One of the most important things to arrive alongside the virtual reality-based Oculus Rift gaming platform is the promise of a soon to arrive future where gaming will take a whole new turn with a virtual reality head mounted display for games. Sounds exciting? Moving ahead to a potential 2014 release for Oculus Rift, the company is already showing interests in bringing the platform over to consoles and smartphones.
CEO Brendan Iribe, who was recently in an interview with EDGE, spoke about the company’s hopes and expectations following the release of Rift and how it will affect the next generation of gaming.
“I love consoles but internally we’re a lot more excited about where mobile’s going to go, and being able to plug it right into a next gen cellphone. It’s the innovation, and how fast cellphones are now improving – where we’ll be with the next Galaxy or the next iPhone compared to where consoles are,” Iribe stated.
“Those things are almost doubling every year, compared to a console that’s just stuck it out for eight years – it just makes us very excited. There’s a lot of improvements that can be made on the hardware side for VR that no-one’s doing yet because it’s a new thing. The mobile rate of innovation is going to be able to make a lot of those improvements.”
As to when fans might expect the Rift’s official release in 2014, Iribe stated that the company hasn’t set a consumer release date as of now, but it’s definitely not arriving this year.
“We don’t want to announce any dates because frankly we just don’t know when it’s going to be really ready for the consumer market where everything is tied together – you have the form factor, HD, motion blur eliminated… so we don’t know how long that will take, but it’s close – we have internal prototypes which have a lot of each thing solved and it’s such a magical experience when you see it all together,” he added.
Iribe also believes that there will be competition in the VR space and that will automatically speed up the development of the medium. He stated: “There’ll be other people that end up doing VR, it’s not like Oculus is going to be the only VR provider – and I think there is a lot of innovation still to come. This is one year in, right? Imagine where we go in the next eight to ten years.”
“It’s going to accelerate so quickly, with the resolution, positional tracking, hand tracking – you should be able to be in there and see your hand without any latency in the future, and you should be able to look at other avatars in the game and see mouth tracking without any latency tied to voice,” Iribe concluded.
