Valve’s CEO Confirmed Work On New Headsets Back In May – UploadVR

Valve CEO Gabe Newell made some comments back in May that went unnoticed until recently, confirming work on new headsets and games at Valve.

Newell gave a talk at the Sancta Maria College in New Zealand and fielded some questions from students. The talk was recorded and uploaded online, but the comments about new headsets only gained attention recently when YouTuber Brad Lynch reposted a clip from a recording to Twitter, embedded below.

His comments came in response to a question asking whether Newell thinks VR/AR technology will ever become a staple of the gaming industry.

Newell confirms that Valve is making big investments in new headsets and games but also feels that VR/AR is a stepping stone toward brain-computer interfaces.

Heres his full response, transcribed from around the 14:00 mark of this video:

There are interesting questions, which is: are things sort of stable end goals or are they transition points? My view, which is not in the accepted sort of middle ground, is that VR and AR are transition points towards brain-computer interfaces. That everything you have to do in terms of control speeds, in terms of understanding visual processing, in terms of content design, are leading you towards brain-computer interfaces and what they do.

So thats the main thing, and then I think brain-computer interfaces are going to be incredibly disruptive, one of the more disruptive technology transitions that were going to go through.

So I think its super valuable. You know, were making big investments in new headsets and games for those application categories, but also looking further down the road and saying what does that evolve into.

Back in September, Lynch also found evidence of a standalone VR headset in development at Valve, referred to as Deckard in SteamVR driver files. Sources at Ars Technica corroborated the headsets existence.

Newell also previously said Valve was exploring work with OpenBCI to solve VR motion sickness. If you sign up for the newsletter on the OpenBCI website for its upcoming Galea interface, the organization promises to ship an initial production run to testing partners in early 2022 fully integrated with the Valve Index, offering image-based eye tracking as well as sensors for EEG, EDA, EMG, PPG, EOG and access to raw data from the BrainFlow application programming interface.

Were working on an open source project so that everybody can have high-resolution [brain signal] read technologies built into headsets, in a bunch of different modalities, Newell said previously. If youre a software developer in 2022 who doesnt have one of these in your test lab, youre making a silly mistakesoftware developers for interactive experience[s] youll be absolutely using one of these modified VR head straps to be doing that routinely simply because theres too much useful data.

Valves current focus is seemingly locked on the Steam Deck for now and the foreseeable future, but new VR headsets are in the offing from other companies and additional sensors seem to be planned for competing high end systems. The HP Reverb G2 currently comes in an Omnicept edition with additional sensors and Meta is preparing a sensor-laden headset currently going by the codename Cambria for next year as Apple prepares its own sensor-filled VR headset for potential launch soon.

Valve shipped the high-end Index PC-powered VR headset starting in 2019 and it is in use by around 17 percent of SteamVR users as of this month. Prior to launching Index, Valve reportedly explored a Vader headset project that sort of maxed everything and wouldve cost the thousands of dollars to buy even if it had somehow been manufacturable.

Well be interested to see what sensors actually do make it into the next generation VR headsets given the difficult reality of securing key components and manufacturing millions of VR headsets amid ongoing developments with the pandemic as well as continuous supply chain challenges.

What are you thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.

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Valve's CEO Confirmed Work On New Headsets Back In May - UploadVR