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Valve working on wearable computing, developer reveals

A Valve developer has revealed the company is working on computer technology you can wear.

Joe Svetlik Reporter
Joe has been writing about consumer tech for nearly seven years now, but his liking for all things shiny goes back to the Gameboy he received aged eight (and that he still plays on at family gatherings, much to the annoyance of his parents). His pride and joy is an Infocus projector, whose 80-inch picture elevates movie nights to a whole new level.
Joe Svetlik
2 min read

The good news? Valve is working on computer tech you can wear, according to one of its developers. The bad? It's more of an ongoing research project, so we won't see products launch any time soon. But still, the idea is enough to get us excited.

Valve's Michael Abrash laid it all out in a blog post, The Verge reports. He describes wearable computing as "Terminator vision", so it sounds quite a lot like Google's Project Glass that was touted last week. Though Abrash is keen to dispel rumours of Valve launching augmented reality spectacles.

"To be clear, this is R&D -- it doesn't in any way involve a product at this point, and won't for a long while, if ever -- so please, no rumours about Steam glasses being announced at E3," Abrash writes. "It's an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development."

He started it just because he thought it sounded like a valuable thing for the company to be doing. He ran it by some people he respected at Valve, and then "just went ahead and started the project."

Valve is looking for people to work on it too, so if you're interested, head over to the blog post and drop Abrash an email.

The post also provides an interesting insight into how Valve operates. This kind of spontaneous project is far from unusual. There's "no formal management or hierarchy at all" according to the post. It takes new hires about six months to fully realise no one is going to tell them what to do.

Instead, employees are tasked with figuring out "what it is they can do that is most valuable for the company, and then to go do it." And it works. "Valve's long string of successes, many of them genuinely groundbreaking, is strong evidence that the hypothesis that creative people are the key to success is in fact correct, and that the structuring of Valve around those people has been successful."

Exciting stuff. But is it all pie in the sky? Or is wearable tech the future? Let me know in the comments below, or on our Facebook page.