Oculus Rift Creator Discusses Consumer Model (CV1) Development

At this years Gamescom event, Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey sat down with Heise to discuss their upcoming VR headset. The technology is currently in a development stage, I should know, I’ve ordered their Dev Kit 2 (DK2) model already! But the question we’ve all be wanting answered is “when will the consumer model be ready?”

“A lot of software companies, especially game companies, say it’s done when it’s done,” Luckey explained. “In the hardware industry what that actually translates into is it’s done when it was done a year ago, because you can’t just be done and now it’s ready to ship. When it’s done, when you know what you’re doing, it’s still many more months of getting components made, getting manufacturers lined up, building up stock. It takes a long time to go from there. So we’re at the point where we know what we’re shipping, I guess you could almost say it’s done. We’re not just waiting around to see how much better it gets. But it takes time to get it actually made.”

Palmer went on to clarify that they have the specification nailed down now, they just need to sign off on manufacturing and final design phases, which sounds like “woohoo it’s coming soon”, I doubt it, I still put my money on late 2015 for a consumer release as this kind of development still takes time and they’re of course still holding for content, as 3D demos in Unity and a few source games simply aren’t enough just yet for a consumer release, but lots of content is coming over the next 12 months and you can bet that Oculus VR will be ready for it as it sounds like development is right on track.

CV1 will be the technological leap that VR needs, bringing the screen resolution up to a whopping 2k, which is said to negate the screen-door effect that is present on their DK2 dev kit and very present on their DK1 dev kit.

Thank you VRFocus for providing us with this information.