Valve's secret hardware project is "wearable computing"
Valve is hiring engineers to bring science fiction closer to science fact
A recent blog post by Valve developer Michael Abrash has revealed why Valve is hiring hardware engineers: wearable computing. The project is reaching much farther than the rumors of the SteamBox home console. Inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, Abrash has taken it upon himself to try to shrink computers down to a point where you can have one on you at all times.
"The logical endpoint is computing everywhere, all the time - that is, wearable computing - and I have no doubt that 20 years from now that will be standard, probably through glasses or contacts, but for all I know through some kind of more direct neural connection. And 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 3-5, 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," Abrash wrote.
He also makes it clear that Valve's secret project is still in the early R&D phases, with nothing concrete to show to the public at this time.
"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 rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It's an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn - failure is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on - and then apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we're just at the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn,"Abrash explained.
Could this be why Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Valve today? To see the next step in computing according to Valve?
The post is much larger than just the project reveal; it gives us a look into what Abrash has been doing and how Valve works as a whole. It's worth a read.