Oculus Rift consumers wanting to get their hands on a final version of the VR headset may have to wait until late next year as Oculus c0-founder Palmer Lucky has confirmed a second developer kit will be released.
Commenting in a Reddit thread following comments made by John Carmack on a second revamped kit he added:
“We’re working on a lot of new tech for the consumer product, we want to ship a new development kit before the consumer version launches. That way, developers can build and test their games on the nearly final hardware that users will be playing at launch. The timing of that dev kit is tightly tied to our progress on these new features.”
“We are not going to formally announce a new development kit or the consumer version any time this year. Also, we’re working to ensure that content built using the current Rift development kit is compatible with new Oculus hardware, though there will be a bit of integration required to take advantage of the new features, especially for the best experience.”
The consumer version has been scheduled for Q3 2014 as indicated on slides shown yesterday and will come with 1080p 3D resolutions. The consumer version will also come in two flavours, a wired and a more expensive wireless version. My advice would be to buy the wireless version, cables attached to a VR headset are really cumbersome and get in the way of movement. In fact I would say it’s essential.
This is what the Oculus Rift may look like.
A timeline for release.
The subject of VR motion sickness was also brought up again and they are recommending a full motion set up to reduce the effects. I say reduce, because in my experience with VR, even being able to rotate 360 degrees is not enough, full movement may eliminate the problem a little more. Having said that, Oculus have stated that a newer version they are testing has reduced sickness effects. You can read my thoughts on motion sickness and VR that in this article.
What this new developer kit tech will include is unknown but it could be the higher resolution 1080p version and a wireless option would be a massive plus.
Thanks RoadtoVR and PCPer for the images.
