SteamVR Home - Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 25, 2018

SteamVR Home Gets A Candy Emporium For Halloween

SteamVR Home has another brand new environment to explore just in time for Halloween, though it’s not quite what you’d expect.

Valve this week launched the Candy Emporium onto its VR hub, free from the usual spooky holiday decorations. The company wrote in a release blog: “That’s right, it’s perfectly normal – just your regular old candy shop with candy and cupcakes – which just happens to be closed right now… On a perfectly normal dark and stormy night…”

As always, you can expect some easter eggs to be hidden around the shop as you explore. As with other recent environments, Valve is also releasing this one as an Asset Pack for others to fiddle with. A SteamVR update adds collectibles for the environment, too.

SteamVR’s Home environments have always made for fun VR getaways before and after jumping into other worlds. As great as it is to see Valve delivering new VR content, though, we’d sure like to find out where those Knuckles controllers are at.

Tagged with: SteamVR Home

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October 4, 2018

Valve Improves SteamVR Spectator Mode, Adds New Home Environment

Valve’s SteamVR Home platform is rolling out another environment for you to make yourself cozy in. Meet the Gulping Goat space farm.

That may be the most Valve sentence anyone has ever written. Anyway, this colorful new environment is now yours to explore. It features robot farmers lazily tending to alien crops, which we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t eat. As always, there’s an asset pack for the new environment that will allow you to incorporate its materials for your own creations. It joins the supervillain layer environment Valve introduced earlier this year.

Perhaps more importantly, this new environment is joined by a host of new tweaks to the SteamVR beta. This includes a new mirror window mode that Valve has named ‘Center View’. According to the company it “maximizes the view for any window size inside the hidden area mesh (the black area of pixels at the periphery)” and is designed for improving the spectator experience so that those outside of VR can see more of what the person inside VR is looking at.

Elsewhere there’s a new mini performance graph for developers to utilize both in and out of the headset and a whole host of smaller tweaks to numerous to recount here (the full changelog is over here).

This is great and everything but, really, Valve, where the heck at those three VR games you promised us nearly two years ago now?

Tagged with: SteamVR, SteamVR Home, valve

July 27, 2018

SteamVR Home Gets New Maps And More In Fresh Update

SteamVR Home is getting yet more fun stuff to play with this week.

Valve just introduced another update for its VR hub world which brings in new locations and assets to decorate them with. You can now explore a supervillain’s lair with friends, solving puzzles and unlocking secret rooms and new collectibles from one of the developer’s most beloved games, Team Fortress 2. Valve has also changed up the Summit Pavilion location with some new additions that allow you to customize how your personal space looks even further.

Expanding on that customization even further, Valve is also introducing asset packs. These allow creators to share assets they’ve made like models and textures with other creators so they can expand their own resources for making environments.

Elsewhere there are some small adjustments, like a reorganized community wall, a new category for free VR apps and resizable panels.

It’s interesting to see Valve expand SteamVR Home with this strand of novel, adventurous content to expand what friends can do while Oculus doubles down on expanding customization within its smaller Oculus Home spaces. We’re fans of both approaches, but we certainly like how Valve’s efforts including features like SteamVR Collectibles cater to the gamers in all of us.

Tagged with: SteamVR Home, valve

The post SteamVR Home Gets New Maps And More In Fresh Update appeared first on UploadVR.

May 19, 2017

SteamVR Home Beta Adds Social Features In Major Update

SteamVR is an essential platform for virtual reality and, starting today, exploring it is about to get a whole lot better.

In a community post published today, Valve Software is announcing a major update that will vastly improve the way users can interact with VR content and friends. SteamVR Home is the name of a new beta program that will bring a wealth of new options to users including new environments, avatars and social capabilities.

According to Valve:

“Today we are updating SteamVR with a new home experience that is richer, more interactive, and more social than the existing launch area. SteamVR Home is currently in beta and will appear for everyone who opts in to SteamVR Beta…

We’ve also heard loud and clear that creators want the ability to make more detailed home environments, with sound, animation, interaction, and social elements. All of these features and more are now available with the new SteamVR Home update.”

Environments are the first thing getting a major makeover in SteamVR Home. The sterile background and basic menus of the previous iteration will be replaced by spaces that “can now be higher resolution and support animation, sound, games, and interactivity.”

New environments can be made by users inside the SteamVR Workshop.

You’ll also now have the ability to create a personal avatar from a selection of pre-loaded pieces and parts. You can “choose your avatar’s head and accessorize it with wearables and props. Additional avatars and wearables can be found by completing quests in other SteamVR environments.”

Invite Friends To Your Virtual Home In Steam

VR social interactions will also be possible with your Steam friends for the first time:

SteamVR Home has social functions built in, making it easier than ever to connect to friends and other players. Invite friends to join you in your home space, or open any environment up to friends or the public. Voice chat with other players, interact with tools and props, and explore different SteamVR environments with others.

Lastly, this all may look familiar to longtime SteamVR users. This is because the entire thing is essentially an updated version of another SteamVR application: Destinations. Valve explained the future of Destinations in a separate posting which states that:

“The short of it is that we are building the core functionality of Destinations into SteamVR as SteamVR Home (Beta). This means that richer environments, props, tools, multiplayer, and avatars will be available to all players by default…Once this update is out of SteamVR Beta the Destinations application will no longer be updated.”

Tagged with: SteamVR, SteamVR Home