Category: Steam Dev Days

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Valve: No Steam Dev Days in 2017 “and not very likely for 2018”

Valve’s ‘no press allowed’ dev conference, Steam Dev Days, is seeing the ax this year, and it seems next year doesn’t look any better.

According to a tweet by Valve Marketing and Business Development team member Tom Giardino, Steam Dev Days is definitely not happening this year.

This isn’t the first Steam Dev Days Valve has decided to skip though, so we’re hoping this isn’t the end of the conference as we know it. Valve famously skipped 2015’s Dev Days, which was one year after the conference’s inauguration and first showing of Valve’s VR headset prototype. Had Dev Days 2015 taken place, it would have come only a few months after Valve unveiled its first version of the HTC Vive.

Image courtesy Cloudhead Games

Last year’s Steam Dev Days saw a new controller prototype, Knuckles, that has since shipped out to select VR developers, but still isn’t in the hands of consumers.

A second-generation Lighthouse basestation was also teased last year, which is planned to work with newer devices VR headsets. Valve has said the hardware will be lighter, quieter, cheaper, more reliable, and require less power, but won’t work with current HTC Vive headsets on the market now. The improved 2.0 basestations are said to ship in “production quantities” in November 2017.

Valve is typically low-key when it comes to announcing these sorts of hardware updates, and very rarely uses Dev Days like it might with consumer-driven conferences. The lack of a Dev Days doesn’t mean the company isn’t interested in engaging the dev community, it just may mean they don’t have any substantial updates, VR or otherwise, to show developers at this time.

The post Valve: No Steam Dev Days in 2017 “and not very likely for 2018” appeared first on Road to VR.

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Valve Says No Steam Developer Days in 2017

Many developers have derived much benefits from Valve’s semi-regular events, the Steam Dev Days Conferences. As such, many developers will be disappointed to hear news that Valve are not planning any of the events for 2017.

Tom Giardino of Valve revealed on Twitter that there are no plans for a Steam Dev Days event during 2017, and is also unlikely for 2018. Giardino did ask Twitter what sort of things people would like to see at future Valve events.

Discussion in the replies to this question was lively, with several users expressing interest in hearing more about the Steam controller and its development, others were interested in a different controller, wanting updates on the current status of the HTC Vive Knuckles controllers, or asking for updates on projects discussed at previous Steam Dev Days events, such as an unknown VR project Valve’s Greg Coomer was said to be working on.

Known for covering a broad variety of subjects, covering areas such as virtual reality (VR), server hosting and maintenance, videogame development and other areas. The events are known to be places where Valve showcases projects in-progress, or teases upcoming products and videogame titles. The November 2016 event was recorded, with the videos later released for perusal by the general public, with 25 videos available to view, including several covering VR-related topics.

VRFocus will bring you further updates on Steam Dev Days as it becomes available.

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SteamVR to Get Linux and Mac OSX Support Within “a Few Months”

Valve is planning to introduce beta versions of its SteamVR platform for Mac OSX and Linux users within a few months.

One thing’s for sure, if you’re a PC user wanting to indulge in a spot of immersive entertainment right now, the choice of operating systems on which you can do so are mostly limited to just one. Windows dominates the VR PC landscape right now and that looks set to continue for a while longer. However, Valve will soon move to encourage a diminishing of that monopoly, as it plans to bring SteamVR – the company’s Steam-integrated VR platform – to both Linux and Mac OSX platforms within the next few months.

The initiative was revealed by Valve’s Joe Ludwig during a talk at this year’s developer-focused Steam Dev Days event in Seattle last month. During the talk, Ludwig outlined the company’s view that VR should be as open to innovation as possible, touting the benefits for the long term evolution of virtual reality and how Valve, with OpenVR, are trying to keep what Ludwig calls platform “gatekeepers” from (as they see it) stifling progression in the VR space. Additionally, Ludwig stated that it’s been listening to developer and user feedback during SteamVR‘s first year in consumer hands, and says that they’ve heard clearly that a version of SteamVR is wanted on other operating systems.

Ludwig presented a screenshot (seen at the top of this article) of SteamVR running on Linux (distribution undefined), powered by the open source graphics API Vulkan, in turn powering an HTC Vive VR headset. Ludwig goes on to say that “we’re actively working on support for both OSX and Linux and we hope to get support for both of them into a beta in the next few months.”

