BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON—When I first arrived at Valve Software's headquarters, all I wanted to do was take photos of things I could see in front of me, at which point I learned what I was not allowed to photograph.

Take the video game studio's giant fitness facility, for starters. The full-service gym appears to take up approximately a third of a floor, and its main, outward-facing wall is covered in photos of the company's 13 dedicated personal trainers. My tour guide, the comfortably grumpy Chet Faliszek—the company's longtime game-script writer and PR face—mentioned issues with legal clearance of those photos. We moved along.

My Canon T3i also had to remain sheathed when we reached a room full of convention clutter, which included such detritus as boxed TVs, stands, cables, wires, and a giant tub full of Steam Controller shells. Same went for a wall covered in unreleased Dota 2 T-shirt designs that have been stapled up for staffers to preview and vote on; the most-liked ones will eventually be sold to fans.

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech































































































That's not to mention entire floors and areas I wasn't even shown. Those included the following: an internal motion capture studio; a 3D printer room; a massage room (curses); any room in which I might find studio co-founder Gabe Newell; and most of the company's general-use office space, which is famously made up of desks that can roll away on wheels at a moment's notice, not to mention plugs for computers that tell the entire staff where a staffer has relocated at any given moment.

Faliszek, to his credit, made sure I visited every single coffee machine in the building. "This one's not as good as the others," he dryly remarked by the time we found the sixth one. "But you can take a photo of it."







I mention this photo restriction because my entire tune changed after I arrived at the whole reason I'd scheduled the studio visit in the first place: the SteamVR prototype development kit. Suddenly, I didn't really care about all the stuff I'd taken photos of, or stuff I'd wanted to take photos of. Forget the rest of this six-story office; I just walked beneath a giant whale, painted a giant 3D cartoon character, walked over a little virtual army, taunted a massive beast, shot a bunch of arrows around a room, stomped over real-life mountains, cooked a nice ham sandwich, and stared into the eyes of Valve's famed GladOS.

I couldn't take a photo of any of that experience; it's not physically possible to see inside the unit's displays with my trusted Canon. And sans visuals to share, I struggle to explain just why this virtual reality demo felt so much different, so much better, than any I'd played on other modern VR kits. Worse, I couldn't even take a photo of the kit I'd just worn: a pile of hardware, consisting of a headset, two handheld controllers, a pair of headphones, and the cables that connected them all, all coiled together after I'd taken them off and returned to a far more boring reality than the one I had just experienced.

Faliszek remarked on how ungainly the whole thing looked—even though he'd let me snap a shot of the rig's even older prototype version an hour earlier—but I didn't care. A photo can't capture exactly what it looked like—what it felt like—to be a user inside of a SteamVR experience, the new "room scale" virtual reality concept powered by an early version of the HTC Vive headset. I've played all of the major VR contenders at this point, but none left me feeling so eager to dive back in. Even at this stage, SteamVR delivers a major feeling of immersion without even a hint of the usual VR nausea.

With a photo of this fresh-off-my-head hardware, at least, I'd have a memento to tide me over.

Two yoga mats

The demo I received was largely the same as the one Ars Technica editor Kyle Orland saw at March's GDC world premiere , but much of the experience bears repeating. This has been a big year for virtual reality, after all, and the major products coming down the pipeline can get mixed up if you're unfamiliar.

Virtual reality demos that we've seen for sets like the Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus require sitting down and putting on a headset, which we were asked to do with SteamVR as well. This HTC-produced headset, like others, contains high-res displays directly in front of your eyes—one 1080p display for each—along with a pair of headphones. Once you've put it on, your head is tracked in virtual space so that when you move, the entire virtual world appears to move in sync. If there's any lag or latency, we didn't notice it, and the screens benefit from a smooth, 90 frames-per-second refresh thanks to "global illumination, low-persistence" panels.

The same goes for the other modern sets we've used. What's different in this one is Faliszek's major directive: "This isn't a sitting demo, but a standing demo, so go ahead and stand up," he tells me. I do, and the virtual world keeps up with my every step and turn—up to a point, anyway. "See that wall?" Faliszek asks, referring to a virtual grid that has appeared in my vision after a few real-life steps forward. "That wall means it's a wall."

