The founder and inventor of virtual reality (VR) headset firm Oculus Rift, Peter Luckey, says he wants a headset in every home but is “realistic” about launch sales.
The founder of Oculus VR, the virtual reality firm famously kicked off by a Kickstarted crowdfunding campaign and then purchased by Facebook for US $2B, has spoken to gaming site Kotaku, explaining his vision for headsets one day being in every home.
Mr Luckey said that future VR headsets wouldn’t plug into an existing PC but would be self contained computing devices all their own.
Telling Kotaku that the “games industry is the only industry with the tools and the talent to build immersive 3D real time environments”, he also says “in the long run. . . they’re going to have dedicated chip sets on the headset itself”.
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| Oculus Rift – don’t go walking down the street with one on.
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He also suggested much work still needed to be done, with virtual and augmented reality technologies to converge into the same hardware” that “you can wear all day every day”, even though it will “take a long time” before that happens.
Part of the issue is the immaturity of the technology, with headsets needing to offer “10-15 times higher resolution before we’re maxing out the capacity of the human eye”, with the screen tech needed still years away.
Even so, an Oculus headset for consumers should be out by the end of 2015, although developer versions are currently available.
The consumer model is expected to have a “higher frame rate, higher resolution” and to be “smaller, lighter, cheaper” than today’s early models
Mr Luckey expect to “see one in every home”, but just not at launch, where “probably hard core gamers” are “going to be the ones with PCs most capable of running it”.
Google and Samsung have also been hard at work creating their own VR headsets using smartphones as the screens and brains of their devices, with Google’s Cardboard app here, plenty of third party and ready made cardboard headsets to buy here, and even news of how to use Google Cardboard with an iPhone here.
Information on Samsung’s upcoming VR headset is here.
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| The new DK2 Developer Version of the Oculus Rift. |
In the end, virtual reality is both a fascinating and terrifying future where you can be plugged into any reality you want at the potential expense of the actual reality you’re living in.
Bill Gates had a vision of a PC in every home, Steve Jobs managed to make a smartphone in every pocket a reality, but whether we’ll really want to wear a headset all day and every day is yet to be determined, with intelligent contact lenses and lightweight, normal looking glasses a lot more practical than bulkyVR headsets that place non-transparent screens in front of your eyes.
The full interview is at Kotaku.
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