1 Welcome to Valve’s Steam VR Mini-museum

Virtual reality is still in its infancy. Many hard problems are being worked through and thus, the hardware to deliver compelling VR experiences is still evolving. Anyone who’s followed the VR space for a while will already be familiar with Oculus’ evolutionary path from Kickstarter to current prototype, but Valve’s work has always been shrouded in mystery.

The world came to know Valve’s virtual reality technology through a demonstration held at Valve’s dedicated developer event, Steam Dev Days in January 2014. “The Room” featured a relatively advanced VR Headset prototype from Valve’s R&D lab and used fiducial markers placed on the walls and ‘on-headset’ camera’s to track the user’s movements in 3D space.

Fast forward to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday 1st March and HTC announce that they’re the hardware partner Valve has chosen to bring Valve’s flagship Steam VR system to market.

So what happened in the time between each of the above events that lead us to hardware we’ve now had the opportunity to try at GDC 2015? Valve figured you’d ask, and has setup a mini-museum charting the research and development steps taken to deliver the developer level hardware on show at this year show. Here’s a visual tour of that museum timeline, complete with footnotes.

Use the navigation arrows above to move through the slides.