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This is news that will likely delight both open source operating system enthusiasts, Apple fans and Windows detractors alike. However, be aware that although even when these SteamVR OSX and Linux betas drop, application support for those operating systems are still limited. The vast majority of applications that integrate SteamVR right now, are rendered using the Microsoft DirectX APIs – these as you might expect are exclusive to Windows operating systems. In order for a game to run on an OS other than Windows, the game needs to support a graphics API, such as OpenGL and its successor Vulkan. Those games are limited in number right now, although Valve’s move to open up the possibilities for companies to offer versions of their titles to run on other platforms, may now encourage others to emerge.

The debate on the relative benefits of open platforms versus proprietary will rage on of course, but if you’re interested in Valve’s view of the VR landscape both now and in the future, take 20 mins to watch Ludwig’s presentation (embedded above) as it clears up some long standing confusion on just how ‘open’ OpenVR and it’s required SteamVR runtime components are.

In the mean time, Oculus have gone on record stating that any plans for Mac OSX support are “on hold” and the company’s founder has voiced vocally his reservations about the platform, namely Apple’s hardware lineup and its ability to meet the demanding rigours of rendering virtual reality applications.

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SteamVR to Get Linux and Mac OSX Support Within "a Few Months"
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All the Steam Dev Days Conference Videos Are Now Available

Last month Valve held its Steam Dev Days conference, aimed at developers worldwide who publish titles on the platform. The event saw Epic Games’ CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney give a keynote address and Valve showcasing prototype controllers for virtual reality (VR). The two day conference featured a variety of sessions covering VR, videogame development, server hosting and much more. Now all the videos from the talks have been released.

None of the talks were live-streamed so this is the first time the entire event will be viewable by the public.

  • There’s loads of VR specific sessions to watch including:
  • Philosophy of VR –  Presented by Joe Ludwig from Valve
  • The Future of VR and Games – Presented by Tim Sweeney
  • SteamVR Hardware – Presented by Ben Jackson from Valve
  • Unity Development for VR Presented by Corey Johnson from Unity Technologies –
  • VR Developer Panel – Panelists: Brandon Laatsch from Stress Level Zero, Sarah Northway from Northway Games, Dylan Fitterer from Audiosurf, and Dirk Van Welden from I-Illusions.Moderated by Chet Faliszek from Valve
  • UE4 Development + Shipping an UE4 VR Game – Presented by Wes Bunn from Epic, Steve Bowler and Jeremy Chapman from CloudGate

There are 25 videos in total averaging around an hour each. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Steam and Valve, reporting back with any new updates.

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SteamVR Tracking Courses Begin, Already Completed by 50 Developers

Valve opened up their SteamVR tracking technology for third-party development in August, and since then, 50 developers have completed the mandatory training course provided by Synapse, the first company to enter the field.

Synapse says that most of the participants have been interested in gaming specifically, but some have expressed interest in applying the technology to the automotive industry, science, sports, education, and general consumer electronics.

Synapse has received more registrations for the training course than originally anticipated, so they’ve added additional slots for the course in November and December. A representative for Synapse said that there are currently no plans to continue the course past December, so interested developers should sign-up as soon as possible to get in the remaining classes.

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Valve: 300 Companies Already Planning to Use SteamVR Tracking Tech

Synapse will also be presenting a compressed version of their training course at SXSW as part of the VR/AR track in March of 2017.

synapse-stemvr-lighthouse-training-course-100012

At Valve’s annual Steam Dev Days event earlier this month, the company laid heavy emphasis on making their Lighthouse room-scale tracking technology available to companies wishing to integrate it into 3rd party products. Valve stated that claiming that those 300 licensees span multiple industries ranging from “entertainment VR to automotive to televisions and toys.” Further, Valve says we can look forward to seeing many of these products appear in 2017.

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Shortly after the announcement that the SteamVR Tracking technology would finally begin to open up to third-parties, semiconductor firm Triad Semiconductor announced that it was collaborating with Valve to create the ‘light to digital’ chips that form an important foundation of the sensors and make the impressively accurate tracking and which Valve recommends for use in products integrating SteamVR Tracking.

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Steam to Get High Quality Adaptive 360 Video Streaming Service

360 video is coming to Steam and it looks as if Valve are aiming high in terms of the quality they’re aiming to deliver to consumer VR headsets.

