Valve patent filing points to a new VR headset

gamesradar.com:

Valve has submitted a new patent filing which could point to a brand new virtual reality headset from the company.

Earlier this week, IGN (opens in new tab) first reported a brand new filing to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (opens in new tab) by Valve. The patent filing was submitted back in December 2021, but was only just published by the U.S. office on June 16, and describes a "head-mounted device" which looks an awful lot like a virtual reality headset.

The product description lists "a front having a display housing and a back having rear housing," and an "actuation of a first rotatable actuator and a first cabling mechanism." The rest of the product description delves into further detail on the particulars of the "cabling mechanism" and rotatable actuators, offering little technical details of the product itself.

As per usual with patent and trademark filings from video game companies, this represents something that might not even come to pass from Valve. Just because there's been a patent filing, doesn't automatically guarantee Valve will actually act on the patent, and could simply be testing the waters to see if the filing would be approved.

Then again, there have been reports of Valve developing a new "standalone" headset. ArsTechnica (opens in new tab) managed to confirm that Valve was producing a standalone VR headset back in 2021, codenamed "Deckard." If Valve does launch a new standalone VR headset, it'd rival the Oculus Quest 2, and might sit alongside the Valve Index as a potentially cheaper option.

Check out our full Steam Deck review to see what we made of Valve's latest foray into the hardware space.