All you need to know about the leaked Valve VR headset: is Half-Life 3/2 coming?

The VR ecosystem is in fibrillation because of the leak of a possible upcoming next-gen Valve HMD headset. But what do we know about it? Well, in this article I’ll try to summarize all that we know and all the main speculations regarding it. Are you ready to discover everything about this headset? Of course you are, because you know that I will use the word “Half Life” in the article… so keep reading!

Before we go on…

This article is 99% speculations, so everything you will read can be completely true, completely false or something in between. Nothing contained here has been confirmed by Valve, so read just for the pleasure of reading speculations, that is always fun 🙂

How everything has started

The source of this story is Reddit: actually, most of the info of this article has been actually written by redditors, and I’m just aggregating in a single place of all the info found in that great community.

On Saturday, Reddit user 2flock, that is also one of the mods of the /r/Vive subreddit, published a post called “Valve headset? This doesn’t look like Oculus Quest” and in the text puts a link to an Imgur album with 4 photos featuring various half-assembled VR headsets.

In subsequent comments, 2flock clarified that someone just dropped these photos in his inbox and that of course, he has shared them to the whole VR community.

The headsets are something we have never seen before and one of them clearly features a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) with the Valve logo on and from that moment on, the hype regarding an upcoming Valve virtual reality HMD has risen.

The photos

Here you are the four magical photos that have been published (click them to zoom):

Is this real?

At this point, the first question that has come to people’s mind has been: are these photos real? Do they really show Valve’s lab? Well, one person stated that they can be photoshopped, but IMHO this would be a too complex job and would have anyway little sense to create such a monstrous effort just to troll the little VR community. So, yes, these are most probably real.

flock2, of course, doesn’t say who has sent these photos to him and while some people argue that he should, as a VR blogger I say that he absolutely should not. No journalist would be so stupid to reveal his sources: it would harm the source and of course this would mean that no one would ever send secretive news to that journalist anymore because he is someone that can’t be trusted in this sense. And in any case, we don’t even know if flock2 knows the people has sent these photos to him. It may just be someone from Valve that is inside the /r/Vive community.

At this point, there is another question that every one of us is making: is this a controlled leak by Valve itself? Of course, we don’t know, but my best bet is yes. I mean, these photos are a too perfect leak to be true: they are high resolution, they have no blur, they show enough to make people excited but not too much to let people understand what it is happening, there is a clear Valve logo in one picture and a clear date/time of the photos in another one.

I really can’t imagine some employee walking through the lab with the smartphone in hand, shooting high-quality photos with a firm hand and not create suspects in his/her colleagues. Furthermore in one of the photos it is clearly visible the date and the time… I guess it would be too easy for Valve to get the leaker by analyzing the people that were in the lab at that time, considering that for sure people operating with a secretive device have to use the badge to enter in the secret lab area. If I were a leaker, I would have deleted immediately any sign that could identify me. I’m not saying that it is absolutely a controlled leak… I just want to say that personally, I believe that it is. Anyway, whatever the case, this doesn’t change all the speculations that we can take by looking at the photos 🙂

Furthermore, Valve already teased that it was working a new headset in a recent video showing all the iterations of Vive, where at the end it was possible to see Gabe Newell wearing a very strange prototype…

What is portrayed in the photos?

There are some semi-disassembled VR headsets that are under assistance. All of them have problems: for instance, in one, you can clearly read “Panels do not enumerate consistently”. So, these devices have been distributed to internal and maybe also external testers (like for instance partner companies) and have been returned because of errors. This is why they are under assistance and this is why they are semi-disassembled.

From the white tickets on them, it is also possible to learn that they feature different versions of firmware and this means that there have already been various iterations of these headsets.

In the last photo, it is possible to see the date of this photos, that is July, 25th 2018. This means that whatever is portrayed here may already be old, 4 months later.

Is this a new Valve headset?

This is a tricky question. For sure this is a headset no one of us has ever seen before. And for sure that PCB is one that is not used in any of the existing SteamVR headsets. So, this is a new headset for sure. The absolutely no pleasant design (come on, it is horrible), the materials that look cheap, and the great number of bugs, make us think about a prototypical stage: most probably, this is an early stage dev kit for internal and/or external testing. Like for every product, the first prototypes are always done in a fast and cheap way… it is useless to manufacture them in a perfect way when the design has still to be modified a lot in base of received feedback.

The VALVE logo on the PCB and the padding of the headset that is very similar to the one of Valve Knuckles, clarify that it is, of course, something that is being produced by Half Life’s company itself.

Someone on Reddit has hypothesized that if there has been a leak, it is probably because it is an abandoned project by Valve, so they let the leak come out because it is of no value to them. If it is true, it means that these photos have absolutely no value, apart from showing that Valve is still researching in VR, something that we already knew.

