Valve-produced virtual reality headset not likely to see release

Half-Life and Portal creator Valve has no plans to release its own virtual reality headset, the company's wearable computing designer Michael Abrash said this week during the Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle. The event is open only to developers, but slides of Abrash's presentation were made available from attendee Dave Oshry.

Killing Floor developer Tripwire Interactive game designer David Hensley said he received a demonstration of Valve's own virtual reality headset and remarked, "It's going to be hard to go back to my Oculus Rift dev kit after experiencing Valve's VR demo. Kinda like playing an xbox then 8bit Nintendo."

Although this Valve-produced VR headset isn't likely to be released publicly, the company remains interested in the VR space. To that end, Abrash revealed during Steam Dev Days that Valve and Oculus VR worked together on the Crystal Cove prototype's new tracking features that were shown off during CES 2014 last week. In addition, Abrash said Valve will continue to work with Oculus to "drive PC VR forward."

Regarding the viability of virtual reality technology in general, Abrash said he doesn't expect it to become mainstream for another two years, but noted that Crystal Cove is a good first step. He also said that the PC will be a "hotbed" for virtual reality, not consoles like the Xbox One or PlayStation 4.