Four years after the original HTC Vive and the first wave of Half-Life VR hype, Valve has officially taken the wraps off its Index VR headset. All the signs point to a device built for comfortably playing rich, hours-long titles, but there’s still precisely zero details of the Valve game to speak of.
How did we get here? Back in 2015, Valve appointed itself to the role of backseat consigliere to the headset makers and developers of quality, high-end VR. In the intervening years, however, it has become clear that its directed efforts weren’t enough. Estimates from February 2019 suggest that three years in, there’s less than one million total HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headsets connected to Steam. Sony’s 4.2 million PSVRs sold arguably shouldn’t be classed as "quality".
Speaking in December 2015, before the HTC/Valve collaboration Vive went on sale, former Valve developer Chet Faliszek said: “We could do one big piece ourselves or we could work with and help other developers. We could either go away in our castle, cut ourselves off from the world and work on something or we could make a point of sharing that knowledge. We don’t think just one piece of software is going to launch this.”
Fast-forward to 2019 and with its own headset now built and a “big VR [game] franchise” due at some point later this year, the first of three full-length Valve VR titles in development, the failures of PC VR device manufacturers and game studioses seem to have forced Valve’s hand.
It’s now in the business of not just collaborating on hardware systems, but owning them and the existing SteamVR ecosystem, and not just mentoring and shaping fledgling VR game studioses such as Cloudhead Games and (now Google-owned) Owlchemy Labs, but on the verge of releasing that “one big piece”.
"I’ve always been frustrated by Valve’s unwillingness to produce their own hardware," says Blake J. Harris, author of The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook and The Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality. "In fact, this was largely why most of Valve’s original VR team, including Michael Abrash and Atman Binstock, left Valve to go to Oculus. Valve now appears willing to take the risk and put their money where their mouth is."
The Index itself, an unofficial Vive 2, is both a modest upgrade on the Vive Pro and potentially the new benchmark for VR headsets. The Index offers two 1400 x 1600 LCD screens running at 120Hz, with an experimental 144Hz mode, which Valve claims are not only faster but crisper than rival OLEDs, with a 130-degree field of view.
Elsewhere, there's a few hardware clues as to what Valve is prioritising. The ‘Knuckles’ Index Controllers employ 87 sensors to track your hands and fingers, allowing users to shake hands with robots, point, high five and - in theory - grab, hold and throw virtual objects. Twin RGB cameras handle video passthrough where users can see the real-world while inside the headset. There’s also a USB 3.0 connected "frunk" (translation: front trunk) for modders and accessory makers. It’s on sale as a $999 bundle or $499 for the headset, $279 for the controllers, from 28 June with limited pre-orders now open.
There are none of the usual signifiers that this is ‘next-gen’ VR, largely because it isn’t. There’s no eye-tracking, no wireless adapter kit for the tethered device (the only real misstep) and no inside-out tracking as the Index still requires Lighthouse base stations to be set up. The whole package is expensive, but the fact that the Index Controllers, in particular, are $270 seems especially heinous when existing Vive owners will be looking to upgrade just the compatible accessories.
Valve has a reputation for ignoring the industry and just building what it wants to build, but the focus here is very obviously around prioritising quality and visual comfort when VR gaming for hours, not minutes, and at the same time not racing to compete on futuristic features. Ars Technica reports that Valve staff repeatedly referred to gameplay sessions of “more than 30 minutes” and “more than an hour”.
Urho Konttori, founder and CPO of Varjo, the Finnish professional-grade VR headset company, suggests that Valve is pushing for even higher VR comfort levels and longer session times while Oculus’s Quest is doing the opposite. “This is an uncompromised product for a consumer price point. The high frame-rate and extremely low persistence of the displays is especially remarkable,” he says. “Compared to Oculus’s 72Hz, Valve’s 144Hz is completely different when it comes to comfort and extended period of use. Eye tracking is the feature I’m surprised not to see.”
The Index is unlikely to reach PSVR level sales, instead cannibalising from Vive. According to the latest predictions from CCS Insight, standalone headsets like the Oculus Quest will outsell tethered devices for the next four years, but tethered headsets are expected to reach a respectable 5.3 million units sold this year, 8.2 million in 2020 and 18 million by 2022. Chief analyst Ben Wood says Valve is trying to raise the bar with Index but it’s unclear whether the top-end specs and improvements to optics and audio will tempt users away from the “already good enough performance of Vive devices” given the price.
The peculiar adoration and nostalgia for Valve is based on its track record in games, but despite the pressure on its first full-length VR title, it’s still a major advantage to be able to use the devotion of PC gamers to sell $1,000 headsets. “It's worth looking at how many people were putting aside pre-order money for the Index before we knew anything about it besides the name ‘Valve Index’,” says Callum Hurley, a VR consultant for IPG eSports. “The love for Portal, Half Life, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress translates into a love of everything Valve can ever and will ever do. Stepping out on their own tells me they're more serious about VR than before, but I won't believe that until I start seeing software from them.”
The “big piece” Valve VR game being released in 2019 won’t be an Index exclusive, and judging by social media mentions of the new headset, hearts are set to be broken if it's a new franchise instead of Half-Life related. “I am very curious about Valve’s plans on the video passthrough. One of their launch games will make heavy use of that,” predicts Konttori. Considering the beautifully crafted, if basic, Portal demos that Valve built as showcases for both Vive and Index, and the VR locomotion problems that game would neatly solve, it could be as simple as a new, full-length Portal game for virtual reality.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