But according to others, that also claim sources, these photos show an actual headset that is in development by Valve. We don’t know if it is just a reference design for external partners (like HTC) or it is an actual headset that Valve is producing. Valve has now a hardware production plant and it is already manufacturing the Knuckles by itself, but it is not clear if they are able to produce a VR headset at scale. Until now, they had as a main partner HTC and the Vive has born because Valve has given a reference design to HTC, with the idea of earning money by licenses on sold hardware and especially on games that Valve users would buy on Steam. And until now, things have goon smoothly this way.

Valve may decide to continue such partnership or also breaking them. Someone hypothesizes that Valve may produce the headset by itself because:

• HTC has started its own store, Viveport, and so it is not pushing Steam as an official store anymore. This “hostile” movie may have made someone at Valve angry;
• HTC is focusing mostly on the business market (see the recent release of Vive Focus, for instance), while Valve aims at consumers, exactly as Facebook.

On the other side, HTC has been a good partner for Valve, and the Vive has been a huge success, and it is still doing rather well even after Oculus decided to drastically drop the price exploiting Facebook’s deep pockets. On this sense, Valve may play on the consumers’ side with a strategy similar to the one of Facebook: they could sell the headsets at cost or below cost, hoping to earn money with the sold games. It may also be that Valve will aim at consumers while HTC at prosumers and the two companies will remain so partners. Who knows. No one of the parties want to comment on this, of course.

In any case, returning to the original question: according to Upload VR and also to Valve News Network, this is indeed an upcoming Valve headset. So, a headset that the company will release with its own brand, alongside Knuckles. This would be a massive change for the whole VR ecosystem.

Is this a 2nd gen headset?

I’ll detail the specifications that we know from other rumors later on this article, but we are more or less at Rift S or Vive Pro levels, so this can’t be defined a 2nd gen headset… unless of course, this is just the beginning of a long process that will add lots of features to it. So, we are at premium 1st gen levels.

Since it can be similar to Rift S, some people have started thinking that the Rift S has been designed by Oculus to answer to this move by Valve, or that Valve has started doing this headset as an answer to Rift S.

In any case, do not expect a mind-blowing device. What you can expect is instead something very well done, as in the tradition of Valve: this company likes to ultra-polish everything before releasing each product, and this means that for sure we’ll see a great device.

Is this a SteamVR headset?

Most probably yes, being SteamVR a technology by Valve. Someone also supposes that it can be a Windows Mixed Reality headset, but I would honestly find the choice very weird. At maximum, there could be some agreement so that this headset can also work with native WMR applications, but I expect it to be developed for the Valve ecosystem.

Release date and price

Whatever is this headset, we don’t know anything about release date and price. We are only sure that in July it was still in the early stages and we also know that Valve takes a lot to release its products because it wants them to be great. So, we can expect it to be released for 2050-2051 maybe 🙂

Jokes apart, since it is “just” an evolution of first gen, maybe we’ll be able to see some announcement in 2019 and release in 2019-2020. We’ll see.

Regarding the price, we don’t know again… but as I’ve stated above, if it will be a headset distributed by Valve itself, the company may also decide to sell the device at loss, with the hope of getting back the money by selling games on Steam. If this will happen, this device will be able to compete with the headsets by Oculus even on the price front and this would be great for competition of the VR ecosystem.

According to Upload VR, it will be sold in a bundle together with Valve Knuckles.

In the remainder of this article, I will present a lot of fascinating hypothesis regarding this headset and I think that if they will be implemented or not will also depend on the price tag that Valve wants to give to this device: if they want to sell something that is cheap, it can’t feature much futuristic stuff, but if they want to aim at a higher-cost device, that can also implement some really cool features. Price will be an important decision.

UPDATE: According to rumors, Knuckles will be officially announced at GDC 2019, but the timeframe seems too short to release this headset alraedy at GDC… anyway, we’ll see.

Tethered, wireless or standalone?

Analyzing the board, some people more skilled than me understood that this device needs to be connected to some computational unit, that is a PC. Furthermore, there is a clear slot for a cable, and this means that we are talking about a tethered PC VR headset. There is no place for a wireless module in the current cage (only the frontal slot may be useful for that), and this confirms that it will be a tethered unit.

Optics

The device clearly shows big lenses, and this means that it will have of course a bigger field of view than current ones in the market. Lenses seem an evolution of the ones mounted on the Vive headsets and that are not very appreciated by us users, but we can bet that will be anyway Fresnels of Fresnel hybrids because at the moment they are still the best alternative on the market. One year ago, we already had the news that Valve was working on next-gen lenses for AR/VR and this device could feature these new innnovative lenses.

