This week, Valve announced that it was partnering with HTC for the Vive headset, a virtual reality display that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell promised made “zero percent of people” motion sick. Very little was known about the Vive before release, but Valve’s virtual reality prototypes have been something of a legend in the VR community — especially the “VR room,” a room covered in barcodes that created a precise location-tracking system.
Valve’s weird, old VR headsets are on display at GDC
A rare peek into a legendary program
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
While it wasn’t as exciting as the actual Vive, Valve had a few pieces of its history on display at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. Turns out it took a lot of experimentation to get from barcodes to lasers.
1/8Valve’s first efforts at motion tracking involved putting QR code-like tags all over a room’s walls; a camera on the headset read the codes, got a precise location, and moved the wearer accordingly.
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