Valve says virtual reality hardware could transform entertainment in two years

Perhaps no company in the video game industry is as prescient as Valve. The Half-Life 2 developer foresaw the coming importance of digital distribution in 2003, fighting against market forces to launch its Steam platform. Now, more than a decade later, it sees another major change on the horizon that will change the way we play games: virtual reality. Valve’s Michael Abrash — a programming veteran who helped create Windows NT and co-authored Quake with John Carmack — spoke about the technology at the recent Steam Dev Days conference. In his slides and notes from the talk, now available to pore through in PDF form, Abrash says that Valve has already offered support to Oculus, and that he sees “compelling, consumer-priced VR hardware” coming within two years. That hardware, he says, could “transform the entertainment industry.”