Oculus CEO Says Consumer Headset is “Close”

If you’ve been wishing for the chance to buy a consumer-ready Oculus Virtual Reality headset, you may soon get your wish. A post on TheNextWeb today reports that the company has confirmed a consumer version of their Kickstarted (and now Facebook-owned) VR headset will hit retail shelves in what an exec said would be “many months.”

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe was speaking at Web Summit 2014 in Dublin today, during which he said that the headset’s completion was “close,” and it was “largely finalized for a consumer product.”

As to when, Iribe played coy in terms of specifics, but he offered some encouraging vagaries:

“We’re all hungry for it to happen. We’re getting very close. It’s months, not years away, but many months. […] We want to get it right. We don’t want it to be four or five years. We’re eager for this to happen.”

Additionally, Iribe explained that other virtual reality headsets might do more harm than good to the category as a whole:

“We’re a little worried about bigger companies putting out products that aren’t ready. Disorientation and motion sickness is the elephant in the room. We’re encouraging big companies not to put out a product before it’s ready.”

As to what companies Iribe may have been referring, there are only two other VR headsets that I’ve heard about that are headed to retail: Samsung’s Gear VR (which was made in partnership with Oculus, so he probably wasn’t thinking about that one), and Sony’s Project Morpheus. While it certainly shouldn’t be taken as a definitive statement of fact, but it stands to reason that Iribe’s position in the VR field would probably allow him to have access to Morpheus at some point during the product’s development. If nothing else, he might have tried it out at a Sony booth during E3 or a recent PAX. On the other hand, Project Morpheus is, of course, an Oculus competitor, and making a blanket statement like this to discredit the competition could be nothing more than a strategic marketing move.

Either way, it’s exciting to hear that an Oculus VR headset might hit stores within a year or so, if not even less time. Stay tuned.

[Source: TheNextWeb]