Oculus unveils final Rift design, reveals partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox

Oculus unveils final Rift design, reveals partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox

This, folks, is the Oculus Rift. Three years after it first hit Kickstarter, Oculus is finally ready to show the final version of the Rift to the public, ahead of its projected launch in the first quarter of 2016. The Facebook-owned company held a special, live-streamed press event in San Francisco Thursday, at which it also announced a partnership with Microsoft to bundle Xbox One wireless controllers with the headset and its own Oculus Touch controller.

The final design looks fairly sleek, and according to Oculus, features a few improvements to boost comfort. The headset will better accommodate those of you who wear spectacles and even allow you to adjust the distance of the lenses to match the distance between your eyes. This can supposedly vary by up to several millimeters between individuals, so this should help provide the best possible experience for users.

There’s also a new strap design with a smaller, hollowed-out triangle structure that will rest against the back of your head. The hollow cut-out does actually look like it will be more comfortable since it conforms to the naturally contours of the head. Furthermore, it’s now covered in a soft-touch fabric, which might offer a certain level of cushioning.

And given that audio is an integral part of an immersive VR experience, the Rift will include modular headphone cups at its sides. These are removable, so you can still use your own headphones if you wish.

Then there’s the sensor itself. It sports an elegant, minimalist all-black design that we quite like, with just a small cylinder sitting atop a stand with a circular base. Since the Rift is intended to be used with desktops, the sensor should blend in quite nicely with most desks.

Oculus also talked about what its system to ensure precise head-tracking while keeping latency to a minimum, called “Constellation” tracking. In addition to sensors on the edge of the headset, there are five sensors in the middle in the shape of an inverted pentagon.

Xbox One Controller and Oculus Touch

And what’s a VR experience if you can’t actually move around at whim? As a gaming platform, that’s even more important for Oculus. It’s looking to address this with a partnership with Microsoft to bundle a wireless Xbox One controller and wireless PC receiver with the headset. It will also work seamlessly with Windows 10.

But wait, that’s not all. Oculus also announced the Oculus Touch, a pair of controllers that are supposed to simulate what it’s like to have hands in your virtual world. Oculus is calling this “hand presence” and the controllers will allow you to interact naturally with objects in your VR experience via an analog joystick, trigger button, and two more buttons next to the joystick. 

This will likely enable far more advanced VR experiences than are possible with the Xbox One controller. We don't expect the initial slate of games like Eve Valkyrie and Edge of Nowhere to actually utilize it, but it's something to look forward to farther down the road.

Unfortunately, we’re still missing a couple of key details – price and how or when to order. E3 is next week, so more information might be available then.

Source: Oculus, Xbox Wire via Tom’s Hardware