More than heavily invested in it, they basically have created the entire modern VR industry.
So, story time about Valve's VR hardware: they literally gave it away for free to Oculus. It's amazing how no big gaming publications have ever tried to investigate this story. Look at who left Valve for Oculus during the facebook buy out. The story goes like this: When John Carmack at Quakecon showed off "carmack's VR headset" (which was Palmer Luckey's duct tape prototype) Valve hit him up as they'd already been doing R&D on their own VR hardware with Michael Abrash for a couple of years. They had two teams working on what they considered the *Reality projects: One lead by Abrash, which became their VR division, and one lead by Jerri Elsworth, who was developing an AR solution. Valve decided to back their VR solution, and as such let Elsworth keep all of her valve-funded, valve-developed research and development and take it to her own company (which is amazing on its own).
But back to VR -- Valve hit up Luckey and Carmack and offered to share their solution because they flat out didn't want to enter the hardware market. They needed a big player to take their tech and run with it, so they could have a market to sell with. Valve basically defined modern VR. You can look at the list of features their early headset had, that Oculus cribbed. For example, the constellation tracking system of the rift? It came from Valve, valve was prototyping 10 different types of tracking solutions at the time. Their constellation system was the last one Oculus got to see before they split, which is why Vive uses the more advanced Lighthouse tracking where Oculus went with the older constellation tracking.
I tried their headset at Dev Days, where it was known as "The Valve Room." This was way, way before even the DK2 had been announced. They already had a dual screen, 1080p per eye VR headset with full roomscale tracking and asynchronous reprojection going. Like, 2 full years before Oculus released the DK2. The Oculus rift DK2 and CV1, to an enormous degree, looks like a commercial version of "The Valve Room"
So back to the story about Oculus: There was actually conflict at valve between VR team members over whether or not they should share their technology completely free with Oculus. Valve quite literally gave their tech to Oculus, no strings attached. When Mark Zuckerberg was shown a prototype at Oculus' office as a pitch for facebook to buy them out,
they showed them the Valve room and not the DK2. Zuckerberg literally thought, when he bought oculus, that he bought valve's technology. When he learned that they didn't have the team, or the exact demo he tried, they tried to buy out valve, and when they couldn't, they tried to poach the VR team. Maybe I shouldn't share this stuff as it's really contentious, but those who stay told me that the people who left for big raises at Oculus, are the same people who had been arguing prior that Valve should give their tech away to oculus for free.
Anywho, Facebook's attempt to poach Valve's VR division actually didn't work, with the vast majority of the VR division staying and working to this day. They cross over into other R&D, as to "power" their VR technology, they had to simultaneously prop up technologies like dx2vk (in fact, their VR conference is WHERE they announced dx2vk, during their "use our free tools for gamedev" lecture), sdl2, etc.
Valve has the single most unrecouped R&D costs in the entire VR market. They literally charged absolutely nothing for their R&D.
Welp, I'd like to source my claims about Valve and Oculus to Alan Yates, the person behind lighthouse itself, but it looks like he deleted his account where he said some thing. Despite that, a few pictures of evidence:
That's a leaked pic of Zuck's actual VR pitch, he's
literally in the valve room. This is the same room Valve took users into one on one with Michael Abrash at Dev Days.
some direct quotes from him on the subject:
