Half-life Alyx running on #ProjectNorthstar,
— Bryan Chris Brown 🚀 (@BryanChrisBrown) September 12, 2020
Lots of improvements to do with the steamVR driver itself, but it's so cool seeing it progress this far. pic.twitter.com/BP9QtFxLSq
One moment you're in your apartment, and then the next, boom, your reality gets merged with City 17. This clever hack from Bryan Chris Brown, community manager at North Star, an open source AR HMD from Leap Motion.
"Lots of improvements to do with the SteamVR driver itself," he reports, "but it's so cool seeing it progress this far."
And yes, you can even control Alyx with hand gestures.
"We've got a really basic gesture system currently," Brown reports. "Needs a lot more development since SteamVR is so button- based, but yes, hands."
As you can imagine, you need to be in a dark room to get the full immersive effect:
"You can also cover the lenses with a black/sanded (needs to be matte) 3D printed part to act like a VR headset," Brown suggests. "The North Star design would need to be modified slightly to do this, but as you can see from the video the displays are super bright."
To be sure, the hack itself may not be the point, as much as it shows off the growing ambition of the modding community around Half-Life Alyx and the Vive:
Half-Life: Alyx is only 10-15 hours of gameplay, it wasn't meant to hold people's attention longer than that is another consideration. The longevity plan seems to be the same as all previous Half-Life games, which is letting the community create more content for it...
All and all we'll have to wait to see if Alyx is a 'killer app'. It would've been a mistake to judge Half-Life 1 or 2's legacy based on a single run of it's standalone story rather than the plethora of mods and full games that resulted from them.
Hat tip: Jamie Feltham of Upload VR.
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