Valve Software is widely accustomed to public speculation. Unlike many organizations, Valve doesn’t build organizational barriers to its employees by default; it just trusts them and gets out of their way so they can create value. But now, Valve Software has set the world of gaming news abuzz by attempting to hire hardware engineers. Not only that but also Valve developer Michael Abrash has revealed a hardware prototype which is a wearable computer technology.

Michael Abrash became inspired to create this type of wearable computer technology after watching the movie ‘The Matrix’. However, Abrash wrote in his blog :

“To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long
while, if ever – so please, no rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It’s an initial
investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of
research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn – failure
is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on – and then
apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we’re just at
the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn. By ‘wearable computing’
I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly
overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands(think Terminator vision)”

It’s clear that, how the intense freedom at Valve helped him start building the wearable computing R&D project in the first place.

Source : Ramblings In Valve Time