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Having sold over 85 thousand of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset prototypes aimed at software developers, Oculus VR is still pretty far away from introduction of commercial versions of the device. The company said at the Facebook’s F8 conference that the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR gear would hit the market in 2015.
Business Insider reports citing a spokesperson for Oculus VR that the company and its new owner Facebook would be disappointed if the VR headset would not be available at retail for ordinary people before 2016, which points to availability during the holiday season 2015 at the latest. While many enthusiasts who bought developers version of the Oculus Rift would like to buy the commercial flavour of the product already this year, the official launch in 2015 makes a lot of sense.
In a bid to make Oculus Rift a commercial success among gamers (even core gamers) there should be quality games developed with the VR in mind on the market. Development of video games takes a long time these days, those titles that are being built today will only show up sometimes in 2015.
The main issue here is that game publishers are reluctant to invest into development of games for new platforms until that hardware is at the hands of the consumers, who then will buy software. However, gamers will not buy a piece of hardware that is not supported by existing software. As a result, Oculus VR and Facebook should coordinate their efforts with game developers in a bid to release the first commercial version of the Oculus Rift simultaneously with games that were developed for VR headsets.
Keeping in mind that virtual reality titles should be developed differently than currently available games, expect software creators to learn how to make VR games in a right way. The first breed of virtual reality titles will, without any doubts, be very impressive (and certainly more impressive than games developed for monitors which are now experienced in the VR gear). However, eventually, as artists and programmers learn how to build virtual worlds and experiences, the VR games will get much closer to reality than the first wave of titles.
At present neither the launch date, nor the lineup of launch titles, nor the price of the VR headset are known. However, several big developers have confirmed that they are working on titles that will use virtual reality gear. At present Oculus VR is in the process of building a team to work on marketing and branding of the product.
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KitGuru Says: It will be interesting to see how many more devkits Oculus VR will manage to sell to gamers before the commercial version becomes available. The interest towards the VR among the core gamers is so high that it looks like many of them are going to get current-gen Oculus Rift DK2 “Crystal Cove” in order to play select games that have support for it already this year…
I was in Iceland last week for the CCP Fanfest, which had the MK II kit with their latest build of Eve: Valkyrie – and I was hugely impressed – you can see there obvious scope for improvement, but the latency issues have been reduced immensely. I had a number of sessions on it and had zero nausea/motion sickness issues unlike the MK I kit.
I dont know how to make a blog or anything like that so I will just write this on every article that says that the Oculus Rift is coming out in 2015. In case you think I am wrong here is some proof: http://adf.ly/m4z4t
The reason the Oculus Rift is not announcing a release date yet is because they don’t have a Consumer Rift that they can just say is coming in 2015. The Oculus Rift is not a “Consumer Ready” product it still looks ugly and it doesnt have key components that they need to mimic reality it still looks like looking at a cartoon it immerses you but not “enough” for what they are looking for. What the Oculus Team is looking for is to get as close to reality as possible and they want to make it affordable and easy for people that arent nerds to plug and play.they are not at that stage yet. They still have steps to go to achieve that for example better screens, camera on the front, wireless, elimination of screen door effect and just some software tweaks like response time and things like that.
The 2 billion dollars that people are whining about is probably the best thing that could happen to Oculus. This will let them make it cheaper, faster and let them add things they couldnt add before without making it too expensive for an average consumer. This puts the company at a stable position so that they arent either going to be big or they will fail. With 2 billion dollars at their side they are guaranteed to succeed and to bring consumers a product that will make nerds drool on their keyboards when they see it and it will make people throw money at their computer screens because they will be able to hire a design team to make it look really good.
Right now they are at a stage where their money can make a really powerful VR headset but needs to be powered by many servers and this is not something that everyone can have in their homes let alone afford. So they need to make it condensed into a consumer ready product that everyone can walk into a store and purchase rather than need a credit card or PayPal account to buy.
Even if they did have a consumer version ready they still need developers to create games with positional tracking and it also has to be HD for the new Consumer product. Its like shipping out an Xbox One or Ps4 and having no games for them so they need to give Developers time to create quality “Consumer Ready” content for this new “Consumer Version”
We can all hope for this thing to come out a year from now but we will never know and we all just have to be patient and hope for the best.
(side note: Morpheus will end up being a sitting down headset for safety reasons because being tethered, blindfolded and feeling like your in another world is definitely going to have someone fall and break their PlayStations.