Hands On: Valve's Game Lineup for the HTC Vive Pre

Game studios are working furiously to churn out virtual reality content, but VR platform and headset makers aren't sitting back to let them take all the fun. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Sony and Valve unveiled their own game demos and VR experiences.

While the PlayStation VR headset won't ship until October, Valve has a bit of a time crunch on its hands because the HTC Vive Pre, which runs its SteamVR platform, arrives side by side month. So the company walked me through a few of the complimentary games it will offering in time for the first Vive owners to strap their headsets on.

The demos are office of a 12-game collection Valve is calling The Lab. Information technology's a virtual room where you instruct a VR avatar to choose which game or feel you'd like to try by grabbing a glowing orb and peachy your face into it like a 2-twelvemonth-sometime at a birthday party.

For the demo, a Valve developer pre-selected the experiences I would try. The start was a photogrammetry-based, 360-degree view of a peak in the North Cascades mountain range of Washington land, consummate with hikers and futuristic mount animals with which y'all can interact.

The feature that impressed me most hither was the ingenious way you can motility around inside the VR world. Rather than physically walking around the real-world room in which yous're standing (which is nausea-inducing in the virtual earth), Valve has developed a telemetry organisation of sorts. On the acme, yous concord the controller's trigger and a bunch of green targets appear on the side of the mountain. Betoken at the one y'all want to move to, release the trigger, and you're instantly transported.

Next upwardly was a medieval-themed game in which I had to defend a castle by shooting bows at invading armies of what appeared to be gingerbread men. Holding a bow and arrow with VR controllers is challenging, though the haptic feedback is handy for making you aware of the tension in the bow.

I and so moved on to a Fruit Ninja-style game, which was unproblematic but the virtually enjoyable. The controller becomes a tiny spaceship, and you point its laser beams at enemy ships to destroy them. Conscientious, though, because if y'all striking 1 of the enemy'southward carmine orbs, it's game over.

After moving on to shooting projectiles from a catapult, the demo finished in a galaxy far, far away, where nosotros had to defend R2-D2 from Empire forces with a lightsaber while Hans Solo repaired the Millennium Falcon.

All in all, the The Lab's offerings felt much more polished than Sony'south VR demos, which is understandable since The Lab launches in a few weeks.

I of the criticisms of the HTC Vive is that it doesn't have equally much content as the Oculus Rift, which has spent years in development, or PlayStation VR, which will stand up on the strength of the PlayStation ecosystem). But it's articulate that Valve is working hard to remedy this. Information technology already announced a desktop theater mode, which will let you to play 2D games with a VR headset. The fact that it is giving away several very polished games for gratis at launch is icing on the cake.