Games firm Valve has made its long-anticipated move into virtual reality, teaming up with HTC for the Vive VR headset. Standalone device will go head-to-head with Facebook’s $2bn VR headset by the end of 2015, when both will have released commercial editions, says The Guardian.
For Valve it marks the second move into hardware – with the company also developing its Steam Machine console. The company is best known for the Steam digital games service as well as games like Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead.
Vive is a fully-functional VR headset rather than a VR housing for a smartphone like Samsung’s Gear VR.
HTC will launch a developer edition of the new device in the spring before a commercial version goes on sale by the end of the year.
HTC is designing the Vive hardware, but using tracking and input technology from Valve’s Steam VR team. The Steam store will also act as a prominent distribution channel for Vive games and software.
The Vive will ship with two wireless controllers to help its users play games and explore virtual worlds viewed through the headset, but they’ll also be able to walk around these environments thanks to a pair of base stations tracking their physical movements.
The headset, meanwhile, includes two 1,200 x 1,800-pixel screens, promising refresh rates of 90 frames-per-second and “eliminating the jitter common to previous VR technologies” according to HTC.
The Vive headset will be supported by games developers, with a number of titles due to be shown off at the GDC show this week in San Francisco.
They include The Gallery from CloudHead Games, a first-person adventure that started life as a Kickstarter-crowdfunded Oculus Rift game in 2013; and Job Simulator from Owlchemy Labs.
