For now, if you want to play any of the virtual reality games or apps in the SteamVR ecosystem, the only hardware you can use comes from HTC. That may soon change, however. SteamVR creator Valve has opened the floodgates to a new wave of VR peripherals with a surprise Thursday announcement: all licenses for the system's VR tracking interface will be free.

What does this mean? To be clear, this isn't an announcement for new headsets, though SteamVR has always been advertised as a platform that will eventually be open to other VR headset manufacturers. Rather, this is all about virtual reality add-ons.

If a hardware maker wants to create physical objects that will interface with SteamVR—like a pair of gloves, a two-handed shotgun, a piece of fake medical equipment, or whatever else you can imagine—the object in question needs to be tracked by the system's "room-scale" pair of infrared boxes. The HTC Vive's headset and wands play nicely in VR mostly because they're each covered by dozens of IR receiver dots. The headset and wands are spread out in such a way that, no matter how you hold or use them, one of the Vive's two tracking boxes can be seen by enough of the IR dots.

At that point, the controller in question sends that data to a computer, which translates those physical objects' positions and rotations in 3D space. That's why you see them appear smoothly in a virtual play space. (You can read more on how this all works at Valve's licensing announcement page, which includes peripheral suggestions, such as table-tennis paddles and golf clubs.)

Third-party hardware makers have flooded recent gaming expos with their own hacked-together attempts at this sort of thing, usually by attaching extra hardware to existing HTC Vive wands. Now, they can reach out directly to Steam and request a trackable-peripheral dev kit, which includes EVM circuit boards, Vive tracking boxes, and 40 individual sensors, to create their own working hardware prototype. This kit will be made available for free to approved licensees, and it will include documentation and information that hardware manufacturers can use to eventually mass-produce any finished product.

However, those who are approved are also required to attend a training seminar hosted by Seattle consulting firm Synapse , which costs a cool $2,975 per attendee. The first seminars will be hosted at Synapse's Seattle headquarters at the end of September, with more to follow, while HTC will host similar seminars throughout the continent of Asia "in the coming months." Anybody with that budget, time, and travel to spare can sign up for a license (which requires a SteamWorks account ) right now (the first link doesn’t work until you sign up on the second link). The fact that HTC is joining forces with Valve on this consultation part of the deal says a lot about the companies' VR relationship right now. HTC clearly doesn't want to sour that relationship, considering it's still enjoying lead status as SteamVR's only headset manufacturer.

Though Valve representatives answered some of our questions about the announcement, our question about licensee approval and curation—specifically, about whether Valve will greenlight anybody who wants to manufacture SteamVR-compatible sex toys and teledildonics—were not answered in time for this article's publication.