In January, Valve is holding a Steam Dev Days, a two-day developer only conference, which will allow various developers to "meet in a relaxed, off the record encounter." Naturally, weird Steam projects will be the topic of conversation, with sessions covering all things from Workshop, future of Steam Machines, the in-game economies of TF2 and Dota 2, and production of Power Owl, by Gabe Newell. In addition, there is going to be a talk on "What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years." The brief reveals the existence of a Valve-assembled prototype for a VR unit. Valve's Michael Abrash outlined his talk for the conference:

"We've figured out what affordable Virtual Reality (VR) hardware will be capable of within a couple of years, and assembled a prototype which demonstrates that such VR hardware is capable of stunning experiences. This type of hardware is almost certainly going to appear in short order, and the time to starting developing for it is now. This talk will discuss what the hardware is like, and the kinds of experiences it makes possible. A few attendees will be randomly selected to try out the prototype following the talk."

This is a surprise development, as, at times Abrash has made his frustrations known at how far off a proper high-resolution, low-latency VR solution is. At the GDC, he spoke about how hard a true VR experience would be to achieve. There is the question over the Oculus Rift, and will the VR device be going up against the Rift, even though Valve have supported it in their games. The event will take place 15th January, and we will then find out more about what Valve have  planned for the future.