Cloudhead Games, the developers behind the Kickstarter backed Oculus Rift adventure The Gallery have announced that not only have they been working on bringing their game to Steam VR and the freshly announced HTC Vive headset, but that they’ll be demo’ing it at GDC next week.
Things are becoming clearer, we’re beginning to get a picture of Valve’s plans for virtual reality and it’s Steam VR platform. And it is a platform – something which was perhaps not entirely clear until HTC dropped the announcement that they were to make the flagship VR headset for said platform earlier today.
So, the hardware looks impressive, what little we know of it. But what’s going to run on it? Well, we got a glimpse of that too. In a single slide in that same HTC presentation, a collection of developers familiar to many who frequent this site. One of those developers was Cloudhead Games, developer of The Gallery, an immensely ambitious adventure game built for virtual reality.
We have a long history with The Gallery, being one of the first games to get onboard with Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra support after their successful Kickstarter way back in April 2013.
See Also: Gallery Kickstarter Ends With 127% of Goal, New Rift/Hydra Video Shows Tantalizing Early Gameplay
Now, the team have announced that a new version of The Gallery will be on show at GDC next week and that it will be demo’d on the Steam VR platform and the HTC Vive headset. What’s more, the team have been working with the new hardware for months and they’re extremely excited by what they’ve seen:
We now have a hardware target that matches the original vision for The Gallery: Six Elements. To unleash the user into full, volumetric, 360 roomscale experiences with motion control! The HTC and Valve VR experience offers hardware so precise and exacting that we now have the fidelity in our mechanics that we did not have access to before. You will not believe this tech until you get a chance to use it yourself. This is something to be excited about!
It does seem that Valve and HTC may well have something impressive to show in terms of positional and volumetric tracking next week. The Gallery was always a fairly physical experience, down to ladder climbing requiring like for like actions mimicked via the Razer Motion controllers, so to hear that a company with so much experience in VR development talking about such tracking precision is heartening.
Interestingly, in a comment on the blog post, Creative Director Denny Unger confirmed that not only is The Gallery still in development for the Oculus Rift, Denny confirmed that Steam VR will not be exclusively served by one headset.
“We’re still developing for the Rift. SteamVR is a kind of middleware that allows for multiple hardware configurations. That’s about all we can say for now”. Steam VR will surely have a big presence at next week’s conference.
We’ll be chasing the Cloudhead team down to get our hands on the new build at GDC next week and will bring you our thoughts as soon as we can. In the mean time, feast your eyes on these new screenshots.