Oculus Confirms Rift Won’t Be Released in 2015

As competitors spring up all around them, the folks at Oculus VR seem unconcerned about how crowded the virtual reality field is becoming. Case in point: at SXSW on Friday, reports Re/Code, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey said that the company can say definitively that it has nothing to say.

“We don’t have anything to announce,” Luckey told an audience at the Austin, TX festival. When asked about his previous comments—that something would have to have gone “horribly wrong” for Oculus to miss its plans to release the Rift headset in 2015, Luckey declined to explain the cause for the revised timeline.

“I did say that, before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap.

I can’t comment on the date one way or the other, but I can say nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right.”

Okay! So, that’s something. It’s not much, but it’s something. Things are going “horribly right.” Okie dokie.

The post says that the company intends to raise the “target quality level” of the consumer version of the Rift. That’s not unwise considering that early reviews for the HTC Vive prototype have been mostly glowing. That headset, the result of a partnership between HTC and Valve, is slated for a consumer release by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Sony has confirmed that it plans to release its Project Morpheus VR headset—made specifically for use on the PlayStation 4 console—by 2016.

Oculus may have some buffer in terms of when it releases its final consumer-ready product. And it’s certainly got the benefit of the doubt in terms of its reputation with gamers and VR fans. But if Sony and HTC/Valve manage to wow consumers before Oculus can finally put the Rift on people’s heads, it may have squandered the lead it’s been enjoying for the past few years. After all, what good is positive vibes if you’re perpetually stuck in beta?

[Source: Re/Code]