During this evening’s AMA with Valve’s Gabe Newell, he confirmed their future commitment to VR.
When asked about the current direction at Valve, and what he was personally interested in, Newell responded:
“The big thing right now is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences. We think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as we’re designing our own VR games.
“Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kinds of areas where machine learning should work well.
“Personally I’m looking at research in brain-computer interfaces.”
There’s definitely attention being paid to the VR movement at Valve with Newell responding to a question regarding the possibility of the studio releasing a full game for VR. He said, “Yes. We think VR is pretty important as a tool for interesting games.”
While the Lab was a small taste of what Valve could create in VR, it was just a few small demo games for the Vive. Let’s hope Newell does push the team to release a full Valve VR game, we’d like to see what they could create.
As for Gabe hooking directly into our brains, that could be some way off.
