The future of the ambitious system of augmented reality CastAR, the development of which began in Valve five years ago, is in question. On the closure of the internal studio Eat Sleep Play, which was engaged in the device recently, first reported her former employee. Later information was confirmed by the Polygon website.

Referring to the unnamed "former employees", Polygon said that the main investor CastAR refused to invest money in the project, after which the staff was dissolved. It became known that the remaining assets of the company will be liquidated. At the time of writing, the news was not officially confirmed.

In 2012, Valve hired in the experimental unit of an experienced hardware developer Jeri Ellsworth (Jeri Ellsworth). She started creating glasses that form a picture of augmented reality through tiny projectors. The built-in camera tracked the position of the user's head, which allowed the software to change the 3D perspective in real time.

Eventually Valve decided not to encourage Ellsworth's ideas and focused on what later turned into SteamVR. Nevertheless, the company acted in an unusual way and allowed the developer to leave and retain all rights to his invention.

Soon Valve left Rick Johnson (Rick Johnson). He joined Ellsworth, and they started collecting money for CastAR through Kickstarter.

The company then received serious financial support from Playground Global and decided to distribute free versions of CastAR for developers to all investors.

The early demonstrations of the device looked impressive. Nevertheless, the system had many shortcomings related to the refresh rate of the projector, the accuracy of the controller and the clarity of the image. These problems were corrected very slowly. Perhaps the company simply could not keep up with the consumer systems of augmented and virtual reality, published over the past few years.