The popularity of virtual reality gadgets seems to have reached its height in the last couple of months. This year, several tech companies including Samsung, Oculus, and HTC in partnership with Valve have unveiled their own virtual reality gadgets - much to the excitement of tech enthusiasts across the globe.
There is no denying how exciting the prospects and opportunities virtual reality holds for most industries today. Unfortunately, the celebration of impressive VR achievements seems to be getting tarnished in the light of the brewing bad blood between Oculus VR and Valve. Recently, a key employee from Valve has spoken up about Oculus virtual reality headset. Needless to say, the employee's statement was less than pleasant.
Alan Yates, the employee from Valve who was directly involved in the production and development of the HTC Vive, recently commented on a Reddit thread discussing the current trend of virtual reality headsets. In his comment, Yates claimed that the Rift's technology is a direct result of Valve's research program.
"While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it..." read Yates' comment on Reddit.
While certainly accusatory, Yates' statement is not completely unfounded. According to Road to VR, Valve and Oculus had close working relationship at the onset of the VR headset project. Valve President and Owner Gabe Newell, in fact, had only the kindest words for Oculus founder Palmer Luckey regarding the development of the Oculus Rift.
The problems between the two tech companies began following Facebook's acquisition of Oculus almost two years ago. Around the same time, Valve employees involved in developing VR technologies for the company switched teams and moved to join Oculus.