Upload VR’s David Heaney claims that his sources say that the headset will have the same resolution of Vive Pro (2880×1600) and 135° FOV. Valve News Network says that the resolution will be bigger than Vive Pro and that FOV will be 150°. Anyway, redditor D3Pixel spotted that the Analogix 7530 chip that is on the PCB can only support at maximum the resolution of the Vive Pro, so I believe more to Upload VR’s hypothesis.

UPDATE: the last sentence has been proved wrong: redditor Otto_Sump commented it this way:

Making this lower PPD than the Vive pro/Odyssey or Pimax 5K+ makes little sense as it would be in direct competition with them (some people like FOV, some resolution).
Besides, the ANX7530 is the same chip as used in the Pimax 5K+ and I believe that D3pixel has already been corrected on this in the Pimax forums.
I’d hope that this was higher resolution, I’d buy one if it was.

If this is true, this means that since the same screen will be used to have a bigger field of view, the overall PPD will be lower and so the “perceived resolution” will be worse than the Vive Pro. Probably Valve knows that a big FOV is one of the features that VR users ask the most because it creates a more immersive VR and so they are sacrificing PPD.

Regarding the display, the fact that there are ventilation holes on the front panel of the display has made someone fantasizing about a special kind of high-quality display, that maybe will feature HDR, for more astonishing VR visuals.

I've seen it suggested, and I thought so myself, that higher performing panels could need more heat dissipation. Valve have talked about HDR VR before, an experiment with boosting panel brightness. Not unthinkable that they're doing something like that here 🤔

— Andreas "BOLL" Aronsson (@BOLL7708) November 10, 2018

Valve has also patented a technology for SDE mitigation (shared by u_cap on Reddit) and this could be part of this headset, too.

/u/Deftware has also spotted “two spring-loaded metal bars beneath the PCB”, that are probably used for IPD adjustment.

Audio

It is obvious from images that this device will have integrated audio, as all the most modern headsets. I can also guess, even if it is not visible from the photos, that it will also have a 3.5mm jack to let you use your own headphones.

What is intriguing is the fact that some rumors talk about the use of “haptic audio”, so it is possible that this technology will be included inside this headset. What can this mean? Well, there are two hypotheses:

• The most intriguing one is that this device will feature some form of GVS (Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation). GVS lets you stimulate some way (e.g. with electrical fields) the vestibular system that is inside your ears, so that your body may perceive that is moving while actually you stand still. This would eliminate totally or partially motion sickness because when you run in a game, your body would feel as it is moving in real life;
• The one that is most probable is instead that the headphones will also somewhat vibrate, giving your ears some kind of haptic feedback that can make the experience more immersive. This will be something similar to what happens with current Razer Hypersense headphones, for instance (kudos to /u/fourierspacetroll for this idea).

  

Of course, it is also possible that these will be simple headphones… everything will also depend on the price that this device will have. If it has to be cheap to compete with Oculus, I guess that audio will be normal…

Eye Tracking

There are no signs of eye tracking in this headset. But someone spotted a patent by Valve where eye tracking sensors were hidden inside the lens tubes themselves and so are not visible. I don’t know… again, I guess it will depend on the price that Valve wants to give to this headset.

There has been an announcement of Tobii regarding the partnership for an upcoming headset and this made some people wonder if THIS is the headset with Tobii sensors incorporated.

Valve was collaborating with eye-tracking company SMI to add eye tracking to OpenVR (thanks u/PrAyTeLLa for noticing it), and this is a clear sign that it is interested in this technology, but I’ve also to warn you that some months later this announcement, SMI has been acquired by Apple.

Comfort

This headset features a rigid headband, with a knob to secure it to the head of the user. It is the same mechanism that is used in the Vive Pro, for instance. The padding inside is very similar to one of Valve Knuckles.

I’m very happy that this doesn’t use those terrible elastic headstraps as the original Vive or the Oculus Go.

Tracking

If you look closely, you can see that there are clearly Lighthouse Sensors scattered all over the headset. This means that the headset will work with current SteamVR v2 tracking technology.

Of course, there are also two cameras on the front plate of the device and it is not clear if they will be used to track the headset, too. It is also possible that the headset may feature a hybrid tracking technology: if you already have Lighthous stations and/or you want to use it with the high-end tracking of Steam VR 2.0 that lets you track also props with Vive Trackers, you can use it that way; otherwise, if you want just a headset with an easy setup, you just attach it like a WMR headset and you use it. The problem of this hypothesis is that the Valve Knuckles do not seem to have a way to be tracked without using Lighthouses…

Controllers

If it is a SteamVR 2 device, it can for sure work with all the SteamVR controllers. But we all think that the recommended controllers for it will be the Valve Knuckles that will be bundled with it.

