Valve Reveals High-End VR Headset Called the Valve Index (arstechnica.com) 87
After partnering with HTC to launch the Vive in 2016, Valve has moved ahead with plans to launch its own headset, called the Valve Index, in May 2019. Ars Technica reports: The news came on Friday in the form of a single teaser image, shown above, of a headset with the phrase "Valve Index" written on its front. The front of the headset is flanked by at least two sensors. This shadow-covered hardware matches the leaked headset reported by UploadVR in November of last year. That report hinted to Valve's headset supporting a wider, 135-degree field-of-view (FOV), as opposed to the roughly 110-degree FOV of the original HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Valve's dedicated website for the new device includes no other information than the above image and the date "May 2019." It does not include any mention of the new SteamVR Knuckles controllers, which Valve has advertised pretty heavily via developer outreach since their 2016 reveal and a later series of improved prototypes in 2018. This page also doesn't mention a series of three Valve-produced VR games that have been repeatedly advertised by Valve co-founder Gabe Newell since 2017. There's very little information about the headset, but after cranking up the brightness and contrast of the teaser image, Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech was able to find "a series of six dots on one of the headset's surfaces, [...] which may hint to this headset's use of an outside tracking sensor, a la the HTC Vive's infrared trackers." He adds: "Even so, those two giant lenses imply that 'inside-out' tracking, managed entirely by the headset without any extra webcams or sensors, may also be in the cards. Additionally, we can see a giant physical slider, which is likely linked to interpupillary distance (IPD), a precise measurement needed to ensure maximum VR comfort."
Valve's dedicated website for the new device includes no other information than the above image and the date "May 2019." It does not include any mention of the new SteamVR Knuckles controllers, which Valve has advertised pretty heavily via developer outreach since their 2016 reveal and a later series of improved prototypes in 2018. This page also doesn't mention a series of three Valve-produced VR games that have been repeatedly advertised by Valve co-founder Gabe Newell since 2017. There's very little information about the headset, but after cranking up the brightness and contrast of the teaser image, Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech was able to find "a series of six dots on one of the headset's surfaces, [...] which may hint to this headset's use of an outside tracking sensor, a la the HTC Vive's infrared trackers." He adds: "Even so, those two giant lenses imply that 'inside-out' tracking, managed entirely by the headset without any extra webcams or sensors, may also be in the cards. Additionally, we can see a giant physical slider, which is likely linked to interpupillary distance (IPD), a precise measurement needed to ensure maximum VR comfort."
Um... no. (Score:1)
You're not gonna succeed in drumming up any interest for VR in me for another 20 years.
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With the cpu and ram and cpu and games all ready.
4K in each eye was what was missing. 4K will get VR selling.
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Will somebody please ban this fucktard at the firewall
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Most of us skip over your crapflooding.
If you didn't format your spam in such an easily identifiable way, you might suck more people into reading your crapflood.
In any case, carry on if it amuses you.
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Pictures of the headset have been leaked months ago, so we already knew it was coming, this announcement just makes it official. And May 2019 [steampowered.com] is written straight on the website itself.
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Play with the page zoom, if you are too much zoomed in the date will get clipped away.
Are GPUs really ready? (Score:2)
From what I've seen the issue is not so much the headsets but the fact that graphic cards can't yet keep up with comfortable frame rates. If one needs to upgrade to an NVidia 2080 to get some halfway decent FPS, this one is going to be a hard sell unless they come in some kind of promotion.
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It's not the fault of the GPUs.
Some VR makers have been taking shortcuts by using machine vision to track the player using multiple cameras. Think not just running two 1080 screens, but also processing two to six video streams at the same time on top of the game itself. IR trackers are better, but there's plenty of upside for efficiency here.
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Luckily Valve already has a solution to that. When the Vive first came out, they pushed dynamic rendering resolution so that it'd lower the output resolution on the fly according to how much time it was taking to render. It would be at full resolution if the hardware was able to support it that frame. Valve even open-sourced the code to do this, and again encouraged people to use it. AFAIK few VR apps actually use dynamic resolution, despite this.
If a commonplace next-gen VR headset were high enough resolut
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It can be noticeable, particularly for text. There's probably a way to keep the text rendering at full resolution, though.
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My GTX1060 Laptop can do current-gen VR just fine, so if you need to upgrade at all a GTX1070 should be plenty.
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From what I've seen the issue is not so much the headsets but the fact that graphic cards can't yet keep up with comfortable frame rates. If one needs to upgrade to an NVidia 2080 to get some halfway decent FPS, this one is going to be a hard sell unless they come in some kind of promotion.
As someone who owns a Vive, you're mostly right. No, you don't need a 2080, I have a 1070 that still runs games wonderfully and the experience is nothing short of mind blowing. I just tell everyone to at least give it a shot and don't dismiss it off hand. The experience you get of "presence" cannot be described, you just have to experience it.
Unfortunately even a 1070 along with the Vive is still a sizeable investment for most people and the prices will need to continue to fall and the hardware needs t
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Index (Score:2)
'Index' sure is a geeky name for a VR headset. As in 'index of refraction' perhaps? I can see the marketing now: "Index: find your place in the virtual world."
Many headsets have an exploration naming scheme: rift, cosmos, odyssey, quest, (re)vive. Some are on the more technical side: gear, focus, reverb, 5k+.