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Oculus and Morpheus users must be directly in view of a camera, and those rigs are designed in such a way that larger, full-body motions—particularly walking around—are not completely trackable (though both competitors do let you stand and move about in a small area). SteamVR comes with two "base station" laser-tracking boxes, and they must be mounted on opposite corners of an ideal play space at a distance of up to five meters. In short, SteamVR lets you get up and walk around... provided you have room in your house to get up and walk around while wearing a headset that obscures your entire real-life view of the world.

"You can go as small as your desktop, right?" Faliszek says when I press about space requirements for SteamVR. "Be seated, if that’s what you want. Go any space in between. Jokingly, there’s a size we call 'two yoga mats.' Tape them together lengthwise, four feet by six feet. In a living room, four-by-six will fit, and that gives you enough room to react and move."

The unfettered space requirement can seem weird before trying the rig out, but SteamVR's other difference is its additional major peripheral: a pair of custom, tracked-around-the-room controllers. In our demo, Faliszek held the controllers a foot away from us in real space, and we could see and grab them in virtual space instantly and easily.

These controllers have a little in common with Morpheus, which uses the PlayStation Move wands, but again, SteamVR doesn't need users to be right in front of a webcam in order to be tracked in virtual space—and unlike Oculus, which announced its own "Touch" motion controller this week, the SteamVR motion controller will be standard and required, not optional. You really can get up and move anywhere in the playspace, hold SteamVR's controllers to represent your real hands, and manipulate all kinds of stuff in the virtual world.

"When [Valve and HTC] revealed their larger plans—the way you're tracked in full volume, the way they tracked hands—there was this revelation," game designer Denny Unger said from his studio in Vancouver Island. "Shit, this was the missing piece we'd all been waiting for in VR."

"A near-religious experience"

Unger, the lead creative director of CloudHead Games, was invited, along with roughly a dozen other game makers, to visit Valve Software last October in a meeting that was shrouded in secrecy. Unger called it a "three-day secret summit," while fellow participant and Owlchemy Labs founder Alex Schwartz described it as a kind of event draped in NDAs "with snipers perched on the roof."

Roughly two dozen people attended the meeting, including a few from Valve and HTC, but most of the attendees weren't even told what the meeting would be about. Unger suspected it had something to do with VR, since he'd been working on VR adventure game The Gallery: Six Elements since early 2013. Schwartz's team wondered if the meeting had anything to do with the fact that they'd been the first to ship an Oculus-compatible third-party game on Steam (the weirdly titled base-jumping simulator AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome).









Both developers also attended the Steam Dev Days event earlier that year, in which Valve had shown off a virtual reality system that worked in a single room whose walls were covered in what looked like QR codes. It was described at the time as "inside-out tracking," and it too promised free movement in a virtual space. But at that earlier demo, even the eventual first wave of SteamVR developers wasn't convinced.

"It was a near-religious experience doing the room demo," Schwarz said. "After I calmed down, I was almost sad, because that quality of virtual reality, I thought, was not attainable within the next five years. It was like going to some academic place, where they’ve got a $10 million rig of some kind. You say, that’s cool, but I won't be able to play that in my house any time soon."

Reps at the October meeting that Schwartz and Unger attended stated otherwise. The SteamVR-powered HTC Vive would enable the same kind of full-room VR play. It would launch for general consumers by the end of the next year, Valve said, and they wanted new experiences built for it.

"HTC came and explained what they’d done previously with other partners, how quickly they can actually work, how reliably they can hit their marks, in terms of release dates," Unger said. "At that point, leaving that mini-conference, we thought, 'this is gonna get real, and it’s gonna get real really fast.'"

Unger's invite didn't just come because he'd been working on a virtual reality game already. Rather, his game was one of the few demos Valve had seen that locked perfectly into the company's VR vision. Quite frankly, the company was sick of, well, getting sick.

"The Gallery was a good example," Faliszek said. "Brian asked me to see his demo [last year], and I was sure it was gonna make me sick, because there was a lot of locomotion in it. But they did a bunch of smart things where it worked really well. I was moving around in the world that was that kind of world. It just worked. The first time I play [new games], I try to soak it in and not try to piece apart what’s going on. But that was one of those where right away, I wanted to play it again. You realize all this work they’d done, all these tiny things that all add up to you being able to have that kind of locomotion, and you can feel good about it. They went after the hard problem."

