BELLEVUE, Washington—The Valve Index, a new virtual reality system from the creators of beloved video game series like Half-Life and Portal and the mega-popular Steam game store, is an aspirational product. Its sales pitch, as explained by various Valve staffers, revolves around the VR experience of tomorrow.

That’s a nice way of saying that Valve is going for features and dreams rather than affordability with its $999 Valve Index kit, which ships “by the end of June” after “limited” pre-orders go live on May 1 for users in the contiguous US and most of Western Europe (the UK is left out for now).

But through the course of Valve’s reveal event, its aspirations for VR’s future became abundantly clear—and abundantly conservative. If you saw last month’s news about Valve’s VR headset and began dreaming big, today is the day to scale those dreams back.

The Valve Index does not read your brain waves, does not track your heart rate, and does not track your eyeballs’ motion. The Valve Index does not innovate with an “inside-out” tracking system. It does not include an array of secret cameras or sensors and does not bounce sound waves via hidden or embedded speakers. The Valve Index does not employ a shrunken, “infinite pixel” panel or come with a revolutionary new take on foveated rendering. The Valve Index does not include a built-in processing unit. It must be connected to a gaming-caliber PC with a long cord trailing from the back of your head.

Also, the Index was not introduced alongside a new Valve video game. We learned in February 2017 that three Valve VR games are on their way, but this week’s Index event wasn’t used to premiere any of them. In fact, that bad news was met with more bad news: only one Valve VR game is slated to launch by the end of 2019, and we didn’t get to see or test it. (For better or worse, this game will not be an Index exclusive.) Valve’s Doug Lombardi says there’s “no announcement” on the two other games “at this time.”

So what is Valve’s big aspiration for the future of VR as far as the Index is concerned? The answer is long-term comfort. In Valve’s eyes, that goal doesn’t (yet) include features that we have been dreaming of, such as reducing the clutter of an average PC-VR experience, dropping the price, optimizing performance with eye-tracking systems, or liberating users with true, cordless freedom. Valve wants to convince us that Index is as good as VR users are going to get at a $999 price point in 2019—and that it delivers $999 worth of VR quality in 2019.

“Oftentimes with virtual reality, people want to say what’s ‘good enough,'” one Valve representative said during an informal Q&A. “And their sample size for ‘good enough’ is five minutes [of VR use]. One of the driving factors for our game teams, and externally for our partners, is that we want long-form VR experiences.”

Another Valve staffer interrupted, saying, “I don’t use VR for 30 minutes a day. I use VR hours a day. This is where we ended up. What’s good enough for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, is dramatically different than one hour, two hours. We think tracking, optics, displays, ergonomics, input fidelity, the comfort of your hands—all of those matter a lot.”

“They’re all coefficients, too!” an engineer added. “They’re all related.”

But Valve didn’t hand us a box complete with an Index, a “long-form VR experience” (like, you know, an in-development Valve game), and hours of time to put that hypothesis to the test. Until that day comes, we’re left with spec sheets and an odd series of hands-on, eyes-on impressions.

Field of view of dreams

Index’s interesting elements are as follows: a pair of fast-switching, custom-made LCD panels, with a combined pixel resolution of 2880×1600; an increased field-of-view (FOV) compared to most VR headsets, up to 130 degrees; new handheld controllers, finally launching after years of public teases; a pair of floating, above-the-ear speakers; an empty front-of-headset compartment, which includes a USB 3.0 Type-A adapter and no promises of attachments to come; and a reliance on “lighthouse” tracking boxes already used in systems like the HTC Vive. (We’re also in familiar Vive VR territory with the dangling cable plugged into a gaming PC.)

Let’s start with the Index’s pair of pixel-filled panels, which Valve’s staffers described at length. Instead of a single OLED panel, Index comes with a pair of fast-switching LCDs that have been custom-fabricated with an emphasis on subpixel density. They have been positioned to spread the visible VR FOV further than in any consumer-priced VR headset we’ve ever seen. And they are rated to run at incredibly high frame rates. In addition to the Vive-like rate of 90Hz, the screens can clock up to either 120Hz or 144Hz.

Most consumer-grade VR headsets use a single display panel, which is then translated by a pair of large, curved lenses. The Valve Index twists this convention by using a pair of LCD panels, each sporting a 1440×1600 resolution. That doesn’t make them a combined 2880×1600 panel. Instead, the panels are physically separated, then individually angled at a roughly 5 degree angle.

The result is a wider peripheral distribution by default, but the system also allows Valve to implement a new type of slider. Valve insists that no matter what face shape or pair of glasses you bring into the Index, you can turn an “eye relief” knob to bring the Index’s lenses as close to your face as comfortably possible, and the device does so in a way that guarantees a greater effective FOV. After describing most FOV sales pitches as “dishonest” due to many users’ faces or glasses obstructing that full FOV potential, Valve insists that its eye relief knob will guarantee a “20 degree” increase in FOV for all users compared to traditional “110-degree” systems. (This works in tandem with a standard interpupillary distance slider, or IPD, found in most VR headsets.)

Additionally, Valve insists that its SteamVR platform will adjust VR games’ and apps’ rendered imagery to translate across a pair of non-parallel lenses so that developers don’t have to individually account for this Index-specific difference.

What sold me on the FOV boost wasn’t any particular game demo, however. The demos I experienced were focused on front-and-center content—likely because the games in question need to be compatible with other 110-degree headsets. No, it was a VR movie theater moment, where I virtually sat down and watched 1080p movie trailers streamed directly from YouTube. That’s not a great resolution to beam into a high-res VR headset, made worse by YouTube’s compression. Yet I was taken aback by this video’s full widescreen ratio, as opposed to being letterboxed into a tighter 16:9 square.

I could see most of the virtual cinema screen, as if I was seated in a comfortable real-life theater. I needed to glance a bit left or right for the most peripheral content, but otherwise, I could comfortably take in a giant image at all times. That is not how most VR headsets work. This moment stayed with me and helped me realize how awesome Index’s FOV boost was when I went home and tried the same demo on my Vive Pro, which forced me to constantly sweep my glances in either direction to take in a full cinema-ratio image.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1495891