Sure they can. But why would they do it ? To support Pimax ? Valve is closely linked to HTC. So would they want Pimax to gain high business share now while HTC has no wide FoV answer yet ? I doubt it.
Remember the Vive was actually built by both Valve and HTC. They’d cut their own fingers. From a pure commercial/business PoV it would be really stupid for Valve to release such wide FoV support at this point in time.
Valve also wants to sell more SteamVR Software/Games.
Because Valve is a platform. Valve makes money no matter who is making the HMD. Its in their interest for the market to expand to more HMDs.
Valve helped Oculus a ton before the facebook acquisition. Partnership with HTC was a reaction to the facebook acquisition.
VR as an industry. (Especially hardware) moves at a breakneck pace.
Think about your logic here for a second please. If Valve didn’t want competitors HMDs to be successful why allow Oculus, Rift and now MS partners access to Steam in the first place?
Imagine if Steam began directly or indirectly using code or setting that rendered other HMDs inferior? It would not take long for some sort of litigation to be brought forward.
It’s a case of wait and see right now but I feel the 200 degree FOV even with minor stretching at the extreme periphery is better than existing HMD FoV limits. I also suspect it won’t take long for OpenVR to support angled lenses correctly without hacks.
The software will move with the market. You got it dead on.
Not only htc is partner with valve, but LG wil luanch the steamvr HMD soon.
And htc open their viveport and has promotion for dev to get 100% revenue until the end of year, it look htc want to stand by themselve too.
Valve wants competitors to HTC to make SteamVR headsets. They get nothing directly from HTC selling Vives they only get money for people buying games and especially games using SteamVR.
@PimaxVR please pimax, add a software option to reduce the FOV if someone want to. If someone finds the stretching effect too distracting then at least they can reduce the FOV and not complain about the product. Congrats on reaching a million.
Because they realized that all alone they’d die. Just like blackberry did. But that doesn’t imply they should be giving Pimax a headstart, gain momentum and a big market share because of wide FoV …
How do you know that ? They made the Vive together, surely they must benefit.
It would make lots of sense for them to first bring out a wide FoV headset themselves before supporting others. But we’ll see. I hope I’m wrong 
We know this because Steam is a software distrobution solution. Valve is not exclusively interested in one company’s HMD.
A huge stake of HTC just got bought by Google.
Michael Abrash was a Valve employee before joining Oculus, and he helped Oculus while he was still at Valve.
Oculus CV1 got a ton of design cues from the Valve room prototype.
There is no good reason for Valve not to update Steam VR features to work with this or other HMDs.
It is clear that valves goal is to be the top VR platform , which they would use to sell games , they created OPENVR to invite others to use their platform, others like oculus home vive port and even pi play are in competition with steam (well poorly so!)the Point is ,steam will do anything to help any developer using their system because it benefits them directly to do so. HTC has no leverage over valve. The relationship is tenuous at best they’re losing potential profits every time somebody buys a steam game and not from vive port.
And Valve is also a hardware seller 
Anyway nobody knows what they’re going to do. I’d be highly surprised if we’d see official wide FoV support before 2019. But of course it might happen. We’ll have to wait and see.
Pimax is doing what I want as a gamer that supports and uses VR. That’s why I am supporting them and I hope the other companies see that and follow making innovations in hardware and software that can blow my mind in VR with high FOV and ever increasing pixel density eye tracking and even things we haven’t dreamed up yet.
+1. I know the Pimax 8kX might not be as good as we hope it is. It might be, it might be not. But at least they’re pushing forward while the big buys are doing nothing. So that’s also reason I’m backing them. Then again, they really need to get this wide Fov right
I also know there will be some compromises due to current tech and such to achieve next gen VR goals. I am glad to see a company like Pimax coming up with solutions like Brainwarp and 1440p upscaling to 4k to give us pixel density and performance. And whatever fixes they have in software and hardware for High FOV rendering. These compromises might be less than ideal but at least they are open about what they are doing and they listen and reply to us there users and fan base that’s more than anyone can say about HTC or Steam or Oculus.
It shows they care about us the users and that goes a long way in me supporting them on this Kickstarter.
I know there may be some less than ideal solutions but I will not back out of my pledge. I appreciate the chance to cast my vote for Pimax as a company and have it displayed in the Million dollars and growing votes from all the other supporters.
Valve is no more binded to HTC or LG. Valve’s openvr is to support headsets. Valve has placed their flag also on PiMax just like Disney, BMW, AMD, Nvidia, Unreal & Unity.
Valve sponsored HTC & LG to create a steam compatiable headsets. Translation they bought Valve’s help.
Valve is as @VRGIMP27 said is commited to selling games not limiting their platform like Oculus has. Wide support of headsets that meet their Openvr standards.
Now their are games that like i said support multi monitors to increase fov. Most good simulations support multi monitors so you can have more immersion RFactor & flight sims come to mind.
Now like i said some games will need updates to open up wider fov in vr native games. Now some games maybe too old or unpopular might not receive support from the game developer.
Now where might be issues with is sbs injecting non vr titles are unlikely to be able to unlock ultra wide fov as the title was not originally designed with vr in mind.
The other concern is while Valve will support it in their OpenVR. Oculus Home titles are unlikely to support Ultra Fov as they don’t want non Oculus made headsets supported on their platform.
As for game textures i am sure you have seen many old titles gettung hi res texture packs for free or a small fee.
Yep
Htc partner with valve to learn how to built quality headset (sort of).
Just look at LG’s attempt with their 360? Sort of headset that plugged into thr lg g5.
I am sure lg doesn’t want yet another epic fail.
yangjludan said
this article is very good, actually we already have met the problems mentioned in this article. and we have fixed it. the article mention that steamvr(openvr) did not support rotated eye views which is a bit outdated. and the way hmd provide hmd parameters through the hmd firmware is not the only way, there are other ways that can provide more information to steamvr.
I read on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/7257gj/docok_projection_and_distortion_in_widefov_hmds/
valve fixed the screen rotation angle issue in July
And doc_ok miss this api change.
So I believe that the new demo will be better.
Why doesn’t Pimax just create a native 200 fov demo (like the old DK2 Tuscany demo). That way people can at least see what’s possible.
*of course a game not designed for 200 degrees fov is gonna look a tad wonky