Oculus held a press conference of their own last night, getting some major announcements out into the open before the mess and noise of the main E3 show. In it, they showed of the Oculus Rift’s final design, new controllers, games and features.
It’s a pretty sleek looking device, with headphones built in, so that you don’t have to awkwardly add a set of your own over the top, but Oculus went further to talk about how you’ll control your games. Each Oculus Rift is to be bundled with a wireless Xbox One controller and adapter to use it with PC – Phil Spencer also appeared on stage to announce that you would be able to stream Xbox One games to Windows 10 and have them played in a virtual living room in the Rift – before also moving on to announce their own in house controller, the Oculus Touch.
While the Rift is still scheduled for Q1 2016, the Oculus Touch will only be being made available to devs at that point in time, explaining the need to bundle the Xbox One controller. It does, however, split the controller in two, to give you more freedom to move and interact with the world. Each hand has a separate device with an analogue stick, two face buttons, two triggers/buttons for you fingers and a loop that features an array of LEDs for positional tracking by the Rift’s camera. Importantly, it gives the Oculus a counterpart to what Sony’s Move controllers offer the Morpheus.
But then came the games, with the biggest announcement being that of Insomniac’s exclusive Oculus Rift title, Edge of Nowhere, a third person action game set in an icy world full of monsters that quite likely want to kill you.
Gunfire Games showed off Chronos, an RPG set in a beautifully stylised world, and with more than a few twinges of Dark Souls or Bloodborne in feeling mismatched against powerful opponents, if you ask me.
There was also a new Eve Valkyrie trailer, a first-person hockey game and sports collection and developers and publishers, including Square Enix, Harmonix, High Voltage, Carbon Games and more.
With the Rift still a good 9 months away, it will be interesting to see if we have more game announcements in the next week, or if they’ll be eager to hold off until Gamescom and beyond.
camdaz
It looks OK but not as good as Project Morpheus.
Morpheus should be cheaper as there’s no bundled controller with it, but Sony doesn’t always work that way.
Starman
Pretty good move getting it compatible with xbox.
Severn2j
Its actually windows 10 that’s doing the compatibility, the rift is just acting as the PC’s monitor..
beeje13
Yeah its a shame that they stopped short of making the rift compatible with X1.
TSBonyman
Interesting route they’ve taken with xbox, so will the PC convert the XB1 games into VR games or will you just be looking at your game on a virtual 2D screen in a virtual environment?
Starman
Its the latter. I think it would need too much power to make it true vr, and I presume support would need to patched even if it could.
TSBonyman
I thought as much but wasn’t certain. Still, VR games are possibly going to be thin on the ground at first so early oculus adopters wil have another option while they wait for the next VR title.
Tanster
I like the look of the new Oculus Touch controller however is it just me or is the headset one ugly looking piece of hardware.
I know functionality is more important than form but that is not an aesthetically pleasing piece of kit