The company behind hit games like "Half-Life" and "Portal," as well as the Steam PC gaming platform and its own "Steam Machine" console (still in development), just announced another foray into the gaming future: SteamVR.

Valve announced the new venture into building a virtual reality hardware system on Tuesday, and it turns out the company hasn't just decided to start working on VR now: Valve said it would be giving demos of its (pretty) well-kept secret VR hardware at the Game Developers Conference 2015, happening next week in San Francisco.

Not much else is known from the surprise announcement, other than Valve is actively looking for developers and publishers to try out (and assumingly create content for) the SteamVR system. It's probably safe to assume SteamVR is in a very early development stage, and judging by the full year-behind schedule Steam Machine platform, fans should probably expect SteamVR to take a while to get off the ground.

Those Steam Machines -- essentially customized PCs built by hardware partners with the open source SteamOS preinstalled -- were set back from the intended 2014 launch date while Valve continued to test and tweak its Steam Controller.

According to Forbes, next week Valve is also set to unveil its final version of the Steam Controller, along with a "family of new Steam devices" for the living room (i.e., likely its Steam Machine launch lineup), as well as the long-awaited Half-Life 3.

So even if it turns out Valve is a long way away from being ready to launch a Steam-powered Oculus Rift competitor, Valve fans have a lot to look forward to come next week!