The Consumer Electronic Showcase is fully underway in sunny Las Vegas and we are awash in industry updates. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Valve's own Gabe Newell took a few minutes to open up about the company's much hyped Steam Box, give the world a peek at a few prototypes, and discussed what the future has in store for Valve's system.
The most important confirmed fact is that the Steam Box will run Linux, the company's other hardware partners can run whatever the hell they want, but the Steam Box will be all Linux.
"We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box," Newell told The Verge. "If you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination."
Newell also touched on how motion control has hit a wall in terms of performance, and how bio-metrics will play a much larger role in user interface.
"We’ve struggled for a long time to try to think of ways to use motion input and we really haven’t [found any]. Wii Sports is still kind of the pinnacle of that. We look at that, and for us at least, as a games developer, we can’t see how it makes games fundamentally better."
"Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important."
While all of this sounds FUCKING amazing, let's take things slowly. Valve also announced that it had no plans to release anything in 2013. What you should do is read the rest of the interview here, because it's super interesting and let us know what you think in the comments.
[via The Verge]
