Heads up, VR devs: Oculus VR has taken care of a bit of housekeeping today with a blog post trumpeting the return of its Oculus Connect dev conference, the impending launch of its Touch controllers — and the fact that it has finally shipped Rift headsets to everyone who pre-ordered one, nearly four months after launch.
This presumably concludes the pre-order struggles Oculus encountered earlier this year when it had to delay Rift pre-order shipments due to supply issues and component shortages.
That means VR devs need no longer factor supply constraints into their evaluations of the Rift customer base. Moreover, those devs working on VR games or other experiences which rely on motion-tracked hand controllers can probably expect Rift to become a viable target platform between October and December of this year.
That’s because Oculus says it will talk at length about the Rift’s delayed Touch motion controllers at its third annual Oculus Connect developer conference, which will be held the first week of October in San Jose, California. The company had previously stated it would launch Touch in the latter half of 2016, and that window now seems to have narrowed to the final three months of the year.
While Oculus Touch has long seemed superficially similar to the motion-tracked wand controllers that ship with Valve and HTC’s Vive headset, Oculus’ Brandon Iribe made a point of differentiating the two input methods whiile speaking with Gamasutra last year.
Touch is designed to track actual hand and finger movements, he said, and Oculus hopes the controllers will further enmesh players in a virtual world by fostering a sense of “hand presence.”
“I believe it’s going to be one of the fundamental differentiators of the Rift, and I’m very confident you’ll see all the other VR systems out there pivot and go in the direction we’re going,” Iribe told Gamasutra. “This is the right path for VR input.”
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2016