Do the locomotion

Unger describes The Gallery: Six Elements as an "'80s movie adventure" a la films like Labyrinth or Dark Crystal in which players explore classic fantasy worlds; the game will be split into four episodes, each offering roughly two hours of play. Its world premiere demo has players stand in a single room full of all kinds of items to manipulate. Wheels to turn, items to pull up and slam into each other, levers to yank—all before a gigantic monster shows up and taunts you from the distance.

This fantasy-playroom sliver of VR gameplay was the thing Unger had dreamed of when he began work on The Gallery in 2013—but surprisingly, that dream nearly slipped out of his fingers, mostly because VR started gaining momentum.

"After Facebook got involved with Oculus, they switched messaging into a more locked-down type of experience—one that required you to sit," Unger said. "That was a momentum killer for us. We had to rethink our game. We’d built it with the intention of standing up and using hands."

He also pointed out that the Oculus team had never gotten around to telling developers to expect "hand input," and Unger realized he had "assumed blindly that it would come." Instead, the messaging was about sitting down with a gamepad. He points out that this led his team at CloudHead Games to chat with Sony's Morpheus team, which at least supports a non-traditional motion controller. However, that route still forced players to be confined in a small space in front of a camera. Unger, like other VR developers, wanted players to feel free in virtual space, and that meant both smooth control and a complete removal of discomfort, sickness, and nausea from the equation.

Not "less" nausea, but none at all. Both Unger and Schwartz were emphatic on this point, and they'd each researched issues such as vestibular disconnects that occur when "moving" in virtual space with a controller, as opposed to naturally walking around.

"There’s no way to get a fully nausea-free experience if you are moving the character outside your own physical movement," Schwartz said. "People instantly think, 'Well, the Oculus said you’ll probably be seated, so just hit a button and drive forward.' Cockpit games are gonna be huge, surely. But personally, the direction Owlchemy's taking is a no-nausea approach, period, full stop.

"Valve doesn’t like to make crazy claims," he added. "They like their developers to make those claims and nod their heads in the background. But I’ve said, properly designed games in the Vive will get zero percent of the populace sick. Zero. That’s an amazing technical feat. My mother, our co-founder's grandmother, people who can’t put a DK2 [Oculus headset] on their face for a second without getting sick, stay in our game, Job Simulator, for over 20 minutes."

Owlchemy's first SteamVR game feels like Wii Sports for the VR generation. Its silly premises mock the concept of putting on a VR headset and simulating real life, as it puts players in a near-future world in which humans no longer do anything for themselves. As a result, Job Simulator has come out to remind our future selves of rudimentary tasks like working at a bar or manning a kitchen. The GDC demo simply has players grab various elements in a giant kitchen—full of tables, shelves, and sharp objects—and make food, though it supports both serious and silly play.

Want to "cook" eggs by walking halfway across the virtual kitchen and throwing them at a microwave? Go ahead—and because the SteamVR system tracks movement so naturally, there's no learning curve to throwing and manipulating objects in its virtual space.

It was the result of a wild seven-day VR game jam in January of this year, in which Owlchemy's small team gathered in a basement in Manitoba. With nothing more than a "super-janky" HTC Vive prototype, the team got to work, specifically trying to figure out how well the rig's motion controllers would function. For one early game prototype, Schwartz simply built a white virtual table, on which he'd coded a few colored blocks. He just wanted to see how it worked to attach "grab" and "hit" commands to these blocks.

"I remember sitting on the floor in that Winnipeg basement, like a kid playing with wooden blocks," Schwartz said. "And I knocked these blocks off the table. I was just stacking them. I had the physics, accuracy, and manipulation to play a fully fledged Jenga game without having to build Jenga."

That inspiration drove the eventual development of Job Simulator as a full video game, and the resulting title taps in to the joy Schwartz and his team felt from being able to pick up and manipulate virtual objects in SteamVR in ways they'd never been able to with other platforms. The pinpoint accuracy of reaching for and grabbing things and the haptic feedback within the controllers to confirm those actions cannot be undersold, Schwartz said.

"It’s not a sexy term," he added. "But near-field manipulation of physics objects is fucking amazing."

Snuggling up to a cozy virtual fire

Schwartz, Unger, and their respective development teams at Owlchemy and CloudHead insisted that their games will be ready by the time the HTC Vive headset and its matching controllers and base stations launch for consumers by the end of this year.

