Valve is moving beyond evaluation prototypes of its Knuckles tracked handheld controllers and onto developer kits “with improvements to cap sense, trigger feel, and more.”
The new controllers have been in development for some time from privately-owned Valve, which is based in Bellevue, Washington. The engineers at Valve are the folks responsible for the key tracking technology used in the HTC Vive. They are also developing their own head-mounted display and, with these controllers, could offer new ways of using your hands in a virtual space. The controllers strap to your hands and allow for realistic grasping and release sensations with capacitive sensors meant to track finger movements.
“While we have Knuckles DV kits available in quantity, we will be unable to fulfill all requests,” a post outlining the new kit explains. “The team will hold on to dev-kit requests and developer information for any future releases.”
Among the improvements listed by Valve with these latest controllers::
Cap Sense
Capacitive sensors have been rearranged to accommodate more hand sizes
Firmware has been updated to take advantage of the new sensors
Trigger
Trigger spring strength increased
Trigger click feel improved
Strap
Increased durability of strap adjustment connector
Strap adjust feel improved
Firmware
Fast charging improved
Fixed pairing bugs
Improved stability
Other
Thumbstick feel improved
Force sensor variation reduced
LED light leakage minimized
Improved fit and finish
Improved reliability
We’ll of course bring you the latest as developers start to share their impressions of these new controllers.
In case you hadn’t heard, we’ve got confirmation from multiple sources that not only is Valve working on its very own VR headset, but the headset is also expected to come bundled with a Half-Life VR game. Reportedly, this game will be a prequel story either before or immediately after Half-Life 2.
Today, November 19th, is the 20th anniversary of the original Half-Life. Around the world, Half-Life is widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all-time. Back when it first released in 1998 on PC, it set a new precedent for first-person shooters and narrative-driven games as a whole. Before then, the likes of DOOM and Quake had popularized corridor shooters overflowing with gore and enemies with little to no story, but after Half-Life everything changed.
In the above video, YouTuber Ahoy breaks down exactly what made the original game so revolutionary for its time. Furthermore, if you want to see someone play it with a fresh perspective (that’s right, I’ve never finished a single Half-Life game) you can join me for my planned Let’s Play series over on my personal YouTube and Twitch as well.
But now let’s go to it! These are the main five reasons that we think Half-Life is a perfect fit for VR and why we can’t wait to learn more about this new game.
Focus On Atmosphere
In an uncharacteristic move for the time, the original Half-Life opened with a scripted trolly ride in which you stand there, watch environments pass by, and listen to voiceovers as you saw the opening credits on your screen, a lot like you’d see in a movie. It was slow-paced and deliberately atmospheric. VR games are always at their best when they’re designed with those sorts of themes in mind.
Without much surprise, Half-Life feels like the kind of series that would transition over to VR incredibly naturally. Whereas some games like Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR feel a little hamfisted, a Half-Life adaptation could feel incredibly bespoke and organic, especially if it’s being designed with VR in mind first and foremost.
Familiar World
If you take a look at many of the top-selling and best-performing VR games over the last two and a half years of consumer VR, you can clearly see that familiar IPs tend to do well. That’s why Bethesda adapted the worlds of Skyrim, Fallout, and DOOM instead of crafting brand new experiences and investing tons of extra capital.
Similarly, Half-Life’s world is regarded as one of the most treasured and well-known in PC gaming. Not only for the main series, but even branching out into the Portal universe as well. I’d be willing to bet that a Half-Life VR game would be a persuasive argument in favor of buying a VR headset, especially if it came directly from Valve.
Agency in the Experience
Gordon Freeman might be a well-known and recognizable protagonist now, 20 years after Half-Life first came out, but back then he was anything but iconic. Other than the main menu and box art, you never really see his face and he never once speaks. But instead of just being a vessel for destruction like in most other shooters, he still feels like a real character.
Half-Life did a great job of transferring that agency onto the player directly. When you interact with scientists, swing your crowbar, and gun down security guards it feels like a world that you are really exploring.
Great Storytelling
There are no cutscenes in Half-Life, at least not in the traditional sense. This goes back to the point about player agency, as you are always in control. But with that being said, it’s a strictly linear game with a curated story that’s meant to be experiences beat for beat the same way every time. And it’s fantastic.
Things start out slowly, but it’s a real roller coaster ride. And while it looks extremely dated by today’s standards, Half-Life and its sequel really did set the bar for storytelling in first-person action games. Its influences can still be seen today.
