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Valve brought VR HMDs to Boston VR jam. Impression from redditor. Dota 2 mention

A

ashecitism

Member
Again, Valve doesn't plan to sell these. Not consumer products. They're for demo, research, technology purposes.

Saw this on reddit

The Dota 2 thing wasn't shown, they have internal experiments regarding that which they just mentioned offhandedly at the event.

I participated in the Boston VR jam this past weekend, had an awesome time making some new VR stuff, and had my mind completely melted by the Valve hardware and demos. We've had a few posts here about it already, but some more pics, thoughts and details here:

Pics of the Valve HMD's: http://imgur.com/a/jSdgb#0

The most interesting thing I heard all weekend was: after I tried the demos, I was asking about The Room (Valve's Holodeck setup with AR trackers on the walls), and asked if it would be viable to do edge detection in an arbitrary space to get inside-out (cameras on the HMD looking out) positional tracking, and the guy from Valve said "no, that's not fast enough; we have a different solution already." My speculation has run dry -- what do you guys think it could be that doesn't involve trackers on the wall, edge detection, or external cameras? And I'm assuming not STEM or a similar sensor, since they're not as accurate as cameras, and Valve & Oculus are looking for the least-cumbersome experience.

Thoughts on the Valve hardware & demos: We ran our jam project on the hardware a number of times, and also each got to run through Valve's official demos. The demos were the same ones they run in "The Room": a 3D grid of cubes showing webpages, a mirror showing your head as a cube, a tiny office of the 2D Portal people, the room full of pipes, a room with three of the robot playable characters from Portal 2 (one that's your size, one tiny, one huge), one looking at a complex animated robot, and one where particles are constantly created a couple of feet in front of your face (thousands of serious DX11 compute particles with complex motion). All were very impressive; everyone I talked to agreed that the office full of Portal people was the most interesting: you really felt like a giant, and being able to bend down and hang out among them was very cool.

Needless to say, the experience in the HMD is amazing: low persistence, perfect tracking (within the camera of course), very high frame rate (they implored us to keep the jam games running at higher than 95 FPS). I don't get sim sickness with the DK1 as it is, but nonetheless felt much more comfortable in the Valve units. However, I did consistently have major disorientation after leaving the HMD: I felt a little fuzzy and distant, and once felt like I was going to fall over. I felt something similar the very first time I came out of the DK1, never since, but every time after leaving the Valve units (4 or 5 times).

Other details:

The HMD's are dual vertical S4 (OLED) screens, running a total of 2160x1280, with white IR-reflective dots on the shell. As you see in the pictures, the bottom ~half of the screen sticks out below the faceplate, so clearly you're only seeing about half of it.

This is not a change of plans from The Room (as I saw someone speculate in another thread) -- the Valve guys said that they each have one of these units on their desks for convenient VR testing, and then they load it up in the Room for primetime.

We used a Unity plugin from Valve which is interoperable with DK1, DK2 (apparently), and the Valve hardware. The biggest end-user difference between this plugin and the Oculus Unity plugin that my team experienced is that the Valve plugin creates the stereo camera setup at runtime, so attaching gameobjects to the camera / using its forward vector / etc is slightly less trivial.

No DK2's, or Oculus folks, to be had -- word on the grapevine is that they decided they couldn't afford the time off, as they're busting ass getting DK2 to the rest of us. :)

There's a Boston VR meetup tonight where people will be seeing the Valve hardware and jam games; we'll report back with any updates.

Update & Edit: /u/IMFROMSPACEMAN asked about how displaying the image across both screens works, so I asked the Valve guys, and they showed me this box that they made which, if I'm understanding it correctly, makes the image double wide and sends half to each screen. I'd like to point out how shockingly chill these guys are about posting stuff: I've asked for permission repeatedly, and they've been so chill that one of the guys literally lit that circuit board photo while the other held it so I could take that photo.

