Gaben has come through once again to the delight of gamers everywhere. Valve, the company behind the highly popular & successful gaming platform Steam, has opened up the HTC Vive virtual reality tracking system to custom hardware makers. Companies can sign up to licence the technology for their own hardware through a new partner program the company launched.
However, each company must send at least one person to undergo training during September that takes up to 3 days and cost $3,000, although Valve states that this may not be a requirement in the future. The reasoning behind the training sessions is to ensure that third-party developers are “Valve-certified”, ensuring that they have a solid foundation in the theory of SteamVR Tracking and also gain hands on experience in each aspect of tracked object design and integration.
Once developers have gone through the training they will be given access to the dev kit, which includes HTC Vive base stations, custom prototyping accessories, 40 individual sensors and other tools to start creating VR programs. Additionally, they’ll also be able to make contributions to the exclusive developer forum where they can also take part in discussions with other developers. Furthermore, all devices created through the licensing program will be royalty-free. This is Valve’s hope to further broaden the VR market, which is currently being dominated by the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Hopefully with the open invite for the Steam VR system, we could see some new, swanky VR headsets on the market soon.
Unlike the camera system utilised in the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, the tracking system used by the HTC Vive utilised lasers that are emitted by the two base stations. These pulses are used to triangulate a headset.
Source: Steam VR
