Valve Is Bringing Steam's Game Library Into VR With Desktop Theater Mode

An anonymous reader writes: From characters sprinting around levels at inhuman speeds to the player's view being forcibly moved when a game takes control of the camera during a cutscene, it isn't as easy as you might think to make a game work in VR if it wasn't designed for it in the first place. So Valve is striking a compromise that lets players make use of their existing Steam games in VR. SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode, which Valve says is in early beta and will be shown at GDC next week, puts player's games on a huge screen in a virtual home theater setting. Future possibilities for gamers playing together on the same virtual couch are enticing.

Windows only...

[houstonbofh]

Funny that the company pushing cross platform so much does not have it for the VR test program. I keep looking at it from Steam. On Linux...

Re:

[bloodhawk]

I am not sure Valve knows what it is doing. They are slow on inhouse game dev, steamboxes are just a skid mark in valves shitter from when they were afraid MS was going to be successful with its own store. They have lots of good ideas but don't seem to have the resources, direction or knowhow to follow through effectively

But will the games have depth

[HalAtWork]

Will these games show up as a flat texture or in stereoscopic 3D?

Re:

[aliquis]

I assumed 2D.

There already is this in GarryÂs mod where you can watch movies together in a virtual theater:
https://youtu.be/gceedIPSAjc?t... [youtu.be]
So nothing new really.

Re:

[aliquis]

Then again imagine twitch and streaming like this..

Per game cinemas with larger rooms and all the people showing who watch for more public viewed content?

And co-op gaming / just showing your game for friends / whatever as previously said.

Bring the drouds to the masses

[nospam007]

Once everybody is a wirehead, the world is doomed ...yadayaddayadda

Not so much wire head ....

[AmazingRuss]

.... as DorkHelmet.

VR Comfort

[rtb61]

The biggest challenge remains how to make VR comfortable for extended game play. Easiest measure, can it fit the VR display and still lie back in bed to play for an extended period of time. Not neccesarily the most comfortable way to play or the best for the most interactive experience but the one that does most effectively test the comfort level of the VR headgear (of course that test will also make life better for many people in hospital or the disabled an immersive escape). We have yet to see any publicl

Resolution

[The Raven]

VR still has a resolution problem, and it will for at least a couple years. The resolution of a poor monitor exceeds that of the best VR. Even an adequate monitor will give you a better experience than the same task in VR.

If you use the VR to emulate expensive setups however, then it gets more interesting. Multi-monitor setups, or faking TrackIR... that would give it some interesting utility. But just emulating a big screen will not do a very good job, unless your environment is so depressing that hiding it