Valve working with Apple on video game console?

Apple boss Time Cook was spotted making an unexpected visit to Valve HQ on Friday, with US reports over the weekend speculating that the two companies are collaborating on a new home console.

Earlier last week all the rumours were centred around Half-Life and Portal developer Valve making it is own home console, a so-called ‘Steam Box’ that worked together with Valve’s iTunes-inspired download service Steam.

It doesn’t seem as if things are anywhere near that simple though, with Valve’s Michael Abrash posting a lengthy blog entry on Saturday which describes what his new hardware project really is: wearable computing.

‘By ‘wearable computing’ I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands (think Terminator vision), he wrote.

The concept sounds very similar to Google’s recently announced Project Glass (illustrated in the video below), but Abrash is careful to make it clear that the technology won’t be viable for three to five years at the very earliest.

‘To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumours about Steam glasses being announced at E3,’ he says.

That would seem to account for why Valve has been hiring so many new hardware people lately, and yet it doesn’t explain what their patent for a customisable joypad was all about or why the boss of Apple had popped by for a visit.
Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/896256-valve-working-with-apple-on-video-game-console#ixzz1sJAIwnht