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dudelsac2331 karma

Hi Mr. Newell & colleagues at Valve - first of all thanks for taking the time out of your day to do this AMA!

I'm a member and moderator at the Oculus Rift subreddit and I am writing to you today on behalf of all users of /r/oculus. Ever since you and Mr. Abrash supported the original Rift kickstarter, it was clear that Valve had a huge interest in Virtual Reality. So I would like to ask a few questions relating to that topic, some of them coming directly from our users.

  1. Recently, the experimential Valve VR headset has stunned developers and has shown what's possible in the years to come. When did Valve originally start to research VR technology and why?

  2. /u/Gl0we asks: SteamOS could potentially be the first commercial Virtual Reality OS - what plans do you have for the future of the platform? How do you want to tackle the harder problems like user input for example?

  3. /u/Pingly and /u/druidsbane ask: The vast majority of demos for the Oculus Rift are done with Unity. Does Valve have any plans to turn Source or Source 2 into a more user-friendly development system with a C++ API as well as easy tools and release it early to give VR developers a headstart?

  4. /u/remosito asks: What VR experiences are you personally looking forward to the most for Year 1 and 5?

  5. Have you personally played the HLVR mod that expands Valve's current VR implementation for Half-Life 2 into a full-fledged experience with body tracking? See this article for a short example of the great work that /u/Wormslayer and /u/adoral84 are putting together with the community's help.

  6. Finally - and I guess you get that question a lot - I wanted to ask about the title that everyone is waiting for and that lends itself perfectly for a VR adaption, due to its way of storytelling, the open world as well as the puzzle elements: Ricochet 2. Did the long development time have anything to do with evolving technologies such as Virtual Reality? Are you planning to bring full VR support to future titles, such as Ricochet 2?

Again, thanks for your time and please accept our humble invitation to join the discussion in /r/oculus. We would love to hear your feedback on emerging technologies in the video game space!

Best greetings from all users of /r/oculus,

dudelsac