Some potentially bad news for console gamers as the Oculus Rift may not be supported by consoles for some time. The creator of the Oculus Rift has attributed this to the way that consoles such as the Xbox One and PS4 are designed and updated.
When a console is bought, it will typically not receive any technical upgrades during its life-cycle. Most computers, on the other hand, nowadays can be upgraded with new technology to increase their technical ability. Consoles do not have that same luxury.
This is the main argument brought forward by Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift.
“Consoles are too limited for what we want to do,” said Luckey. “We’re trying to make the best virtual device in the world and we want to continue to innovate and upgrade every year–continue making progress internally–and whenever we make big jumps we want to push that to the public.”
“The problem with consoles in general is that once they come out they’re locked to a certain spec for a long, long time,” he said. “Look at PCs that existed eight years ago. There have been so many huge advances since then. Now look at VR hardware of today. I think the jump we’re going to see in the next four to five years is going to be massive, and already VR is a very intensive thing, it requires rendering at high resolutions at over 60 frames a second in 3D.”
Even if the Oculus Rift does not have a set timetable for a Xbox One or PS4 release, both companies are currently working on their own virtual reality headsets for their consoles. Microsoft revealed their virtual reality peripheral last year and Sony is expected to reveal their VR peripheral sometime in 2014.
No official release date for the commercial version of the Oculus Rift but the price is expected to be around $300 for the unit. Development kits were sent out earlier this year and several PC titles will support the Oculus Rift when it is released.