This will almost certainly be targeted at VR enthusiasts. The text "Upgrade your experience" presumes a target audience who already owns a VR headset, and also throws shade on the Rift S' incremental im
impossible to google. (Score:2)
When your company name is a common noun you should not name your products with common words. One of two things becomes a problem either no one can find your product or conversely if you become famous like "Amazon" then you now obliterate searches for the original words
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I used to play an MMO called 'Glitch' made by a company called Tiny Speck.
If you want to name a game so that it is impossible to google for pages and reviews about it, name it 'Glitch.'
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A very long time ago, I searched for the lyrics of "Sexual" by Goddess. [wikia.com] Guess what all the results were...
Fucking over partners (Score:1)
Noticing this more and more in business. Company X partners with company Y so that in a couple years company Y can fuck over company X and release something they both worked on without compensating company X. After everything I've seen from Valve, could have predicted it also. Fuck valve and fuck steam.
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Except in this case, the company Valve partnered with (HTC) is absolutely garbage and has the worse customer support to the point of being customer hostile. It would be a terrible decision to "partner" with HTC again.
Valve is doing a lot of good for linux gamers with Steam Play and employing WINE/DXVK developers.
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Valve is doing a lot of good for linux gamers with Steam Play and employing WINE/DXVK developers.
Except this is exactly wrong. Valve is the company that literally stole half-life/counterstrike by inserting steam into it. Before the late 90's/early 2000's, PC gamers owned their games and they game with dedicated servers and level editors. That got dialed back hugely after steam in 2004. The rebranding of PC rpg's in development to mmo's to undermine game ownership. Valve pioneered walled garden gaming. We saw TF2 get mtx around 2010.
The only reason Valve is making proton and has any interest in li
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FWIW, I own a Vive, which broke after about 10 months due to sweat damage. I fought with HTC for several months to try and get them to honor their warranty (which explicitly covered damage caused by sweat), however they insisted that the unit had been submerged in water and refused me at every turn. I have not bought and will not buy another HTC product after that experience. So, if Valve wants to try their hand at releasing a product without HTC, more power to them.
Also, Valve developed their SteamVR te
The Non-reveal (Score:2)
I saw this teaser yesterday, then today the "Valve Reveals" headline on Slashdot. Oh great, Valve are already giving us the lowdown on it! That was quick! Then look closer, and this is only about the teaser image. Somebody at /. needs to learn what "reveal" means, because this isn't it. Get back to us when you've got some info we can use, 'kay?
RoadToVR coverage (Score:2)
Outside-in lighthouse compatible, adjustable IPD:
https://www.roadtovr.com/valve... [roadtovr.com]
Honestly (Score:1)
VR is a non-starter, it hasn't advanced that much since the *last* wave of hype 20 years ago. It still makes people dizzy, the gear is cumbersome, and if you wear corrective lenses, forget it, it's a joke. I doubt we will see anything truly useful come out of this in our lifetimes, and even for gaming it's pretty much a novelty, 3D TV 2.0. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't be hitting the mainstream in a meaningful way.
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My HTC Vive doesn't make me dizzy, is only a bit cumbersome (largely because I haven't yet sprung for the new cordless upgrade), and I got prescription inserts that work Just Fine. I've been using it since the system was released, and there's a lot more software now. I have no idea about "hitting mainstream", since everyone seems to have a different idea of what qualifies as mainstream. What I do know is that VR is working pretty well for a lot of us out here, and it doesn't appear to be going away at al
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Cheap VR does that. I had the _exact_ same misconceptions as you, due to cheap VR, until I tried _good_ VR. I never get nauseous playing First Person Shooters but I do with cheap VR. Bad VR is anything sub 90 frames/sec.
I don't get dizzy and can wear glasses with my VR.
Other then that, yeah most people don't want to wear some bulky thing on their head. Nausea due to cheap VR is never a good marketing point.
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I agree that VR is a "niche" application; it is doubtful it will ever go mainstream until we have cybernetic eye implants -- at which point VR will be redundant.
Re: Honestly (Score:2)
...it is doubtful it will ever go mainstream until we have cybernetic eye implants
Did you come up with that when you were on or off your meds?
Nope (Score:2)
At this point VR causes me less nausea than bad 3D games played on a large monitor (like The Witness, which makes me sick after about a half hour).
You are right about gear being cumbersome but we are already seeing reduction in that area with self-contained headsets. If you go in something like the Void you basically wear a small backpack/vest and a helmet and you get fully mobile VR.
Re: Honestly (Score:2)
Anonymous Coward 8 hours ago VR is a non-starter, it hasn't advanced that much since the *last* wave of hype 20 years ago.
There was no 'wave of hype' twenty years ago; there were two primitive, proprietary headsets (that I can recall), the Forte VFX1 and SimulEyesVR (or something like that); they were only supported by a handful of titles and were utterly pointless.
And you're a fucking crackhead.
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Outside In as well as Inside Out (Score:2)
The cameras have been known about, and indicate inside out tracking (where the device determines your position by analyzing the video feed of your movement). But the new image does show faint circles, which are indicators of Valve's outside-in tracking (the detectors for the base station infrared laser sweeps). So that's news... it'll offer both methods? Simultaneously perhaps, to allow for robust tracking even when the base station goes out of view? Outside-in is usually more accurate too, so this may allo
all i'm interested in is (Score:2)
how good will linux work with it?
after all these years the vive still is rather troublesome to setup.