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Valve Is Bringing Steam's Game Library Into VR With Desktop Theater Mode (roadtovr.com)
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.
The end of the innocence.
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...
Nerds run 15 year old computers without so much as an HDMI port. How the f*ck are they going run VR applications that tax even the latest and greatest high-end gaming systems?
Sword art online 2, episode 24.
Will these games show up as a flat texture or in stereoscopic 3D?
Twinstiq, game news
I have made this comment before but games that are designed to do stereoscopic 3D should play just fine on VR goggles (with minor driver tweaks). Instead of displaying the two slightly different frames on a monitor, you would just be displaying them on two different screens.
As for games that do not support 3D or VR, you could use VR goggles as a virtual very large display. You wouldn't have the head tracking camera display (probably) but you could virtualise a quite large screen using the goggles (it would be like using a 24" screen from an inch away but without being able to see the individual pixels). You could even tweak it a bit so you had a virtual display on your VR headset that you could pan and scan on by moving your head, that way you wouldn't have issues with not being able to see stuff shown at the edges of the "screen"...
Future possibilities for gamers playing together on the same virtual couch are enticing.
Yes, instead of one pasty faced shut-in staring into a mask closing them off from anyone else in their basement, there can be two or more pasty faced shut-ins staring into masks closing them off from anyone else in their respective basements while pretending to be sitting together in a virtual basement. Perhaps there will even be a virtual Cortana/Mom bringing them virtual cheezy poofs and Mountain Dew...
Once everybody is a wirehead, the world is doomed ...yadayaddayadda
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 publicly disclosed extended game play experiences, still. Where is the first 12 hour game play session, something many people do on occasion with desktops or consoles.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
.... as DorkHelmet.
As one of those very sensitive to these 3D gadgets, I always wondered why ultra high resolution 2D glasses aren't a thing. It can be difficult to fit three 4K monitors into some spaces. In addition, or maybe because of that, they want to make these TINY 4K screens instead of giving more real estate for text and information (what, ONE 40 inch 4K monitor with display ports on the market - if you can find one?).
Small rooms could use something like this to eliminate the huge physical monitors, why all the 3D fuss? or is it just me?
Don't you end up with a huge screen,but low res?
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 is a value-add on its own.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.