To be clear, the Dota 2 VR modes were mentioned as demos/experiments, not as confirmed things that they'll release. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it, being that they explicitly gave the social go-ahead for talking about and posting pictures of the hardware, but no such encouragement to spread news of content they're making (and I've as such removed that from the post... for what good that is now). Awesome as it would be... take it with a grain of salt please!
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and here's an article about it, which has the Dota 2 part before it got removed.

“[Valve] mentioned offhandedly that they have a Dota 2 VR experience where you see the entire game arena sitting on a table in front of you and can bend down to inspect any piece of the action,” said Jonomf. “They also mentioned a life-size Dota 2 VR experience where you’re hanging out in a lane watching the heroes fight; they said it was very scary.”
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pic from Gamespot said:
2548537-valvevr.jpg
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http://www.gamespot.com/articles/check-out-valve-s-polka-dotted-vr-headset/1100-6420057/

jam me if old
 
A

ashecitism

Member
From RoadtoVR

There are some more pictures posted on the meetup site:
http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Virtual-Reality/photos/22308592/371241132/?a=pu3.1_l#371241132
The wide angle shot was taken early in the evening and I’d say only about half the people that showed up were in that photo (I’m easy to spot).

Valve had 3 Prototypes at the event. There were somewhere between 10 and 12 demos made over the weekend at the game jam. I got to try out 2 of them. After trying the VRELIA dual 1080P HMD at SVVR, I was astonished at how light the Valve Prototype was. The first thing that came to mind both times I tried it was the weight (or lack there of). Shaking my head back and forth quickly resulted in absolutely no motion blur. I did not get a sense of presence, but I think that had to do with the demos that I tried. I’ve tried 9 different other VR & AR HMDs over the past two weeks and It’s hard to put into words, but after you try the Valve Prototype you think to yourself “yeah, this is how VR is supposed to be”.
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http://www.roadtovr.com/new-bits-new-valve-vr-headset-makes-appearance-boston-vr-bender/

You know, looking at that pic, I really want a Valve VR game led by Doug Church (or could be non-VR game too!)
 
C

ComputerMKII

Banned
With all the work and money that have been invested in VR, you'd think Valve would come up with something less amateur-looking that this bulky headset made out of scraps and duct tape
 
A

Adnor

Banned
ComputerMKII said:
With all the work and money that have been invested in VR, you'd think Valve would come up with something less amateur-looking that this bulky headset made out of scraps and duct tape
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It's just proof of concept, it isn't for costumers and they don't have investors to wow with shiny plastic cases.
 
D

Durante

Member
ComputerMKII said:
With all the work and money that have been invested in VR, you'd think Valve would come up with something less amateur-looking that this bulky headset made out of scraps and duct tape
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It's a research prototype, not a product. Looking polished is actually usually a negative thing in a research prototype, since the qualities required to achieve that run directly counter to what you want in a prototype. (E.g. a product needs to look sleek and ideally a single unbroken surface without obvious openings. A prototype should be easy to take apart and change)
 
C

ComputerMKII

Banned
Durante said:
It's a research prototype, not a product. Looking polished is actually usually a negative thing in a research prototype, since the qualities required to achieve that run directly counter to what you want in a prototype. (E.g. a product needs to look sleek and ideally a single unbroken surface without obvious openings. A prototype should be easy to take apart and change)
Click to expand...

Oh, OK. Makes sense. I guess Project Morpheus wasn't a prototype, then (or was it?)
 
A

ashecitism

Member
ComputerMKII said:
With all the work and money that have been invested in VR, you'd think Valve would come up with something less amateur-looking that this bulky headset made out of scraps and duct tape
Click to expand...

Huh? The very first sentences in the OP are about how these aren't for consumers, but research purposes. Who cares how prototypes look?
 
O

Orayn

Member
ComputerMKII said:
Oh, OK. Makes sense. I guess Project Morpheus wasn't a prototype, then (or was it?)
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The Morpheus headset we've seen so far is probably a prototype that's relatively far along, with a lot of attention paid to aesthetics. Sony most likely has their basic set of features pinned down a while before they decided to demo it publicly, so they had more time to spend on presentation.