Cameras

The device features two frontal cameras, that have a really wide baseline (that is they are very distant from each other). We have no idea of their specs and their purpose. It may be:

• To help with tracking of the headset (maybe when the headset is not visible by both Lighthouse stations), or to allow inside-out tracking;
• To track the hands of the user;
• To perform some kind of environment understanding (like reconstructing the mesh of surrounding objects or environments), so that to do mixed reality;
• To perform AR with the headset, but this seems improbable, because they are not in the same position of the eyes;
• To allow for a better Chaperone, that also warns you about the elements surrounding you.

PCB specifications

Redditor stumro tried to find the specifications of all the circuitry portrayed and he found this data:

Connectivity

There are no cables attached to the portrayed devices (another strange thing about these photos), but we can dream that these headsets will already feature the powerful VirtualLink connector.

In the frontal slot of the device, it is clearly visible a USB 3.0 port.

Frontal slot

The headset features a frontal slot with a USB 3.0 port. Everyone is wondering what is it for. Again, there are various hypotheses:

• It is just a slot to let you add future accessories (some of them will be even created by Valve itself);
• It is a slot for a battery to make the headset standalone/wireless. This is fascinating, but there is the problem is that adding weight there, would make the device uncomfortable;
• It is a slot to add Leap Motion. This is what lots of people think, but honestly, I don’t agree that much. The Leap Motion we all have is the v1 sensor, that is far less powerful than the v2 sensor, that is only sold as integrated into headsets. I think that if Valve wanted to have Leap Motion into the headsets, it would have integrated a v2, that has a very different form factor than v1 and do not fit there;

  

• It is a slot for an AR/MR module, something like the ZED Mini MR camera, that could be sold as a separate accessory;

Another thing worth a mention

Since two days before these photos were taken, Valve’s driver_lightouse.dll has been updated so that the function that returns the name of current HMD can now return a new value: “Valve Unidentified”. Can it be the placeholder for this headset? (This has been spotted by Redditor Mochipoo)

Half-Life 3?

Has someone said Half-Life?

According to Upload VR and Valve News Network, this HMD will be sold in a bundle with a Half-Life-based game. VNN says that since every Half-Life has been a disruptive game in every iteration of its (something that my buddy Max confirms as well) if Valve will release a Half-Life game for VR, it will be a game that will disrupt completely current VR games. It will make it as the best action VR game possible, with innovative controls and dynamics. It will set a new quality bar for VR games. It will also be moddable, and this will create an amazing community around this game… and we have already seen with Robo Recall how people love mods. And modders could also use this engine to re-create Half Life 1 and 2 in VR with knuckles, for instance.

This game would be developed with Source 2 game engine and would be optimized for interactions with Knuckles, that are optimal for Half Life mechanics like the use of the Gravity Gun (Max confirms this as well).

And it would feature the Half-Life brand, that is something able to generate incredible hype. I guess that if it is true that a new Half-Life game will come out, the Internet will explode and there will be riots all over the world to buy it. Half-Life is the kind of brand that really can attract new enthusiasts to buy a VR headset just for it. And it is possible that Gabe will use this card to finally let VR skyrocket. Half Life can be the killer gaming application for VR.

But we won’t be talking as Half-Life 3, but as a prequel of Half-Life 2. So it is more or less Half-Life 1.5, or as I like calling it, Half-Life 3 / 2.

Various sources confirm a Half-Life VR game incoming, and also various flags and code modifications that are happening in the Steam and SteamVR runtime. So, it seems that something is really coming.

But some people say to chill out, because technically also Portal is a Half-Life-themed game. So, it may also be a non-Half-Life game in the sense we intend it. Someone also talks about the possibility of it being a card game, but I really HOPE NOT.

In any case, if Half-Life 3/2 will come out, I will immediately buy this headset, even selling both my kidneys and you can forget me writing blog posts in those days!

These are all the rumors and the hypothesis that I’ve read regarding this headset. I hope that you enjoyed finding all of them in a single place.

And if it is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter so that I will let you know when Half-Life 3/2 will come out 😉

UPDATE: The newest update of Knuckles firmware seems to confirm that this will be a new headset coming to the SteamVR ecosystem (and that it will be compatible with Knuckles). Check this reddit thread for further details.

All have been already said so I will just slowly leave this lucky Newell here so the rumour turns true…

Please, Gabe: high FOV, high res, wireless ootb (hybrid?), Knuckles, and Half Life VR at a decent price, and I'm in… pic.twitter.com/R8ax5yM7uG

— Matias Nassi (@matinassi) November 10, 2018