Oculus Rift Consumer Headset, Touch Controller Revealed
Double hrmm.
The Oculus press conference in LA ahead of E3 has come to a close (though you can watch the rebroadcast here), and we now know what the consumer version of the Rift VR headset will look like, that it will come with an XBox One controller, and that Oculus have developed their own motion controller called the Oculus Touch. Step below for a brief round-up of the most important news from the conference, a trailer showing the headset, and mention of a couple of the new games that were shown at the event.
Here's a trailer that introduces the look of the consumer headset:
It's now apparently much lighter than before, has built-in headphones, adjustable lense-positions, and has been designed to be comfortable when worn over glasses.
The conference talked through some of the software that will ship with the Rift, including a platform for distributing games, CCP's long-teased EVE Valkyrie (which showed the same trailer they released at GDC), and the first footage of Edge of Nowhere, a new, third-person, VR-specific game called by Insomniac Games, creators of Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive.
Most interesting was the announcement of the Oculus Touch, a pair of wireless motion controllers designed to be used in tandem and to simulate your hands inside virtual worlds. They each have a small, palm-gripped handle with a perpendicular ring at the top. It's functionally similar to Vive's motion prototype. They're designed to be lightweight, have an analogue thumbstick, two buttons and four analogue trigger buttons, its movement is tracked in the same way as the Oculus Rift headset and it offers haptic feedback.
What's different from the Vive's prototype is that the Oculus Touch can apparently track your finger positions, recognising when you're pointing or giving the thumbs up. That makes it sound like it's doing something similar to the Leap Motion, but it's unclear how precise that functionality is. No price for the Touch was announced, but presumably, given the inclusion XBox One controller, it costs extra and won't be bundled by default with the Rift headset.
No price was offered for the Rift headset either, though Oculus committed again to a release date sometime in the first quarter of 2016.
I watched the conference and found it pretty underwhelming, especially in light of what I saw of the Vive at GDC. What did you think?