Oculus prototypes and devkits have been uglier by comparison because the feature set is still evolving and the consumer version is still a ways off. And as Durante said, Valve doesn't have to care about aesthetics at all because they're only planning to use theirs internally.

syko de4d said:
TI 2015 stretch Goal should be a VR Spectatore Mode :D
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Oh shit. Set up virtual bleachers on the map, make people buy tickets for that!
 
A

ashecitism

Member
from that thread

Valve's HMD's were truly impressive. The position tracking was quite crisp, which made a big difference. Resolution was great. I also had an easier time focusing with my near-sighted eyes through their generic lenses than with the Oculus A-cups. Any optics geeks care to speculate why?

Their guy, Doug Church, said that they put the HMDs together from off-the-shelf components for $2500 each, but $1000 of that was for their tracking cameras, which they used only because they already had them. $100 or $200 cameras would do just as well. And no, they are not going to be in the business of selling VR gear.
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B

bj00rn_

Banned
ComputerMKII said:
Oh, OK. Makes sense. I guess Project Morpheus wasn't a prototype, then (or was it?)
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What we saw from Sony was a hybrid of prototype and design so to speak. Sony is a brand closely tied to design, and in context to an official announcement like they did with Morpheus they have no option but to care about how stuff is perceived from the get go. With Oculus it kinda is the opposite (although I'm sure they have plenty design (and ergonomic) plans in-house that they won't show us until CV1 announcement), and especially Valve who's just playing around and technology is the single only priority.
 
D

Durante

Member
ComputerMKII said:
Oh, OK. Makes sense. I guess Project Morpheus wasn't a prototype, then (or was it?)
Click to expand...
What they've shown was clearly built to be shown. They probably took the innards of their then-current prototype (which surely looked a lot more prototype-y) and put them into a fancy shell for showing it off.
 
Z

Zaptruder

Banned
The idea of seeing the entire DOTA 2 game board is so simple but so utterly damn awesome.

And will be a significant killer app for VR with the right control setup; providing dyed in the wool traditional gamers with an immediately intuitive understanding of the value that VR can provide all types of games, not just first person view games over traditional monitors.
 
C

ChrisG683

Member
Throw us a bone Valve and give us proper 3D rendering for Dota 2 :(. You've already got it working for VR, I imagine it can be applied to 3D as well.

Dota 1 and Starcraft 2 in 3D are amazing.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
Dolor said:
Does anyone not think HL3 is going to made for VR?
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Yes. Gabe Newell.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1zkfmv/wearea_videogame_developer_aua/cfuf5ft

Finally - and I guess you get that question a lot - I wanted to ask about the title that everyone is waiting for and that lends itself perfectly for a VR adaption, due to its way of storytelling, the open world as well as the puzzle elements: Ricochet 2. Did the long development time have anything to do with evolving technologies such as Virtual Reality? Are you planning to bring full VR support to future titles, such as Ricochet 2?
Click to expand...

We aren't holding any game until VR is shipping. You don't want to create that kind of dependency.
Click to expand...
 
O

Orayn

Member
The Dota 2's dual vertical displays create a resolution of 2160 x 1280 pixels, which is crisper than the Oculus Rift's 1920 x 1080. The reddit user tested Valve's official VR demos, one of which let you hang out in a room with the characters from popular first-person puzzler "Portal 2." His only complaint was some physical disorientation after taking the device off.
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The Reddit post notes that the Dota 2 is a prototype with no official release currently planned. However, with E3 right around the corner and the virtual reality space growing consistently (Not to mention Valve's SteamOS ecosystem), we're hoping Valve has more VR goodness up its sleeve for the future.
Click to expand...

#Dota2Headset
#OcculusChallenger
#VRGoodness
 
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