“SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode is in early beta, and will be showcased at next week’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco”. Valve will make it so via SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode. So, basically, you’d be sitting inside what amounts to a virtual living room, watching your games on a large, flat-panel screen. Where developer-centric bundles like Oculus VR’s early Rift Developers Kit (Rift DK) hardware allowed users to hack support into existing titles, a smoother experience will be demanded of the retail hardware – and that’s something Valve is claiming to offer.
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As of the moment, the new SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode is in early beta testing, according to Engadget.
We don’t have all the details about what SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode might look like, but Road to VR reports that the mode will allow you to play normal games in a three-dimensional environment of-sorts. You can supposedly slap on your VR headset and be transported into a virtual room – an environment that you can setup however you want; when you start gaming, you aren’t playing on the monitor in front of you, but on a massive cinema-sized display. It has the benefit of cutting out real-world distractions, and loading up the Windows desktop could be useful in a pinch.
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Virtual reality (VR) seems to be expanding beyond itself, now with the ability to play games that weren’t initially intended for VR. Valve is expected to host 36 SteamVR games at its GDC 2016 booth. Valve, naturally, is particularly enthusiastic about the technology: it has invested heavily in its SteamVR platform, and has even partnered with smartphone maker HTC to produce a flagship hardware bundle with motion control, positional tracking, and a high-quality stereoscopic head-mounted display dubbed Vive. The $600 Oculus Rift ships with “headset, sensor, remote, cables, Xbox One controller, EVE: Valkyrie, and Lucky’s Tale”.
