Valve teases "wearable computing" research with augmented reality overlay

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Coming soon to Steam?

Following on recent rumors pointing to Valve's interest in entering the hardware market in some way, Valve developer Michael Abrash wrote in a blog post on Valve's official site about his research on a project "where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view."

Abrash, a game programming and graphics veteran whose work includes the original Doom and Quake, outlined a concept similar to Google's recently unveiled Project Glass, where there is "no separate display that you hold in your hands." He likened the effect to the "Terminator vision" from the movie of the same name, and noted that it could be achieved with glasses, contacts or "for all I know through some kind of more direct neural connection."

While Abrash was quick to point out that his research "doesn't in any way involve a product at this point, and won't for a long while, if ever," he was effusive about the potential of wearable computing as the logical next step in computing's progression from desktop to laptop to tablets and mobile devices. And he thinks such wearable, eye-mounted devices could become a new standard in a relatively short time frame.

"I'm pretty confident that platform shift will happen a lot sooner than 20 years—almost certainly within 10, but quite likely as little as three to five, because the key areas—input, processing/power/size, and output—that need to evolve to enable wearable computing are shaping up nicely, although there’s a lot still to be figured out," he wrote. Those things to "figure out" include important questions involving user interface and the practicality of augmented reality, he added.

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