Team Fortress 2 adding Oculus Rift VR support (update)

Valve's free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2 will officially support the Oculus Rift VR headset, programmer Joe Ludwig tells Engadget. An update that will enable "VR mode" for the team-based shooter will go out in the coming weeks for enthusiasts who snapped up the Rift's development kit.

Oculus Rift support for Team Fortress 2 is one of a number of experiments with virtual reality headsets happening at Valve, Ludwig says, with the developer playing around with Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead integration. But Ludwig says TF2 is an "obvious choice" as a testbed due to the game's large community and frequent updates.

Ludwig plans to speak about Team Fortress 2's VR Mode at the annual Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco. His talk, "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality," will features lessons learned during development including rendering of 2D user interfaces and "how mouselook can interact with head tracking in a first person shooter."

Team Fortress 2 for Oculus Rift currently supports the Windows PC version of the game only. Valve and Oculus say support for Mac OS X and Linux is coming once the SDK for those platforms is released.

Update: An official announcement from Valve dates Team Fortress 2's Virtual Reality Mode for release "in the coming days" and confirms support all game modes and classes. Valve also said that a unique in-game hat will be made available to owners of the Oculus Rift in TF2.