At a press conference held earlier today, the Facebook-owned Oculus debuted the consumer market model of the company's long-in-development Rift VR device. The company announced that the Rift would be available in the first quarter of 2016, but did not offer a purchase price.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe outlined the many improvements made to the Rift to make it ready for a mass audience. The presentation emphasized the improved comfort and adjustability of the Rift, calling to mind the old aphorism that the best technology "disappears" into the background while it's used, getting out of the way and letting users focus on the content instead of the device. Iribe also explained the technical upgrades over the previously available developer models, including increased resolution, reduced motion blur, integrated audio, and better head tracking that uses a camera packed in with the headset. And in an Apple-style "One more thing..." announcement, Iribe brought company founder Palmer Luckey to the stage to debut the "Oculus Touch," a pair of wireless, motion-tracked controllers.
Iribe also announced another surprising input device that will come packed in with the Rift: A wireless Xbox One Controller. The head of Microsoft's Xbox division, Phil Spencer, took the stage to give an overview of the new partnership between the two companies. On top of the controller pack in, Spencer stressed the Oculus Rift's native, out-of-box compatibility with Windows 10. He also announced that players would be able to utilize the Oculus alongside the Xbox One-Windows 10 game streaming feature that Microsoft first discussed back in January. This sounds cooler than it is, because, okay, here's what that means: You'll be able to stream your Xbox One games from your living room to your Windows 10 PC (presumably not in your living room), and then put on your Oculus headset where you'll be seated in a virtual living room, where you can then play the Xbox One game on a virtual TV screen. There's a use case there, sure, but boy did it look ridiculous.
The event also featured trailers for a few games that are actually built to take advantage of VR, including EVE: Valkyrie (the multiplayer space shooter from EVE Online developer CCP), Chronos (a third-person fantasy game from the Darksiders alumni now at Gunfire Games) and Edge of Nowhere (a third-person, vaguely Lovecraftian adventure built from the ground up for VR by Insomniac Games). The company will show off more games at next week's E3, and hopefully those will also be built specifically with the Rift in mind. For virtual reality to take off, there need to be games that leverage the platform's strengths in a fundamental way, not just as a little tacked on bonus. Which means less virtual living rooms, please.
On the whole, though, today's event should ease fears that Facebook's acquisition of Oculus meant that the company would stop focusing on gaming. It's clear that, at the very least, the folks at Oculus see gaming as the primary vector for getting VR into homes. Who knows what'll come after that.
(It's porn. It's VR Porn. That's what's next.)
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