Valve Launch Free VR Place Creation Tool

Having been fed so many promises during the '90s, I really, really, really want the latest wave of VR to be a success. I've been suitably impressed by the few games I've sampled so far - which include the wonderful EVE: Valkyrie - but one area I'm interested in seeing develop is travel: how strapping on a headset will transport us to famous real-life landmarks, or fictional hot spots, games or otherwise, with the touch of a button.

Valve's new Destinations Workshop Tools [Steam page] has just launched on Steam Early Access and lets users create and share "both real and imaginary worlds", which sounds pretty close to what I'm after. You'll need VR hardware to do so, of course, but Destinations itself is free.

In its current beta form, Destinations lets users muck around with its content creation tools to construct worlds, before sharing them via the Destinations Workshop. After that, they can explore them with the Destinations Viewer - a feature that's housed in your Steam library under the Software heading.

Speaking to Polygon, Valve programmer Tom Bui described Destinations as a logical forward step following the enduring wide-spread popularity of Steam Workshop. "We've seen all of the awesome things the community can do with user-generated content, not only in our own games, but also in the 400 plus other games utilizing the Steam Workshop," said Bui. "So it seemed a natural extension to enable creators to make cool new VR experiences that they could share with others."

Based on images from NASA, users can currently visit the Curiosity Mars rover, an English churchyard, and...a pile of popcorn that's based on photos snapped from a mobile phone. Weird.

Anyway, Destinations definitely looks like one to watch as its sure to attract the inventive and intuitive among us over time. If you're interested, head on over to Steam.