In an interview with The Verge – Gabe Newell, the Valve CEO confirmed that the company is indeed working on building its own Linux based machine, which was fondly being called as the “Steam Box” until now. He added that even though it will be produced by Valve, users will in no way be restricted to a particular operating system or software and will have complete freedom to install any other distribution of Linux or even Microsoft Windows if they choose so. He expanded that the hardware will be built to support streaming content to multiple screens like laptop, TV, desktop etc., in the same house with the help of open standards such as Miracast. Speaking of controllers he said, “I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method,” making it clear that Valve is planning to use biometrics especially gaze tracking heavily in its hardware. Talking about the software platform, Valve wants the Steam store to resemble more like user generated content where anyone will be able to create multiple stores which cater to multiple criteria that a user wishes to choose. In Gabe’s own words, “Some people will create team stores, some people will create Sony stores, some people will create stores with only games that they think meet their quality bar.” Besides this obvious project that is known as “Bigfoot” within the company, he also revealed that they are planning to extend these efforts to the mobile and tablet
segments which is known as “Littlefoot”. Among other things, he suggested that multitouch devices might just be used as a way of controlling the larger screens in the form of a touchpad-like input.
