Every year, a game developers conference is held in San Francisco. In GDC 2013, Valve’s Joe Ludwig plans to give a talk about porting Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality goggles in a talk titled “What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality”.
A summary of the talk:
Several people at Valve spent the past year exploring various forms of wearable computing. The wearable effort included porting Team Fortress 2 to run in virtual reality goggles. This session will describe lessons learned from Valve’s porting experience. Topics covered include an overview of what stereo support entails, rendering 2D user interface in a 90 degree field of view display, dealing with view models and other rendering shortcuts, and how mouselook can interact with head tracking in a first person shooter. In addition to the lessons that apply to Team Fortress 2, there are also several lessons that would apply to any new virtual reality game. A game designed for VR could avoid many of the issues that came up with Team Fortress 2. These topics will also be covered.
Naturally, porting to VR goggles isn’t easy. So there’s another talk by Michael Abrash, titled ” ‘Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going).’
Hopefully these talks aren’t just nods to idle experiments, but a look at what we can expect in the future when it comes to interfacing options on Team Fortress 2. One can dream!
Valve to talk head-mounted display research, Team Fortress 2 VR port at GDC 2013 [GDC News and Information Blog ]
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