Valve reveals new projects at GDC 2015

Valve has announced a number of products and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend the Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

Valve will also show a virtual reality (VR) headset at GDC. Developer versions of the headset will be available this spring, and partner HTC will ship their Vive headset to consumers by the end of the year. Two new technologies are part of the VR release - a room scale tracking system codenamed Lighthouse, and a VR input system. Valve intends to make Lighthouse freely available to any hardware manufacturers interested in the technology.

Last but not least, Valve has announced the Source 2 engine. "With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games," said Valve's Jay Stelly. "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."

Valve will also be releasing a Vulkan-compatible version of the Source 2 engine. Vulkan, previously called Next Generation OpenGL, is administered by the Khronos Group, along with other standards such as OpenCL, OpenGL, and WebGL.

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