Four months ago, a new Steam Deck model appeared in stores – with an OLED screen. In honor of the gadget’s premiere, Valve released an unusual trailer, the production features of which it decided to share only now.
So, in a short teaser, viewers were shown a Steam Deck OLED in the center of a whole ball of the same devices. In a recent article on the official Steam website, the company spoke in detail about the filming of the video, as well as its source of inspiration:
Having seen the new devices in person, we were simply amazed. We certainly expected OLED screens to be bright, but they turned out to be INCREDIBLY BRIGHT. Amazingly bright. So bright that we came up with the idea to use only Steam Deck OLED as lighting for the trailer shoot. We thought the idea was fun (and stupid) enough to at least give it a try, so we got to work.
In total, to implement the idea, one hundred copies of Steam Deck were used (their prototypes were lying around in the office), two connected network switches (“there is a chance that the “brains” of our ball were once the very server on which you know-coped noobs or from which you downloaded Doki Doki Literature Club!”), dozens of Deckmate brackets, many cables honestly borrowed from IT specialists, and, of course, an aluminum frame designed and constructed in the Valve laboratory. Known for its attention to detail, the company approached the matter very meticulously:
“We wanted the image in the ball to be displayed correctly, without being stretched or distorted, so we had to create a video with an eye to the spherical display shape. By taking the original CAD design of the aluminum frame and flattening the 3D model, we determined the approximate placement of the screens, then created a very wide, high-resolution design in After Effects, which was then sent back to the ball via a 4K video stream.”
You can read about creating the ball on Steam . The material has been officially translated into Russian.