Valve's weird, old VR headsets are on display at GDC

This week, Valve announced that it was partnering with HTC for the Vive headset, a virtual reality display that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell promised made "zero percent of people" motion sick. Very little was known about the Vive before release, but Valve's virtual reality prototypes have been something of a legend in the VR community — especially the "VR room," a room covered in barcodes that created a precise location-tracking system.

While it wasn't as exciting as the actual Vive, Valve had a few pieces of its history on display at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. Turns out it took a lot of experimentation to get from barcodes to lasers.

Valve's first efforts at motion tracking involved putting QR code-like tags all over a room's walls; a camera on the headset read the codes, got a precise location, and moved the wearer accordingly.
Valve's early headsets were noted for having very low latency, compared to the relatively blurry Oculus Rift. This is a small, one-eye prototype.
This was Valve's "first glimpse of presence," and it's the headset that got a lot of people talking about VR when Valve showed it off at Steam Dev Days in 2014.
This version of Valve's headset appeared in public a few months later, in mid-2014. Instead of having a head-mounted camera track barcodes, an external camera tracked dots on the headset, more like the Oculus Rift.
Like the Vive, the dot-tracked headset came with a controller that was also covered in motion-tracking dots.
After the dots, Valve moved to its current laser-tracked system. "Our first approach to this was to just hot-glue the sensors to one of our dot-tracked headsets," reads the placard.
Another step towards the Vive, this one with integrated sensors.
And now we're almost up to the present, with the prototype controllers that accompany Valve's Vive demo.