Unger, in particular, pointed out how long he's been working on his game already. He's got a handle on how moving around in his virtual world will work without making players feel trapped in a "two yoga mat"-sized box. He was hesitant to announce the final game's suite of movement options just yet—and told us to expect an unveil at this August's Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle—but he did hint to one system called "blinking," in which players can point toward an area in The Gallery's virtual world that they'd like to walk to. At that point, the game will black out, then fade back in with players standing in a new place. No sickness, all access.

Other SteamVR demos we tried already felt totally complete, particularly Tilt Brush, which Faliszek was careful to describe. "You can say, 'oh, that's Photoshop in 3D," he said. "But is it really?"

He then spoke about the entirely new experience that comes from a combination of fully tracked controllers and the ability to virtually walk around a space. It's so new that it's hard to type out, but a few minutes in Tilt Brush changes the language used. Here's how it worked: imagine holding something like a Wii remote in virtual space and pressing down on a trigger to "paint" in mid-air. When we first did, we created what appeared to be a 2D painting, but once we walked around, we realized each of our dabs of paint had its own x, y, and z axis position, meaning we could walk around the room and quickly build fully three-dimensional shapes in mid-air—and then add different textures and "paints" at that.

Schwartz, like SteamVR's other first-wave developers, mentioned that devs and friends of his got lost in Tilt Brush for "over an hour." One of those—possibly driven nuts by being in a cold Manitoba basement for a week—created an entire virtual scene with nothing more than Tilt Brush's early, rudimentary painting system. The friend had drawn a virtual, animated fireplace, then drew a 3D human sitting next to that fireplace. The artist then laid down next to the scene, as if he was chilling out by the fire.

That scene sounds a little creepy, sure, but it's also indicative of a whole new language of gameplay experiences—fueled by a sort of control simplicity that gaming has never before seen—that will follow when something as intuitive as SteamVR launches. The people behind SteamVR aren't talking about the "friendly to novices" kind of simplicity that the Wii had promised, either; rather, control and mastery will now mimic real life more than ever.

"In a room-scale system, people can instantly move around," Faliszek said. "I wanna go down and take a look at that? Guess what I do? I walk over, crouch down, and I look at it. And the controllers, they’re simple, we tried to make them become intuitive very quickly, so that your muscle memory is super quick on it."

He mentions a bow-and-arrow demo that required reaching behind my back to get more arrows from a virtual quiver that I quickly adapted to: "When you grab an arrow, that action would have been on a button before, but now it’s not. And equally, it’s not, 'I’ve seen that motion control before.' It’s not. It’s not abstracted. You’re not looking at the screen and thinking of what your avatar’s doing. You’re just doing it. When you were trying to shoot that balloon at the end, you were rapid-fire pulling the arrows out. You were doing that as if that’s how you’d always done it."

It's that very feeling that has Unger and Schwartz convinced that SteamVR's major space requirement will not be as big a hurdle as many expect. Unger believes that 2017 will be the tipping point for major VR sales, based on what he's seen and played already, while Schwartz says the issue of making room for SteamVR in your home is easier to swallow with the right comparison point. "The jump up in tech between playing a normal video game and playing with Kinect was X. The jump between a regular game and playing a room scale VR experience is X times 100. It’s like saying, 'I have an IMAX theater in my house.' It’s so much better that we can get away with a cumbersome setup."

As such, the game maestros at Valve really have no good advice for aspiring SteamVR developers, and they love it that way. Iterate, don't be married to good ideas, and on and on—a lot of standard development advice, now attached to the wildest game design frontier we've ever entered.

"Once you have [room scale movement] in your vocabulary, what’s the next step?" Faliszek said. "How do you look at things differently? Over the years, as we start exploring more and more, we’re gonna start really tapping into the potential. The example I’ve used is, when Pong first came out in homes, it was the most awesome thing, right? I had one of those Bally ones to play Pong, graduated to 2600, and had to go to a friend's house to play an Intellivision. We thought that was the end-all, man. Games are never going to get better than this. Those were horrible—well, not really, but they were very primitive, very simple steps towards something. That’s where we’re at now in VR.

"The good thing is, we’ve been making games for 40 years now, so primitive step one still starts off as pretty damned good. But where we take this, what it becomes, is really hard to define right now."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech