Take a peek inside the Oculus Rift... coming in Q1 2016.
The wait is (almost) over. Two years after Facebook acquired the company in an all-cash, $2 billion transaction, the world waited the arrival of Oculus Rift. On the first day of CES (January 6, 2016) at 8AM Pacific, Oculus opened pre-orders for the Rift Virtual Reality headset.
Oculus ‘Crescent Bay’ prototype was the final preparation run for the mass produced version of Rift.
Unlike the DK1 and DK2 editions, the consumer version of Rift will not cost $349. Instead, Rift will retail/e-tail for $250 more, i.e. $599, with the price including the Xbox One wireless controller and the hard shell plastic ‘suitcase’ which Oculus used to ship the original Development Kit 1. Naturally, the design and typing will be updated to fit all the legal requirements of a production design.
Back to the Future: Oculus Rift will ship in a hard-shell plastic case similar to the one used for DK1.
The package will not include the Oculus Touch controllers, which are expected to ship in the second half of 2016 (hence the reason for Xbox One controller). On the software side, there are two confirmed titles: a space shooter opera EVE: Valkyrie and a platformer Lucky’s Tale. From day one, you should be able to play not just these two, but also games such as Adrift (sci-fi), Chronos (RPG Chronos), Darknet, Dead Secret, Edge of Nowhere (horror adventure), Project CARS (racing simulation ) and many more.
Furthermore, Microsoft is working on bringing its whole Xbox One catalog to Rift, through its Xbox Live service on a PC. You should be able to stream games from Xbox One to the PC where Rift VR headset is installed, and there are some games planning to have VR support from the launch date – such as Forza Motorsport 6.
Still, the authors of this lines is looking forward to the final consumer version of Rift (DK2 still has too low of a resolution for me to fully enjoy), and playing in the post-apocalyptic word of Fallout 4. Fallout 4, and many other games are playable through VorpX, middleware that wraps a DirectX game into VR. VorpX is currently in version 0.9, and we have a feeling 1.0 is going to come out when Oculus starts shipping those pre-orders (as early as next month – February 2016).
