Hasta La Gadget!

Valve Software’s experiments with virtual reality, most recently exposed as a “VR Mode” of its popular free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2, are actually just an offshoot of the company’s longer-term goal: augmented reality. The dozens of AR markers plastered to the three walls of Valve programmer Joe Ludwig’s shared office are testament to that (seen above). “We’re mostly looking at a software level. We’ve talked to a bunch of different display vendors on the augmented reality side, and none of them are quite ready to go yet,” Ludwig says when we prod him for more on Valve’s AR efforts. One thing’s for sure: we didn’t spot any Google Glasses on-site, nor products from other companies producing wearable computers, not to mention in-house glasses.

“We’ve done some gameplay prototypes,” he says. “We’ve done some test pattern type stuff. But that’s basically it. There’s an application that we call ‘Sea of Cubes’ that fills the room you’re in with cubes just to basically test a bunch of different tracking methods and displays.” Thus far, though, Valve isn’t much deeper than that. A variety of different cameras mounted on tripods can be seen throughout Ludwig’s office. A $30,000 3D camera, which looks an awful lot like a giant Microsoft Kinect, sits in one corner. Ludwig tells us it can pinpoint specific objects with incredible accuracy, though he wouldn’t share much more. It’s not clear what all of this means for Valve’s AR work, but it’s clearly still a work-in-progress. Indeed, when the company first started talking wearable computing, Valve’s Michael Abrash called it “more research than development.” So, what fruit has come of that research since last April?

Filed under: Cameras, Gaming, Peripherals, Wearables, Software, HD

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We’ve known for some time now that Valve was working on virtual reality support for its perpetually updated free-to-play shooter, Team Fortress 2. The company’s even giving a duo of talks at the upcoming Game Developer’s Conference on the difficulties of game development for virtual reality. What we didn’t know, however, is that said support is also headed to consumers as “VR Mode,” and it’ll get pushed to PC Team Fortress 2 players “sometime within the next couple of weeks.” But how will you play it? Simple: Team Fortress 2 is the Oculus Rift‘s first official game.

Valve programmer Joe Ludwig revealed as much during a recent visit Engadget paid to the Bellevue, Wash.-based game company. “This is a mode that everybody who has a Rift dev kit and access to Team Fortress 2 will be able to play, just on public and in the same servers that everybody else is playing in,” Ludwig said. Of course, “everybody” doesn’t include Mac or Linux TF2 players just yet. “We don’t have a Mac or Linux SDK from Oculus quite yet, but once we get those, we’ll get it ported over to those other platforms,” he explained. Oculus tells us those SDKs are coming. “The Oculus SDK will only support Windows at launch, but we plan to add support for OS X and Linux as quickly as possible. It’s just a matter of time,” Oculus VP of product Nate Mitchell says.

We’ll have more from our visit to Valve in the coming hours, so keep an eye out!

[Image credit: Michael Clinard]

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD

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Valve head Gabe Newell says the company isn’t stopping any planned hardware initiatives, despite reports of layoffs at the company and the news that hardware lead Jeri Ellsworth was fired. In a statement issued to Engadget, Newell said:

“We don’t usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I’d take the unusual step of addressing them. No, we aren’t canceling any projects. No, we aren’t changing any priorities or projects we’ve been discussing. No, this isn’t about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We’re not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn’t working here.”

When pushed, company reps wouldn’t confirm or deny layoffs at Valve, nor would they comment on the confirmed exit of Ellsworth. Valve’s big push this year is hardware, as evidenced by the company’s presence at CES 2013 with a variety of living room PC prototypes, dubbed by many as the “Steambox.” The company’s also working on virtual reality and wearable computing technology — we’ll hear more about Valve’s VR plans in mid-March at the Game Developer’s Conference — beyond its enormously popular game distribution platform, Steam.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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Filmmaker J.J. Abrams (Cloverfield, Star Trek) and game creator Gabe Newell (Half-Life, Portal) just announced they’ll be working together on creating movies and games, via their respective companies, Bad Robot Productions and Valve Software. “We sort of reached the point where we decided that we needed to do more than talk,” Newell said of the partnership. The two were speaking at the DICE 2013 conference in Las Vegas, addressing “Storytelling Across Platforms: Who Benefits Most, the Audience or the Player?” After a half hour of speaking about storytelling in their respective mediums, Newell announced that the presentation came from an ongoing conversation between the two about storytelling. Today’s news is the fruition of that conversation, with the two taking action.

Newell specifically said that J.J.’s team could craft a Half-Life or Portal film — something we’ve heard about in the past, albeit not with Abrams attached — and Abrams said that Valve could help create a game with Bad Robot. Interesting indeed! Of course, the two have their jobs cut out for them — Abrams is currently working on both the Star Trek and Star Wars movie franchises, and Valve’s got a new hardware initiative set to debut this year.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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I lost a bet with myself at CES 2013. In the gaming preview we published ahead of this week’s big show, I wrote, “As per usual, the games industry and CES are acquaintances at best — at least from what we’ve heard thus far. Perhaps this will be the year that bucks the years-long trend, but we’re not betting on it.” Wrong. Wrong. But hey, this is one of those, “glad to be wrong” situations. NVIDIA shocked everyone with its first Tegra 4 device, Project Shield, which is essentially NVIDIA’s first in-house dedicated gaming handheld. Not only does it play Android games, but more importantly, it streams full retail games from your NVIDIA GPU-based PC, all on its high-res 5-inch screen. Heck, it even has Steam’s Big Picture Mode built right in, allowing you to explore Steam and purchase games, as well as push them directly to your television (employing Shield as your controller).

And then Valve’s internal hardware prototypes popped up, confirming what we’ve heard murmurs of for months: the company’s head down on creating a PC for your living room. Not exactly shocking, but certainly exciting; the plans are still nebulous, but Valve’s confirmed we’ll see hardware in 2013. We even saw some third-parties stepping up with their own versions of Valve’s initiative. Xi3’s Piston is the first such creation revealed, though the company’s staying tight-lipped about specs — we do know that Xi3’s working directly with Valve on its tiny, modular PC. It’s barely 2013, and already Valve’s Steambox initiative is dominating gaming news. Let’s call it right here — this is the year that Valve attacks.

Continue reading 2013: The year that Valve attacks

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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