Valve announces Portal-themed VR ‘experiment’

Valve today announced The Lab, a virtual reality experience set in the Aperture Laboratories of Portal.

As Polygon reports, The Lab is a “compilation of new VR experiments” designed to showcase the potential of VR and the Vive headset, which Valve is co-developing with HTC. Aperture Laboratories is an excellent backdrop for experimenting, and it will be interesting to see how, if at all, Portal’s titular mechanic plays into the experiments.

The Lab itself will be a free Steam download, but obviously it will require the use of a Vive, which will run you $800. A good chunk of that price comes from the Vive’s motion-tracking stations built for 3D movement and interaction in a VR space, which will be a focus of The Lab.

We’ll find out just what experiments Valve has in store when The Lab debuts at next week’s Game Developers Conference, and when we get to try it ourselves later this spring.