"We're still working on VR"

picture:valve

In an interview, Valve confirmed that it's still developing VR and hinted at the direction that journey might take.

Tested's Norman Chan recently spoke with two Valve employees about the newly announced Steam Deck OLED: hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat and product designer Lawrence Yang.

Chen asked how insights gained from developing Steam Deck could be applied to VR hardware, and Yang responded:

"A lot. Using APUs, miniaturizing computers. We don't have anything to announce today on the VR front, except that we're still working on VR and still advancing it. But just liking the Steam Deck is the result of learning a lot from Steam Controllers and Steam Link and VR, future products will continue to learn from everything we do and the same goes for Steam decks.”

Aldehayyat added the following:

"Obviously, there's a lot of overlapping technology that we can reuse. For example, wireless streaming is very suitable for VR. This benefits us a lot." The Steam Deck can also improve the wireless streaming experience. But that's just building relationships with component suppliers and other hardware partners. The Steam Deck team and the VR team work together, so there's a lot of ideas, parts, and technology. "

In 2022, Valve CEO Gabe Newell also hinted that Steam Deck may affect Valve's next-generation VR hardware.

Valve takes long-term hiatus from VR

Valve's last piece of VR hardware, the Valve Index, was released in 2019, with Half-Life: Alyx released the following year. Since then, nothing major has happened in the VR direction, probably also due to the fact that Steam Deck has attracted most of Valve's attention.

But there have been signs for some time that Valve is developing a wireless VR headset that can stream content from a PC or be used as a standalone device, using a built-in chip similar to VR. Steam Deck. A job posting for late 2022 says Valve wants to "take the next step in VR" and "reach millions of customers around the world," and it recently released SteamVR 2.0, a much-needed interface update for Valve's PC VR platform.

For a company like Valve, which has amassed a lot of VR expertise and operates a large VR platform, it stands to reason that research into virtual reality is continuing in some form. The question, of course, is when the new VR headsets and software will be released. As we all know, Valve takes time.

In their statement, employees hinted at the direction the upcoming headset might take, confirming previous rumors: a Steam Deck, which could have an integrated APU to render PC VR games as a standalone device, or via Altitude Optimized wireless solution for streaming games from PC. A number of Valve patents also support this idea.

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