There’s an op-ed piece I’ve been meaning to write for some time around the current technical state of play with regards to 360 video. Leaving aside the contentious (and ultimately pointless) debate over whether immersive video content counts as ‘real’ virtual reality – despite all of the format’s technical limitations, I think it has significant potential.

However, after years of writing about so-called groundbreaking 360 camera rigs and the rise of numerous so-called groundbreaking VR video startups, there is still not a single way to consume 360 video on your VR headset at the level of quality which I think would allow that potential to blossom. Not to put too fine a point on it, 360 video quality sucks right now and it’s time for the companies who have planted their flag on this particular patch of VR frontier land to step up and deliver on the promise.

Enter Valve, stage left.

At last week’s Steam Dev Days event, Valve revealed that it was to bring its own solution for the delivery of immersive video content to its content portal Steam. It’s partnering with video streaming specialists Pixvana and Akamai to deliver an adaptive 360 video streaming system that’s capable of delivering what it claims to be 8k-10k resolution video quality via the same bandwidth as a 1080p stream.

steam-dev-days-360-streaming-pixvana

“But that’s impossible!” you may be exclaiming, and you’d be right. Pixvana’s technology uses adaptive bitrates for video delivery, depending on the user’s direction of gaze. In other words, it drops the quality of the video stream for the angles you’re not currently looking at. Turn your head to look at a segment and the bitrate is upped to deliver a much higher quality image. This is how the technology achieves the “10k over 1080p bandwidth” claim – and it’s an interesting approach, one which Facebook and others are exploring too.

pixvana-spinplayer-1 pixvana-spinplayer-2 pixvana-spinplayer-6

The system is called FOVAS, short for Field of View Adaptive Streaming, and was developed by Pixvana and is encapsulated in its Open Projection Format, a way to facilitate the above adaptive streaming techniques using existing video compression standards (i.e. AVC / H.264).

fovas-1

You can already get a taste for what Valve’s 360 video service will look like too as Pixvana released a technology preview app onto Steam a couple of weeks ago. I took a look myself to see how the quality claims held up. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Indeed, the looping video clips demonstrated very good detail and a refreshing lack of compression artefacts. Once you turn your head to look at another angle, the compressed video outside of your previous viewport was then clearly pixelated and poor in quality before the system upped the bitrate and resolution again with the image becoming pleasingly detailed again. The transition is sudden however and a little jarring, but once it had transitioned there was no doubting it’s one of the best quality streaming VR video I’ve yet seen.

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Pixvana Reveals 10K VR Video Player and Publishing Platform 'SPIN'

It’s early days for the application of course, but if Valve’s implementation of the technology can smooth out and quicken those transitions, we may finally see the viable delivery mechanism for high quality VR videos I’ve been searching for. As to when Valve’s 360 streaming will come online, it’s not yet clear. As no press was allowed at the Steam Dev Days event we were unable to glean any more details. We’ll of course update you of we learn anything further.

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Impressions on Valve’s New VR Controller Prototype from Cloudhead’s Denny Unger

denny_headshot-200x200Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They’ve created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close your hands to mimic the feeling of grabbing a tangible object. They used a modified scene from The Gallery, Episode 1 demo to show off this new controller, and I had a chance to Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director Denny Unger about it at the VR on the Lot conference. We talked about the Valve’s new input controller prototype, the growing ecosystem of lighthouse-tracked peripherals, his thoughts on the future of non-linear narrative, and an update about The Gallery, which recently won best narrative VR experience at the Proto Awards and has surpassed $1 million in sales.

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Valve Showcases Prototype Controllers at Steam Dev Days

Over the course of today and tomorrow Valve is hosting its Steam Dev Days event, open to any Steam developer. News has been filtering out from the conference with one of the most interesting being a prototype virtual reality (VR) controller.

Several images have been tweeted by Twitter user @downtohoerth that showcase the new two part design. The controller has a section that goes around the back of the hand which is then attached to a small palm sized unit with a directional pad and a trigger. The devices are said to have 21 sensors, presumably for tracking, but one interesting piece of info is that the controllers can detect grabbing motions, thus enabling users to pick up virtual objects with much more realism. This also allows objects to be thrown without actually throwing – and damaging – the device.

The images certainly show a very rough and ready prototype, with few other details being released, certainly nothing from Valve just yet. But the design does show a morphing of traditional controller design with that of VR and data gloves, such as Manus VR, whereby allowing users to interact with virtual worlds in new immersive ways.

As and when further details are revealed to these new prototypes, VRFocus will let you know.