Steam Dev Days: day 1

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While no one from ValveTime.net was able to attend the event this year, that doesn't mean we still can't provide some summaries from Steam Dev Days.

There are no official live streams from the event's speeches and panels, so getting detailed information is difficult. Indeed, a lot of small information has leaked, and we leave you to read about most of those at SteamDB, but we wanted to just briefly cover the meatier bits for now.

The social media platforms have been abuzz with content on #SteamDevDays, and below is a summary of just a sliver of what we've learned from the event.

If we didn't cover something else you are excited about, let us know at @ValveTime or [email protected].

VALVE WILL REVEAL NEW VR CONTENT IN 2017

"Although we're not going to treat Dev Days this year as the place or time to make big product announcements related to the content that has been in development at Valve in virtual reality," Greg Coomer, Valve's Product Designer, told an audience today, "I do think that when it comes time to do that next year, that nobody in this room is going to be disappointed about what we have in the works..."

VALVE IS INVESTING IN WIRELESS VR TECHNOLOGY

Sven Mesecke, Nitero's Co-Founder and President, told UploadVR that Valve invested a “significant amount” in the company. Nitero has been developing a 60Ghz transmitter and an encoder, both aimed at providing high-fidelity images at low latency costs in VR.

This is a tall order, and has been expressed as such by Valve and other industry experts in the past. In order to mitigate the nauseating effects from VR latency, Nitero's solution has to seamlessly transmit a 2160x1200 image at 90 frames-per-second.

OTHER CONTROLLER SUPPORT THROUGH STEAM CONTROLLER API

No, not the "Steam Controller" API, but think of it as the Steam "Controller API." Well, actually, this is a new feature built upon the existing Steam Controller API. This feature provides support for multiple types of controllers, first providing support for the PS4 controller. Slides detailing this new feature are at Gamastura.

STEAM 360 VIDEO

Sean Jenkin, Engineer at Valve, announced Steam 360 Video. In partnership with Pixami, Akamai, and other leading content providers on the Field of View Adaptive Streaming Open Projection Format (FOVAS), Steam 360 Video enables 8K to 10K resolutions with only 1080p bandwidth. This is built upon the Adaptive Streaming Format used in Steam Videos today.


A big thank you to the attendees of Steam Dev Days for providing all the information leads from the event!