If Valve Software’s Team Fortress 2 is anything, it’s versatile. The company’s demonstrating that versatility once more in porting the game to virtual reality goggles, which could result in some serious psychological trauma. Kidding aside, a Game Developers Conference blurb today revealed the internal project — part of Valve’s ongoing wearable computing efforts — which says the talk, “will describe lessons learned from Valve’s porting experience.” In another talk, Valve hardware man Michael Abrash is diving into the possibilities he sees in the future of VR, as viewed through his own company’s experience.
It isn’t clear whether Valve is using the much-loved Oculus Rift technology (seen above); the notes of the second talk only detail a general exploration of VR’s weaknesses and strengths as they pertain to current technology. One thing is clear: both talks aim to educate game developers on what some Valve employees see as a burgeoning new frontier in game development. We welcome this bizarrely sci-fi future with open arms.
Continue reading Stay seated: Valve’s Team Fortress 2 ported to virtual reality
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, HD
Oculus is a young company that is working on what everyone else has given up on: a great consumer-level virtual reality headset. It was a huge trend in the 90s, but hardware and software developers ultimately bumped on two walls: 1/ the field of vision was too narrow to be truly immersive 2/ the latency between the head movement and the screen response was too low, and could induce sickness (your brain is used to immediate visual response when you move your head). At the time, this couldn’t be solved – even with throwing money at the problem, and ultimately, even the Pentagon gave up. [Video in the full post] 