Modding Potential
Finally, this reason is less tangible in the game itself, but it would be a massive oversight to not mention the modding community that surrounds the various Half-Life releases. From official spin-offs like Counter-Strike, to popular user-made mods and endless iterations on the games, the Half-Life series attracts serious talent from the player base.
While a handful of VR titles have embraced the modding community, such as Pavlov VR, Beat Saber, and Skyrim VR, it’s not as common as early 2000s PC gaming modders. With a new Half-Life title focused squarely on VR, that could usher in a new era of excited modding talent.
Images of a prototype VR headset with a Valve logo visible on the circuit board leaked on the image sharing website imgur. Our independent sources tell us these are in fact prototypes for an upcoming Valve HMD.
We’ve also heard the field of view will be 135° with “Vive Pro resolution.” It may also come bundled with ‘Knuckles’ controllers as well as a Half-Life based VR game that could be a prequel rather than the much-anticipated Half-Life 3.
Valve currently does not sell a VR headset. Instead, the company partnered with HTC to release the Vive in 2016, and then HTC released the higher end ‘Vive Pro’ earlier this year. Releasing its own headset would be a major shift in Valve’s strategy for VR, but the company previously shipped the Steam Controller and Steam Link devices — so it wouldn’t be unheard of for the privately held company to build and ship its own hardware.
The leaked Valve headset features what appear to be SteamVR tracking photodiodes under the plastic (similar to how Oculus hides IR LEDs under the Rift). It also has 2 cameras visible and integrated headphones. The padding on the back appears to be similar to the padding on Valve’s Knuckles controllers prototypes.
Looks like a Leap Motion sensor could fit on the front faceplate of this Valve HMD prototype.
A 135° field of view with Vive Pro resolution panels should result in roughly the same angular resolution as the current HTC Vive. This may indicate that Valve is betting that increasing field of view is a greater priority than increasing angular resolution. We don’t see any indication these headsets could include eye-tracking, so Valve will have to use methods other than foveated rendering — likely software-based — if the company plans for this headset to work on the same class of PCs as the original Vive.
Valve’s latest version of VR hand controller currently known by the name “Knuckles.”
If this headset comes to market next year, it could be direct competition for the “Rift S” headset Techcrunch reported Oculus is planning. The clock on the monitor in the image suggests these photos are from July, meaning there has likely been progress made since these prototypes.
We’ll keep you updated on any further news of Valve’s VR headset. We also reached out to Valve to see if Gabe Newell might be available to comment on Valve’s direction with PC VR, or if we might be able to test the Knuckles controllers so that we can help communicate with developers and early adopters what the new controllers add to VR input.
Images of a prototype VR headset with a Valve logo visible on the circuit board have leaked on the image sharing website imgur. The images are unverified, but the detail and number of headsets shown make it likely to be authentic.
Valve currently does not sell a VR headset. Instead, the company has partnered with HTC to release the Vive in 2016, and then the higher end ‘Vive Pro’ earlier this year.
The leaked headset features what appear to be SteamVR tracking photodiodes under the plastic (similar to how Oculus hides IR LEDs under the Rift). It also has 2 cameras visible and integrated headphones. The padding on the back is visually similar to the padding on Valve’s “Knuckles” controllers prototypes.
The lenses appear to be larger than those of the HTC Vive, which likely indicates a larger field of view. Given that a larger field of view means lower angular resolution, this headset may have a higher resolution display too.
It’s important to note that we have no context for what this heasdset is. It could be an internal prototyping testbed, or a reference design for manufacturers (like HTC) to follow for future headsets. But the more tantalizing possibility, that we know you’re already thinking, is that this could be a prototype for a future headset from Valve itself. If so, the company could be planning to release it alongside its “Knuckles” controllers next year – which could be direct competition for the “Rift S” headset that Techcrunch reported Oculus is planning.
According to our independent sources this is in fact a Valve HMD. We’ve also heard the field of view will be 135 degrees with the Vive Pro resolution and it should come bundled with Knuckles controllers as well as a Half-Life based VR game.
The clock on the monitor in the main image suggests that these photos are from July. Whatever this is, it’s likely much further along today than it was back then. We’ll keep you updated on any further hints of a VR headset from Valve.
China-based VR company Pimax recently put up a listing on its website for upcoming controllers for its “5K Plus” and “8K” PC headsets. Pimax plans to ship them sometime next year paired with base stations for $300.
In its 2017 Kickstarter for the “8K” ultra-wide FoV VR headset, Pimax promised simple VR controllers for $200 extra, with buttons, a thumbstick, and trigger, however the ergonomics did not seem to match more advanced VR controllers like Oculus’ Touch and Valve’s “Knuckles” prototypes.
