Recently Valve announced that it would be giving development studios of every size the opportunity to sign up for a free development version of its Vive virtual reality headset, made in collaboration with HTC. This will give game developers a head start before the headset officially launches towards the end of this year.

Valve announced that sign ups were officially open over on the Steam Community announcements page for SteamVR. The developer edition of the headset is not planned for sale, with waves of units being sent out for free every few weeks. Commercial units are planned to launch later this year.

The Steam Community post said: “Our goal is to support as many VR content creators as possible and, to that end, we will be distributing dev kits continually, with new units going out every couple of weeks. However, supplies may be limited.”

In addition to the new sign up page for developers, there is a new community page set up so that devs can discuss the HTC Vive Developer Edition kit and their experiences with it. This page will be publicly visible so anyone can follow along with upcoming and recent developments.

You can see the sign up page, HERE. 

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Valve's virtual reality plans appear to be taking shape very quickly. The Vive was only just announced in March but soon developers will have their hands on it and by the end of the year, it is due to be available to consumers, just like the Oculus Rift. Given the tight timeline, I wouldn't be surprised if things were delayed a little bit until 2016. 

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