Valve Prepping Source 2 Engine For VR

An anonymous reader writes "In a Q&A session on Reddit last night with Valve's Gabe Newell, the founder confirmed that the company is in the process of getting the highly anticipated Source 2 game engine 'working well with VR.' Valve's Alex Vlachos, Senior Graphics Programmer, is apparently leading the charge. Still no word on when the engine may ship. Valve, who is openly collaborating with Oculus VR, demonstrated a VR headset prototype in January at Steam Dev Days. The company also launched a beta version of SteamVR which offers Steam's 'Big Picture' mode in a format compatible with the Oculus Rift VR headset. A developer who got to experiment with Valve's VR prototype says it's very impressive, even more so than the original Oculus VR dev kit."

Re:Valve

[i kan reed]

I've held this suspicion too. Why deliver a game people have been begging for like oversexed whores for years, when you can deliver the game and a tech improvement that'll bust everyone's balls, propelling the former to "technical marvel" and instantly making a market for the latter?

My doubts about VR

[netsavior]

Maybe it is a problem that screen resolution and headmounted cameras can fix, but every time I get excited about VR, I think about how often I get to look at my computer screen TO THE EXCLUSION of the real world (never).
A full face headset is a 15 minute toy at best for me, because life is not generally set up for total immersion except in very rare situations.

I have a hard enough time finding a chance to play games without a pause button, I can't imagine how little time I would play one that requires you to don and remove a facemask in-between distractions.

I mean there are lonely otaku that could live in this thing, but the vast majority of people *even geeks* actually have to log into the real world more often than you'd think.

I know I know, games aren't geared toward old dudes with disposable income and kids and wives... but really, VR seems to have a deceptively small use-case

Re:How do you know what nintendo is doing?

[TheRealMindChild]

I highly doubt it. Nintendo has been a majority about group-in-a-room play. VR takes heavily away from everyone sharing the same point of view