ebay.com]
...Agreement to Arbitrate, which will, with limited exception, require you to submit claims you have against us to binding and final arbitration, unless you opt-out of the Agreement to Arbitrate (see Legal Disputes, Section B ("Agreement to Arbitrate")). Unless you opt-out: (1) you will only be permitted to pursue claims against eBay on an individual basis....
Newegg preferred account. [mypreferredaccount.com]
THIS AGREEMENT REQUIRES THE USE OF ARBITRATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS TO RESOLVE DISPUTES
On top of all this I have found generic arbitration clauses [arbserve.com] and a plethora of companies [lmgtfy.com]that are too numerous to count.
The headmounted display (Score:5, Informative)
The headmounted display (HMD) the NYT article leads off with wasn't created by Valve though. It was created by Palmer Luckey [mtbs3d.com]. Gabe helped him assemble a tiny little 8 person corporation to commercialize the design (and probably offered private financing to help make sure it gets off the ground in style, though that has never been publically reported). He may not need the financing though. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter [kickstarter.com] ended a little over a week ago and was phenomenally successful. They're calling it one of the top 10 Kickstarters so far. That same HMD has been credited to John Carmack too, so it's not too surprising the NYT got it wrong.
As for the people complaining about how clunky the pictures look, ever heard of prototyping? That's what that was. Check the Kickstarter page for what the Rift 1.0 kits will look like when they ship this December. You can bet the Rift 2.0, likely to be available commercially next year, will look even slicker.
As for the people complaining about getting sick or eyestrain from it, it may come as a shock, but the past 20 years haven't been completely useless in determining what was wrong with '80s VR. Human vision is now so well understood that a layman can explain the basic issues with VR. It doesn't take an optometrist anymore. More to the point, Carmack has done some real science using the Rift prototype he has and determined that the biggest driver for making VR work (or not) is latency, in both headtracking and the display. Get that roundtrip loop down to less than 20 milliseconds, and human vision (and brain) buys it. It looks like looking at a world, after that, and no longer induces vertigo. The hardware is finally at a point where getting under that limit is feasible.
The biggest reason VR can succeed this time is display technology. Smart phones have driven the costs of conveniently small conveniently high resolution LCD panels into the ground. What was once a ridiculously custom built $50,000 piece of gear is now a $300 piece of gear made of off the shelf parts originally intended for phones. Right down to the sensors. Trackers on a chip have also gotten both very sophisticated and astonishingly cheap. It ain't the '80s anymore, kids.
What does all this have to do with Valve? Valve in general and Gabe Newell in particular believes that this time, VR WILL work, and that the platform of choice to get it off the ground is the PC. PCs tolerate new peripherals better than any other platform, especially since many platforms don't tolerate 3rd party peripherals in any form at all. Good luck creating a 3rd party peripheral for the PS3, for instance. Of course, if Microsoft succeeds in killing the PC as we know it with their own app store, then Valve needs their own platform. Hence, the hardware design interest. If their platform includes ready-to-run Virtual Reality that actually lives up to sci fi dreams, so much the better. The results may ultimately become Yet Another Walled Garden (YAWG. Catchy, eh?), but so it goes.
Re:No managers (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sure Gabe Newell appreciates that your dirt poor ideology-spouting ass is a member of a political party that exists for the sole purpose of making sure he gets richer and you stay poor. That must really warm the cockles of his billionaire heart.
This may come as a shock to you, but creative people with brains will work to create without any oversight whatsoever, for the joy of creation. I know, you're such a worthless shit that you have to have someone stand over you to make sure you don't fuck up the burger order, but there are people in the world who make things with no financial incentive at all. Collecting a paycheck for the privilege is just icing on the cake.
Re:I got 99 problems but citing aint one. (Score:5, Informative)
Which is exactly the same case for Steam as it is for these other services. That's not the argument being made here. The argument was that Steam was somehow so much worse and more evil than everybody else.
Re:I got 99 problems but citing aint one. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, yes, the capitals do make it more likely to be legally binding. IANAL, but I was recently reviewing my employment contract with a lawyer, and she explained that it is important to draw attention to arbitration clauses, and caps are one way to do that.
Re:5-10 year plan (Score:4, Informative)
I'm really impressed with Valve right now.
While the Valve model is a part of it, you should be directing your praises specifically at Michael Abrash.
Abrash is a long-time graphics and optimization guru (author of Zen of Assembly Language, Zen of Graphics Programming, and two legendary Dr Dobbs series of articles, one titled Ramblings In Realtime and the other Graphics Programming Black Book) that Valve has been trying to hire for a very long time.
This is the guy who single-handedly made the Quake rendering engine, with its software-based perspective-correct texture mapping and lighting, a possibility at the time that it was released. Valve finally succeeded in landing him about a year ago, and he has been investigating the practicality of Virtual and Augmented Reality ever since.
He even writes about some of his findings in his blog, Ramblings in Valve Time [valvesoftware.com]
Re:I got 99 problems but citing aint one. (Score:5, Informative)
Writing some illegal clause in caps does not magically make it legal.
Re:No managers (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked at companies that were structures this way by accident. It was a government contract design and machine shop. The manager was just a laid back guy that got an order and let us figure it out.. The engineers liked designing and the machinists liked building things. We were very successful because we did what we liked.
The best part is that if you have an experienced group you can easily tell which projects are a waste of time and nobody worked on those. This allocated resources very efficiently.
Then one day the contract was up and new management came in and tried to actually manage the place. Everyone with a brain left after 6 months.
Re:The headmounted display (Score:2, Informative)
I thought this was a tech site?