Valve ports Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality just for kicks

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Valve ports Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality just for kicks

Virtual reality is one of those things that periodically comes out on the table as a future technology that will become indispensable any day now. But with each new VR promise, the public quickly gets annoyed with the technology in reality. Valve has apparently been testing Team Fortress 2 made for VR to see if there’s any future in VR-based Valve games.

At the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, the same renowned video game publisher that’s hard at work on the Steambox will also share its thoughts on VR, after spending a full year prototyping ways to create virtual reality hardware and software. Valve will host two 25-minute lectures entitled “Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going)” and “What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality” at the conference.

The former is hosted by Michael Abrash, the man behind Valve’s mystery wearable computing hardware project… and the latter obviously features Team Fortress 2, a game that we had no idea was being ported to VR. Before you get your hopes up, it’s not yet clear whether TF2 will actually be a title you can download and play on a VR headset. In fact, it’s actually rather unlikely given what we’ve heard.

The session markets itself as an opportunity to learn about the problems that came up when trying to port TF2 to VR. “A game designed for VR could avoid many of the issues that came up with Team Fortress 2,” reads the description, suggesting that perhaps game companies would be better off making brand-new titles rather than pushing out existing ones. If you’ve ever seen a 2D film converted to 3D, you probably know an after-the-fact conversion process isn’t always optimal.

Via