Valve Announces New Portal Content For Virtual Reality

An anonymous reader writes: Although I'm sure we'd all love to see Half-Life in virtual reality, Valve has been focusing on its Portal universe for SteamVR. The company announced today a "compilation of new VR experiments" called 'The Lab', which will be set inside one of Aperture Science's "pocket universes". One of Valve's earlier VR demos, 'Aperture Robot Repair', had players interact with Atlas, one of the robots from Portal 2 (with a brief GLaDOS cameo). The company says they'll be showing off The Lab at GDC 2016 next week and that they'll release it for free to SteamVR this spring.

Motion sickness. Motion sickness everywhere.

[blueshift_1]

The biggest problem is that portal is disorienting with normal play... much less with full VR immersion. I would expect sickness everywhere.

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[Fragnet]

"No motion sickness at all". Ahahahahahahaha.

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[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way in Hades I am going to sink $800 bucks into one of these without trying it out first.

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[LoneTech]

Thank you! It's such a relief to have it reconfirmed that I, and thousands of other enthusiasts and developers, simply don't exist. Takes all the pressure to succeed off... :P

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[alvinrod]

I would imagine that they've tried it internally and it's not too bad or they've found ways of reducing potential disorientation, perhaps by only allowing your head position to change the camera view via the headset instead of using a mouse or analog stick as typical with most games. There's still going to be a disconnect between what you're seeing and your body's sense of motion, but to some degree you'll get that with any VR game.

It doesn't make sense for Valve (who while not as involved in the VR-craz

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[rtb61]

So they claim testing, then let's stop with the lies and secrets and lets see the results of testing. Let's see what someone behaves like and how they fell after 12 hours of VR gaming. Let's scope out the deterioration hour after hours and I am betting pretty major deterioration as the reason why no testing results are being released.

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[dfsmith]

It took me a while to get the hang of the weird Portal angles. But my kids had no trouble at 5 years old—it was just natural for them to do Portal Jumps and rotations. Hey, that's how the universe works, isn't it? ``Dad! Make me a portal to the fridge!''

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[rsmith-mac]

The biggest problem is that portal is disorienting with normal play... much less with full VR immersion. I would expect sickness everywhere.

This assumes that they are using "Portal" as in the gameplay as opposed to the brand. Valve's existing Aperture Robot Repair demo was one big tech demo for the Vive's wireless controllers; there were no portals involved. Expect similar for The Lab.

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[dohzer]

Relax. The VR system will be sold with a vomit bag as standard issue.

In other news

[Alyks]

Valve announces it's still not making Half Life 3.

I.E. short demos you'll only want to try once

[Scorpinox]

I was able to try out the mentioned demo late last year, and it was cute, but it's note exactly something you would want to spend more than ~10 minutes messing around with. So to say new Portal "content" is coming might be a little misleading.

I have a feeling that people are going to be very disappointed with the software available at launch for the Vive. It's mostly short tech demos that are worth seeing once, but certainly not worth $800 + a high-end computer upgrade. Still looking forward to the future of this stuff though. It has the potential to be huge.

Doesn't HL2 work with Oculus?

[Viewsonic]

I swear I was playing that on my DK2 over a year ago. Thought all the HL engine games just "worked".

Maybe that was some other reality I'm thinking about. I've got so many these days it's easy to be confused.

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[Wraithlyn]

Yeah we've played Half Life Source on the DK2, worked great.

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[mobby_6kl]

Yes, however it's not going to work in the future with new SDKs and so on. Apparently Valve considers that direction a failure and isn't going to support it with consumer HMDs.

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[Calabacin]

Yes, however it's not going to work in the future with new SDKs and so on. Apparently Valve considers that direction a failure and isn't going to support it with consumer HMDs.

Is this really true? For what reasons? Got a link?

The 'portal universe'?

[Zibodiz]

Although I'm sure we'd all love to see Half-Life in virtual reality, Valve has been focusing on its Portal universe

Portal is in the Half-Life universe. It's a spin-off.

How about Half-Life 3..?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about working on projects people are clamoring for, Valve? Like, I dunno, Half-Life 3..?

Let other people handle VR. Your solution is dead in the water, just like the Steam Box.