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Valve Reveals Gaming Headset, Teases Big Picture
dotarray writes with a bit from Player Attack: "Gaming is big business, says Valve, as the developer takes the time to show off its brand new gaming headset and TV-based Big Picture. Rather than inviting the games media masses who have been clamouring for any details on the Seattle company's 'wearable computing' initiative, Gabe Newell and his team instead went right to the top, with an in-depth interview published in The New York Times."
The New York Times article on which this report is based is worth reading, too: Valve's corporate non-structure sounds hard to believe. It seems Valve is also looking for hardware designers.
thanks, so how many decades does it take to prove that face mounted helmets are stupid?
I'm certain the world will be lining up to try your arm-mounted helmets any day now.
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THIS AGREEMENT REQUIRES THE USE OF ARBITRATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS TO RESOLVE DISPUTES
On top of all this I have found generic arbitration clauses and a plethora of companies that are too numerous to count.
Valve's structure seems like it's modeled after the 20th Century Motor Company from Atlas Shrugged. Everyone evaluated everyone else and decided who was productive and who wasn't It eventually imploded on itself as there was less and less incentive to actually work and more and more to just please your friends and groups to make sure you maintained a paycheck.
I wish them luck, but just like every other socialist plan it works great for a shot while, perhaps even a few decades, but it always falls to ruin faster than a free market based on incentive to do great.
So what you're saying is: this real company, which is doing great in reality, is doomed because it happens to remind you of a fictional company, which failed in a fictional universe.
The headmounted display (HMD) the NYT article leads off with wasn't created by Valve though. It was created by Palmer Luckey. Gabe helped him assemble a tiny little 8 person corporation to commercialize the design (and probably offered private financing to help make sure it gets off the ground in style, though that has never been publically reported). He may not need the financing though. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter ended a little over a week ago and was phenomenally successful. They're calling it one of the top 10 Kickstarters so far. That same HMD has been credited to John Carmack too, so it's not too surprising the NYT got it wrong.
As for the people complaining about how clunky the pictures look, ever heard of prototyping? That's what that was. Check the Kickstarter page for what the Rift 1.0 kits will look like when they ship this December. You can bet the Rift 2.0, likely to be available commercially next year, will look even slicker.
As for the people complaining about getting sick or eyestrain from it, it may come as a shock, but the past 20 years haven't been completely useless in determining what was wrong with '80s VR. Human vision is now so well understood that a layman can explain the basic issues with VR. It doesn't take an optometrist anymore. More to the point, Carmack has done some real science using the Rift prototype he has and determined that the biggest driver for making VR work (or not) is latency, in both headtracking and the display. Get that roundtrip loop down to less than 20 milliseconds, and human vision (and brain) buys it. It looks like looking at a world, after that, and no longer induces vertigo. The hardware is finally at a point where getting under that limit is feasible.
The biggest reason VR can succeed this time is display technology. Smart phones have driven the costs of conveniently small conveniently high resolution LCD panels into the ground. What was once a ridiculously custom built $50,000 piece of gear is now a $300 piece of gear made of off the shelf parts originally intended for phones. Right down to the sensors. Trackers on a chip have also gotten both very sophisticated and astonishingly cheap. It ain't the '80s anymore, kids.
What does all this have to do with Valve? Valve in general and Gabe Newell in particular believes that this time, VR WILL work, and that the platform of choice to get it off the ground is the PC. PCs tolerate new peripherals better than any other platform, especially since many platforms don't tolerate 3rd party peripherals in any form at all. Good luck creating a 3rd party peripheral for the PS3, for instance. Of course, if Microsoft succeeds in killing the PC as we know it with their own app store, then Valve needs their own platform. Hence, the hardware design interest. If their platform includes ready-to-run Virtual Reality that actually lives up to sci fi dreams, so much the better. The results may ultimately become Yet Another Walled Garden (YAWG. Catchy, eh?), but so it goes.
Interesting article, cool that Valve went right to the mainstream traditional media with their announcement. But, it was kinda cute reading the author's descriptions of Portal and TF2. I guess the Times simply doesn't have anyone under 40 working for them. Apparently Team Fortress is a game about an evil company that sells its customers faulty products.
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Imagine an article covering a sporting event written by someone similarly oblivious to what's going on:
"Members of the Yankees team run to and capture 'bases' as part of an elaborate reenactment focused on battlefield strategies deployed during the Civil War . .
What you're not accounting for is the fact that even though he chooses to run the company like there is no leader, in reality GabeN technically is still the owner and could change the management structure as he saw fit if things started going downhill. Considering his success I'm pretty confident that he'd be smart enough to realize that nobody was working anymore and that he needed a new plan.
Portal 2 wasnt that long ago, and it was (IMHO) one of the most polished games every released in the history of PC gaming. That there was no management hierarchy directing the games development is a testament to exactly how wrong the factory mindset is in creative industries.
"His name was James Damore."
Well played, Gaben, well played.
I've worked at companies that were structures this way by accident. It was a government contract design and machine shop. The manager was just a laid back guy that got an order and let us figure it out.. The engineers liked designing and the machinists liked building things. We were very successful because we did what we liked.
The best part is that if you have an experienced group you can easily tell which projects are a waste of time and nobody worked on those. This allocated resources very efficiently.
Then one day the contract was up and new management came in and tried to actually manage the place. Everyone with a brain left after 6 months.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
apparently you have never worn one of these things, they are heavy, and hurt your eyes, face, nose, and the back of your head, genius? if they are so grand why have they never become popular?
The reason they never became popular the first time around was that the Virtuality sets were so expensive. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each and were only good if you had a few so several of you could play together as they had no single player games available.
If you happened to get access to an arcade where you could play for free though (Like I did) you could still get seriously addicted to playing them. Whenever someone came in to the arcade and wanted to play but they were the only person I would have to don the other headset. I never remember the helmet being that uncomfortable to wear but I probably would not have cared if it was to be honest. The only thing that pissed me off was how expensive it was to play, I thought we should drop the price but when I found out how much it cost to rent it I understood.
Ultimately we gave it back as to just didn't generate the revenue for the floor space it took up. If you could have got the price down to a level where it could cost more like 50 cents or a dollar I think it might have been more profitable. As it was I think the minimum you could charge to cover the rent of one was about $5 per go and that barely covered the rental even if it was busy every night and all weekend (It wasn't at that price).
The problem with anything like this though is that once one company tries it and fails it poisons the idea and prevents anyone else from trying it for a while afterwards. The other problem is that most arcades started closing during this period as the consoles you could buy at home caught up in terms of technology.
The killer product that has made the idea of these things popular again though is the Microsoft Kinect. Once you take 2 or 3 Kinect style gizmos and throw them around you in a living room it will make it possible to track something like a brightly coloured gun to figure out where you are aiming it. Then a headset to control the visual movement and a simple joystick on the side of the gun to make you walk (so you can stay still in the middle of the room). Nobody previously would have predicted that microsoft could have produced the Kinect and released it for the price they did, that changed a whole lot of things.
Another amazing use for one of these devices now is in racing games. Currently even playing with a nice steering wheel setup the way you look at cars around you (such as when they are overtaking and in your mirror blindspot) is quirky or non existent. A device like this could make driving games seem far more natural.
I dont read