At the Game Developer Conference this year, Valve revealed its step in to the virtual reality headset market with The Vive, built in collaboration with HTC. Shortly after, Valve began accepting sign ups from developers to get early editions of the headset in order to start working on VR projects, now the SteamVR development kits are shipping out.
Writing on the Steam Community Forums, Valve's Chet Faliszek, said: This first wave includes a wide range of developers from major movie studios, triple A developers, to small indie teams working on their first title.”
“We will continue to ship to additional developers through the spring and summer. In the box is a headset, 2 Lighthouse base stations, 2 wireless Steam VR controllers, various cables, instructions, and everything else needed to get started. This will allow developers to target the same system consumers will have in their homes later this year.”
The SteamVR developer edition will contain everything that consumers will get later on this year. It seems that Valve and HTC are still intent on a 2015 release date, with no delays currently rumoured, planned or announced. That said, a solid release date has not yet been given either.
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KitGuru Says: Gamers will finally be able to get their hands on the first consumer oriented virtual reality headsets later this year, which is quite exciting. Are any of you planning on trying out VR at some point? Have you given it a go already?
I absolutely want to give VR a try. I was a little disappointed that Oculus have bumped up their price and been delayed untill next year but if the Vive can manage to ship this year then I will buy it providing it is not ridiculously over-priced.
I can’t help but wonder how Valve can get something like this out of the door so quickly, when the Oculus Rift team has been working on this for years now.