Instead of shipping with appropriate motion controls like the Vive from Valve and HTC seem to be doing with their dev kits, Oculus instead decided to partner with Microsoft to ship every Rift with a wireless Xbox One controller.
Microsoft's Phil Spencer took to the stage during today's ongoing Oculus conference to make the announcement.
“The opportunity for us to bring our wireless controller, the one that we’ve spent so many years refining, to every Oculus user at launch is incredibly exciting for us.
“The Rift will natively work with Windows 10. And we all know that VR experiences require the highest performance, and with Direct X 12, we believe we’ll be able to create state of the art virtual reality experiences on top of Windows.”
“The Rift will natively work with Windows 10. And we all know that VR experiences require the highest performance, and with Direct X 12, we believe we’ll be able to create state of the art virtual reality experiences on top of Windows.”
Interestingly, Spencer also revealed that the Oculus Rift will be able to stream their Xbox One games to the Oculus Rift.
Oculus Rift is expected in the first quarter of 2016.
None of this will get me to buy an xbox, though. If I get the Rift, though, it'll be nice to finally have a controller to use with racing games on the PC. It sure beats tapping left at differing rates to turn the right amount!
I still think VR will have a crisis of input problems, since the different options are so many and so varied, that it will divide too much the gaming community. We need to see one of these headsets and one of these input methods rise above all others and become the "best" one or the most mainstream and used one, so that the majority of games can also be optimized for these