Pimax original controllers from the Kickstarter.
In April of this year, Pimax scrapped its old controller design and revealed new ones, seemingly based on Valve’s early “Knuckles” prototypes of the time. The new controller promised an ergonomic design and is strapped onto the user’s hand directly, letting them open their hands and throw objects naturally, as well as a grip button and capacitive finger position detection.
Valve’s early “Knuckles” design.
With the recent store listing, Pimax has now refined its design. While they should have input parity with HTC’s Vive wands, the lack of a thumbstick may put some potential buyers off, and may be missed in a future where Oculus Touch and “Knuckles” could dominate the PC VR install base.
This animation shows the Pimax controllers compared to Valve’s latest “Knuckles” design. While Valve made significant changes to “Knuckles”, adding a thumbstick and 2 buttons as well as changing the trackpad into a “track button”, Pimax kept with the same basic design as the earlier “Knuckles” prototypes. It is possible Pimax chose not to emulate Valve with the final design simply because the controllers were too far along in development, or because they prefer this iteration. We reached out to Pimax to ask about the inspiration for the controllers but we didn’t hear back.
UPDATE Nov 27th: Motion Smoothing has now graduated from Beta to Stable – now available for all HTC Vive users
One of the Oculus Rift’s most helpful features is Asynchronous SpaceWarp (ASW), first introduced in late 2016. HTC Vive owners have been asking Valve, which makes the software for the HTC Vive, for an equivalent. A new feature in SteamVR called ‘Motion Smoothing’ looks like it could be the answer.
Motion Smoothing works very much like ASW. When you’re not meeting (or near) 90FPS in VR, Motion Smoothing will kick in automatically. Motion Smoothing will force the running game/app to render at 45FPS, then generate a synthetic frame in between each real frame, extrapolating from image and the headset tracking data for a total of 90FPS. Half the frames will be “real” and half “synthetic”. Whenever your graphics card has enough free resources to achieve 90FPS normally, Motion Smoothing will automatically disengage and you will return to true 90FPS.
While Motion Smoothing appears to be a direct equivalent to Oculus’ ASW 1.0, Oculus recently announced ASW 2.0, which promises to reduce the kind of artifacts that can be seen by only using the color buffer by also using the depth buffer, which apps can send to the Oculus software. Valve have not indicated whether they are going to add this extra layer in Motion Smoothing.
Motion Smoothing should allow lower end systems to use the HTC Vive, and for higher end systems to better run demanding games like simulators in which framerate can fall even on the strongest of PCs. When Oculus introduced ASW they added a new “minimum specification” for the computer needed to run the Rift, allowing GPUs like the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 960, but it is not yet known whether HTC will make a similar move now that Motion Smoothing is out of beta.
The fact that Valve hasn’t created official VR ports of Portal and Portal 2 is one of the greatest travesties of modern virtual reality technology. If any existing IP would be a perfect fit, it would be Portal. There is a Portal 2 mod called Portal Stories: VR that does a decent job of replicating environments and the overall tongue-in-cheek tone, but it lacks one important thing: portals. That’s a pretty glaring missing feature.
Thankfully the intrepid modding community is doing their part to help keep dreams alive. Over the weekend Reddit user Tesseract-Cat posted in the HTC Vive subreddit that they were “working on a Portal clone in Unity for VR” with GIFs and images to show off the work so far. In the footage you can see the developer is using a Windows VR headset and it’s stated to be running in Unity.
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).
The next iteration of Valve’s Knuckles VR controllers are now arriving on developer’s doorsteps, and Climbey developer Brian Lindenhof is providing his typically dependable first look at them.
Lindenhof, who also gave us a glimpse of earlier Knuckles controllers being used to play Lone Echo and Fallout 4, yesterday posted the below video unboxing the latest edition of the devices. EV3 isn’t looking like a massive update over the last version of the devices (Lindenhof even describes them as “really close to EV2”), but it is shipping out to many more developers than the last batch.
Lindehoff goes over the minute changes to the device, summing them up as “good improvements but very minor”. Stick around to see them compared to other VR controllers like Oculus Touch and the Vive wands.
As for when Knuckles will actually release as a product? We still don’t have much of an idea, sadly, though we wouldn’t bet on it being in 2018.
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.
![HTC Vive Gets ASW-Like ‘Motion Smoothing’ For Low Specification PCs [Updated]](https://i0.wp.com/uploadvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/steamvr-motion-smoothing-16x8.png?resize=525%2C252&ssl=1 "steamvr-motion-smoothing")
