The Valve offices hold some of the most sought after secrets in all of gaming. When will we see Portal 3? What’s next for Steam VR? And is Half-Life 3 ever going to happen? Those are all questions we’d love to answer by sneaking inside the studio.
But while we’ll likely never get deep enough into the real offices in Bellevue to find those answers, we can now explore the company’s lobby using the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. That’s thanks to a recent update to the studio’s Destinations app, a free piece of VR software that allows you to visit various locations with friends either uploaded by Valve itself or by others online. While a host of improvements are included in the update, arguably the most exciting addition is the ability to explore a photogrammetric capture of the company’s office.
This isn’t a quickly hashed together project, though; Valve has gone the extra mile to make this little tour a dream come true for many a fan. Iconic developer Gabe Newell himself introduces the new destination as you walk through into the lobby area, where the the iconic valve sits in the middle. You can even use the Vive’s controls to turn it for yourself.
The area is also littered with easter eggs from the studio’s own games. Mousepads sporting various logos sit next to Portal props and Left 4 Dead sculptures. If you look hard enough you might even be able to find the company’s Steam controller lying around.
If you want to take a shot at uploading your own photogrammetric destination to the app, then Valve has uploaded a detailed guide of exactly how it did all of this.
That’s far from all that’s new with the Destinations update. Valve has now added Public Lobbies so that you can meet new people online and also used the lobby setting to build a new multiplayer game named Arcade Toss. There are the usual bug fixes and tweaks too. A full list of updates to the app can be found here.
Along with The Lab, Destinations is the closest Valve has come to releasing a full VR game thus far. We’ve still got our fingers crossed that something a little more substantial is on the way soon.
