Valve economist talks Steam machines and other hardware

Valve's ‘economist in residence' Yanis Varoufakis, has opened up in a blog post translated by Neogaf user alexanderos, that gives us a little more information on Valve's hardware developments, including the reasoning behind them.

“At the time period between March till June I went back to Valve and we begun a research program of systematic study of their economies,” he wrote. “At the same time I got to “see the future.” He goes on to say that because of Apple and Microsoft's ongoing development into further closed systems, Valve wanted an easier way to reach gamers and the simplest way to do that was to develop its own hardware.

However, Varoufakis also discusses some other sort of hardware that sounds along the lines of augmented reality. “I'll just say that I really saw the future. (it’s not a small deal to see a virtual but highly realistic alien stand beside a real human in the same room with you, walk around the room and wink at you. And all that without a screen, a projector or even a computer near you…)”.

The most reasonable explanation for this would be augmented reality. If we were really looking at a projected form that had a physical presence and was able to communicate with a user, it would need to be, otherwise you'd be talking tech that is far more advanced than anything we've heard of before.

And if we had heard about it, we'd be writing an article about that instead of Mr Varoufakis' rumours.

KitGuru Says: But what do you guys think? Valve's version of a screen free Project Milo? Let us know.

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