Valve To Demo Prototype VR Headset, "Steam to Support and Promote VR Games" 55
An anonymous reader writes "The itinerary for Steam Dev Days 2014 lists two talks by Valve's internal virtual and augmented reality researchers, Michael Abrash and Joe Ludwig. Abrash's talk, titled 'What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years' will feature a demonstration of Valve's secret prototype VR headset that is 'capable of stunning experiences.' Ludwig's talk 'Virtual Reality and Steam' will discuss how Valve will be adapting Steam to VR to 'support and promote Virtual Reality games.' Rift inventor and Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey will also be taking to the stage at Steam Dev Days to speak on best-practice for VR development."
There's a hint that they might be showing off a head mounted display featuring a low persistence display, which would be great news for those of us that get the urge to hurl when playing Doom on a conventional display. If you missed it you might want to check out the slides and notes (PDF) from Michael Abrash's GDC2013 talk on VR.
Low persistance has upsides and downsides. (Score:5, Informative)
Low persistance displays are a tricky issue.
They obviously don't have the issues that high-persistance displays have of holding frames for too long. However, they have another annoying effect, commonly referred to as the strobe effect. This has to do with each pixel being lit for only a minute duty cycle on the display. This causes bad flicker at low refresh rates.
Early low persistance displays obviously were not very good on this issue. This is because the displays used very slow technologies such as oscolating mirrors.
By the details I've read on their blog, I'm pretty certain Valve has gotten down that they need a high refresh rate to get the VR to work right. They have identified strobe effect as a problem, and have identified that while the traditional 60Hz rate, while tolerable, is far from ideal for low persistance displays. They seem to believe they can push the refresh rate high enough to deal with strobe effect. I have confidence that they can.
Higher refresh rates also have other advantages for gaming as Internet router designs improve and ping times drop, the latency produced by interpolation becomes more substancial, and the best way to reduce it is to push more physical frames. If you are pushing more physical frames, there are clear advantages to pushing more visual frames to match.
Re:Competing? (Score:4, Informative)
Kinda both. TFA mentions that the Oculus guys were shown a hands-on demonstration of Valve's headset and plan on implementing some stuff they learned there in the Rift. I have no doubt they'll be sort-of competitors, in that people are unlikely to buy both, but Valve's position on hardware so far has been to let other people handle the manufacturing and only do prototype and design work themselves, so it remains to be seen if Valve even directly produces a VR headset. They are, however, producing at least a prototype version of their own set.
However, competition is good. It'll drive anyone who makes VR headsets to produce a headset better (at least in some ways) than the other guys, and give consumers a bit of choice. Plus highlight problems that one set has that others don't, and maybe give everyone some ideas how to fix those problems. Provided, of course, games are intercompatible with all sets on the market (otherwise you just get fragmentation which in practice can be worse than a monopoly).
Re:CastAR (Score:2, Informative)
CastAR does AR and VR. Valve probably didn't see AR as being anything but a niche toy and wanted to focus on VR. So CastAR splits off to do their own thing. Valve sticks with dedicated VR.